692 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



adjustment and interdependence that in the hands of a Paley or a Sir 

 Charles Bell have given the design argument such force and sweep. 

 Compare the proofs of God's unity and intelligence open to a David 

 or a Paul with those which Prof. Cooke finds in chemistry, or Win- 

 chell in geology, or Agassiz in natural history, and how much more 

 manifold and marvelous the latter ! 



In the next place, science has been most helpful to religion in pu- 

 rifying its faiths and guiding its reverences. Now, this is a service 

 that Faith much needs to have some one to do for her. For, sublime as 

 are her aspirations, her intellectul vision is but dim. Her eye fixed 

 on the heavens to which she would climb, she cannot discern dis- 

 tinctly the steps by which it is reached. She needs science ever to be 

 at hand to direct her. In her mounting instinct, Faith stretches up 

 her hand and clutches and clings to whatever she comes across. The 

 misshapen tree which rescued the savage from the wild beast; the 

 black stone which fell from the sky ; the serpent or the crocodile 

 whose strange form and power fascinate the primitive man such 

 are the objects that humanity, in its first dim gropings for an object 

 of worship, embraces. Religion may remain long in this groveling 

 stage, as it did among the Egyptians and Assyrians. But sooner or 

 later, as knowledge increases, the powerlessness and the worthless- 

 ness of such things for the worship of thinking men are seen. Faith 

 reaches up her hand to higher objects the invisible but potent 

 wind, the outstretched sky, the ethereal fire, the sun that warms 

 and lights the wnole earth. These are looked upon as mighty liv- 

 ing beings, and venerated in solemn rites. But, again, as man 

 learned more of these the fixed laws which they obey the con- 

 fined paths in which they move, and, in learning this, learned more 

 of himself he recognized in conscious Intelligence and the overrul- 

 ing Will something greater than wind or fire. Faith raised her rev- 

 erence, then, to a divinized humanity, a company of human gods 

 Jove, king of heaven, and Juno, queen ; Mercury, messenger of 

 the gods ; Cupid, inspirer of love; and so on. But, again, with the 

 growing comprehension of the unity of all Nature, man rose to the 

 idea of a single supreme deity, a Jehovah the eternal I am Brahma, 

 the one reality, of which all else are masks and shadows and tjirust 

 down the other deities into the position of divinities, spirits, and 

 devils. Still Religon had not got above superstition. She still clung 

 for a long time to burnt-offerings, and washings, and fastings, macera- 

 tions, and masses ; interferences by good and evil spirits ; ideas of 

 God as jealous, wrathful, appeasable, repenting of what he had once 

 done, interposing to mend his work. Gradually-increasing knowledge 

 pulled one after another of these rounds also out of the hands of 

 Religion, and her yearning fingers that must clasp something reached 

 up still higher on the ladder of divine apprehension, until at last she 

 grasped the conception of the universal, eternal action of One Infinite 



