228 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ingly, whatever the principal object of religious feeling in a particu- 

 lar case may be, of that object there springs up a natural religion 

 and also a supernatural religion. There have been two classes of 

 religions which have been conspicuous by their difference in the his- 

 tory of mankind. On the one hand, there have been the religions 

 which have found their objects of worship princij^ally in the sensible 

 world, in physical phenomena, and in man considered as a physical 

 phenomenon. On the other hand, there are the religions which con- 

 template more what is intellectual and moral. The best example of 

 the former class is classical paganism, which, as I pointed out, was 

 arrested in its development at the moment when it began to embrace 

 the moral world ; to the other class belong Judaism and Christianity. 

 Now, both these forms of religion may be found connected with the 

 supernatural and also unconnected with it. Classical paganism itself 

 was a supei'natural religion. The feelings excited in the Greek by 

 the siglit of a tree or a fountain did not end where they began, in 

 admiration, delight, and love ; they passed on into miracle. The natu- 

 ral phenomenon was transformed into a maiweloiis quasi-human be- 

 ing. But the same feelings aroused in the mind of Wordsworth pro- 

 duced a new religion of Nature not less real or intense than that of 

 the ancients, but unconnected with the supernatural. He worsliips 

 trees and fountains and flowers for themselves and as they are ; if his 

 imagination at times plays with them, he does not mistake the play 

 for earnest. The daisy, after all, is a floioer, and it is as a flower that 

 he likes best to worship it. " Let good men feel the soul of Nature 

 and see things as they are." In like manner moral religion has taken 

 two forms. Judaism and Christianity are to a certain extent sujjer- 

 natural religions, but rationalistic forms of both have sprung up in 

 which it has been attempted to preserve the religious principle which 

 is at the bottom of them, discarding the supernatural element with 

 which it is mixed. The worship of humanity, which has been spring- 

 ing up in Europe since the middle of the last century, is in a like man- 

 ner a religion of moral qualities divorced from the supernatural. 



If religion really accepts the supernatural even when its object is 

 only isolated physical phenomena or human beings, how much more 

 so when its object is God, whether God be regarded as the Cause of 

 the universe or as the universe itself considered as a unity ! Our ex- 

 perience of a limited physical phenomenon may be some measure of 

 its powers ; the antecedent imj^robability of its transcending in a par- 

 ticular case the limit which our experience had led us to put upon our 

 conception of it may be very great. But who can place any limits to 

 Nature or to the universe ? We may indeed require rigid pi'oof of 

 whatever transcends our experience, but it is not only Orientals 

 who say that " with God all things are possible ; " the most scientific 

 men are the most willing to admit that our experience is no measure 

 of Nature, and that it is mere ignorance to pronounce a priori any 



