HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 229 



thing to be impossible. Accordingly, those religions which have had 

 for their object the unity of the universe, or what we call, par excel- 

 lence, God, as distinguislied from gods many and lords many, have 

 generally been most lavish of miracle. They have delighted to be- 

 lieve in whatever is most improbable, because by doing so they seemed 

 to show how strongly they realized the greatness of their Divinity. 

 Credo quia impossibile is a paradox specially belonging to the religion 

 of God. But, on the other hand, there is nothing in this religion that 

 requires the miraculous. Tliose who realize the infinity and eternity 

 of Nature most, and who are most prepared to admit that nothing is 

 impossible, may quite well believe at the same time that the laws of 

 Nature are invariable, and may be as skeptical as the most narrow- 

 minded slaves of experience about particular stories of miracle that 

 come before them. Indeed, there is perceptible, both in Judaism and 

 Christianitv, along with the fullest and readiest belief in miracle, a 

 certain contemjDt for those who attach much importance to siich occa- 

 sional exceptions to general law. Prophets and apostles and Christ 

 himself believe one and all that God can and does, at his pleasure, 

 suspend ordinary laws ; they believe this as a matter of course, and 

 with a kind of wonder that any one can doubt it ; but they hold it 

 rather as a matter of course than as a matter of much importance 

 though they may hold a particular suspension of law to be very im- 

 portant for the light it throws on the Divine will ; and it is evident 

 that the God of their worship is rather the God who habitually main- 

 tains his laws than the God who occasionally suspends them. As 

 therefore we found that the physical religion which in paganism ex- 

 isted along with a belief in the supernatural appeared elsewhere 

 divorced from it, and that the Christian religion of humanity reap- 

 peared in modern religions divorced from miracle, so Ave may expect 

 to find somewhere a purely natural religion of God. 



I have before asserted that modern science, however contemptu- 

 ously it may reject the supernatural, has nevertheless both a theology 

 and a God. It has a God because it believes in an Infinite and Eter- 

 nal Being ; it has a theology because it believes in the urgent neces- 

 sity of obeying his laws and in the happiness that comes from doing 

 so. Is it not equally true that it has or may have a religion ? If re- 

 ligion be made of love, awe and admiration, is not Nature a proper 

 object of these as well as of scientific study ? 



It will be said that the religion of God thus understood is intel- 

 ligible enough, but has no character of its own by which it may be 

 differenced from the physical and moral religions described above. 

 When we admire a fl.ower we are worshiping Nature, but this is 

 paganism stripped of the supernatural, or Wordsworthianism. When 

 we admire justice or self-sacrifice in any human being, we are again, 

 after the explanation given above, worshiping Nature, but this is 

 Christianity stripped of the supernatural, or the modern religion of 



