2 30 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



humanity. Now, what third kind of religion can there be unless we 

 introduce a third or supernatural order ol beings ? I answer that the 

 natural religion of God, though closely connected with both of these 

 religions, is nevertheless clearly distinct from them. Its material is 

 certainly the same ; it contemplates the same phenomena and no 

 others, but it contemplates them in a diiferent spirit and for a differ- 

 ent purpose. The object which excites its admiration may be, as in 

 tlie former case, a tree, a flowei*, the sky, or the sea, but the admira- 

 tion, when aroused, goes beyond tlie object which aroused it, and 

 fixes upon a great unity, more or less strongly realized, in which all 

 things cohere. It is thus that the view which the man of science 

 takes of any natural object ditters from that taken by an uneducated 

 man. The admiration of the latter is, as it were, pagan. It ends in 

 the particular form and color before it. It sees nothing in the object 

 but the object itself. But the eye of science passes entirely beyond 

 the object and sees the law that works in it ; instead of the individual 

 it sees the kind, and beyond the kind it sees higher unities in endless 

 scale. What it admires is also in a sense Nature, but it is not Nature 

 as a collective name for natural things, but Nature as the unity of 

 natural things, or, in other words, God. Similar, with feelings less 

 distinct but probably stronger, is the contemplation of Nature in 

 ancient Hebrew poetry, which, when it surveys the great phenomena 

 of the world, instead of considering each by itself in succession, in- 

 stinctively collects them under a transcendent unity. Instead of 

 saying, " How spacious the floor of ocean, how stately the march of 

 the clouds across heaven, how winged the flight of the wind ! " the 

 Hebrew poet says, " Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the 

 waters, who maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the 

 wings of the wind." 



We see, then, that human admiration, when it organizes itself in 

 religion, may take three forms and not two only. Not only may it 

 fix itself almost exclusively upon sensible phenomena and become 

 paganism, or turn away from the sensible world to contemplate moral 

 qualities as in Christianity, but also it may fix itself not upon the phe- 

 nomena themselves, but upon a unity of them. The simplest form of 

 this religion of unity is, I suppose, Mohammedanism, which not only 

 contemplates a unity of the world, but takes scarcely any interest in 

 the phenomena themselves, tlie unity of which it contemplates. Lost 

 in the idea of the greatness of God, it loses its interest in the visible 

 evidences of his greatness ; but in most cases this religion of unity is 

 combined with one or both of the other religions. The unity wor- 

 shiped is not an abstract unity, but a unity either of the physical or 

 of the moral world, or of both. In paganism the physical world is 

 not worshiped simply for itself, but a feeble attempt is made to estab- 

 lish some unity among its phenomena by setting xip a supreme Jove 

 over the multitude of deities. In the moral religions the tendencv to 



