632 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the present century so powerfully that the ideal majesty of infinite 

 time and endless space might counteract a low and narrow material- 

 ism." ' 



This experience ought not to be thrown away. No one, who has 

 paid a serious attention to the progress of the modern sciences, can 

 entertain a doubt that all the really substantiated discoveries which 

 have been supposed to contravene Christianity do in reality only deepen 

 its profundity and emphasize its indispensable necessity for man. Never 

 before, in all the historj' of mankind, has the Deity seemed so awful, so 

 remote from man, so mighty in the tremendous forces that he wields, so 

 majestic in the permanence and tranquillity of his resistless will. Never 

 before has man realized his own excessive smallness and impotence ; his 

 inability to destroy — much more, to create — one atom or molecule ; his 

 dependence for life, for thought, for character even, on the material 

 environment of which he once thought himself the master. The forces 

 of nature, then, have become to him once more, as in the infancy of his 

 race, almost a terror. And poised midway, for a few eventful hours, 

 between an infinite past of which he knows a little and an infinite future 

 of which he knows nothing, he is tempted to despair of himself and of his 

 little planet, and in childish petulance to complain, " My whilom conceit 

 is broken ; there is nothing else to live for." And amid these foolish 

 despairs, a voice is heard which says : " Have faith in God ! have hope 

 in Christ ! have love to man ! Knowledge of this tremendous substratum 

 of all being it is not for man to have : his knowledge is confined to 

 phenomena and to very human (but sufficient) conceptions of the so- 

 called laws by which they all cohere. But these three qualities are 

 moral, not intellectual, virtues. For the Church never teaches that God 

 can be scientifically known ; she never offers certainty and sight, but 

 only " hope," in many an ascending degree ; she does not say that God 

 is a man, a person like one of us — that were indeed perversely to mis- 

 understand her subtile terminology — but only a Man has appeared, when 

 the time was ripe for him, in whom that awful and tremendous existence 

 has shown us something of his ideas, has made intelligible to us (as it 

 were by a word to the listening ear) what we may venture to call his 

 "mind" toward us, and has invited us — by the simple expedient of 

 giving our heart's loyalty to this most lovable Son of man — to reach 

 out peacefully to higher evolutions, and to commit that indestructible 

 force, our life, to him in serene well-doing to the brotherhood among 

 whom his Spirit works, and whose welfare he accounts his own. 



Is not this Immanizing of the great Existence, for moral and prac- 

 tical utility, and this utterance (so to speak) of yet another creative 

 word in the ascending scale of continuous development, and this social- 

 izing of his sweet, beneficent Spirit in a brotherhood as wide as the 

 world, precisely the religion most adapted to accord with modern sci- 

 ence? 



1 Kaliscb, " On Genesis," p. 43. 



