628 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



symbols of Egypt and Assyria. It was another great step to Baal, the 

 blazing sun, and Moloch, wielder of draught and sunstroke, and Agni, 

 friendly comrade of the hearth. But when astronomy and physics had 

 reached sufficient growth to master all these wonders, and to predict 

 the solstices and the eclipses, then the fullness of times had come once 

 more ; and now the greatest religious transition was accomplished that 

 the human race has ever seen — a transition from the physical, and the 

 brutal, and the astral, to the human and the moral, in man's search after 

 a true (or the to him truest possible) representation of the infinite forces 

 at play around him. In Abraham the Hebrew — i-iay, the man who made 

 the great transition — this important advance is typified for the Semitic 

 races ; for others, the results only are seen in the Olympian conceptions 

 of Hesiod and Homer. For here we have, at last, the nature-forces 

 presided over and controlled after a really human fashion. Crude, and 

 only semi-moral, after all, as was this earliest humanizing effort, still 

 human it was — not mechanical nor bestial. And it opened the way for 

 Socrates to bring down philosophy, too, from heaven to earth, for Plato 

 to discuss the mental processes in man, and apply them (writ large) to 

 the processes of nature, and for Moses to elaborate with a divine sagacity 

 a completely organized society, saturated through every fiber with this 

 one idea — the unity of all the nature-forces, great and small, and their 

 government, not by hap-hazard, or malignity, or fate, but by what 

 we men call law. " Thou hast given them a law which shall not be 

 broken." For this word " law " distinctly cdnnotes rationality. It im- 

 plies a quality akin to, and therefore expressible in terms of, human 

 reason. Its usage on every page of every book of science means that ; 

 and repudiates, therefore, by anticipation, the dismal invitations to sci- 

 entific despair with which the logicians d outrance are now so press- 

 ingly obliging us. 



This grand transition, then, once made, all else became easy. The 

 human imagination, the poetic or plastic power lodged in our brain, 

 after many failures, had now at last got on the high-road which led 

 straight to the goal. Redemption had come ; it only needed to be 

 unfolded to ils utmost capabilities. Dull fate, dumb, sullen, and im- 

 practicable, had been renounced as infra-human and unworthy. Let 

 stocks and stones in the mountains and the forests be ruled by it; 

 not free, glad, and glorious men ! Brute, bestial instinct also had been 

 renounced, as contemptible and undivine in the highest degree. And 

 so, at last, the culminating point was attained. The human-divine of 

 Asiatic speculation, and the divinely-human of European philosophy, 

 met and coalesced ; and from that wedlock emerged Christianity. The 

 " Something is " of mere bald analytic reasoning had become clothed 

 by the imagination with that perfect human form and character than 

 which nothing known to man is higher ; and that very manhood, which 

 is nowadays so loudly asserted by positivists and atheists to be the 

 most divine thing known to science, was precisely the form in which 



