148 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be veri- 

 fied ; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon 

 is verifiable by human reason or experience ? The kind of evidence 

 which theology accepts, or has accepted in the past, is too much like 

 that which led the old astrologer Nostradamus to predict the end of the 

 world in 1886, because in this year Good-Friday falls upon St. George's 

 day, and Easter upon St. Mark's day, the very latest date upon which 

 Easter can happen. 



Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view — 

 the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and 

 shapes the universe with man as the center. It has no trouble to 

 believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal 

 element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of 

 the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, 

 and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as inti- 

 mate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as 

 the special theatre of the celestial powers — powers to whom it has 

 given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious 

 plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining 

 to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the 

 mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and 

 their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes 

 a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities. 



Of all the great historical religions of the world, theology sees but 

 one to be true and of divine origin ; all the rest were of human inven- 

 tion, and for the most part mere masses of falsehood and superstition. 

 Science recognizes the religious instinct in man as a permanent part of 

 his nature, and looks upon the great systems of religion — Christianity, 

 Judaism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, the polytheism of Greece, Rome, 

 and Egypt, etc. — as its legitimate outgrowth and flowering, just as 

 much as the different floras and faunas of the earth are the expression 

 of one principle of organic life. All these religions may be treated as 

 false, or all of them treated as true ; what we can not say, speaking 

 for science, is, that one is true and all the others are false. To it they 

 are all false with reference to their machinery, but all true with refer- 

 ence to the need to which they administer. They are like the con- 

 stellations of the astronomical maps, wherein the only things that are 

 true and real are the stars ; all the rest — Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion, 

 etc. — are the invention of the astronomers. The eternal truths of 

 man's religious nature have lent themselves to many figures of poly- 

 theism as well as of Christianity; these figures pass away or become 

 discredited, but the truths themselves — the recognition of a Power 

 greater and wiser than ourselves, to the law of which it is necessary 

 that our conduct in some measure conform — never pass away. Was 

 not Egypt saved by her religion, and Greece by hers, as much as Eng- 

 land is by hers ? 



