50 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



causation. Presently we arrive at a stage at which, even after long 

 trial, we do not see our way to going further. Yet we are not able to 

 demonstrate that further progress in the same direction — that is, along 

 the chain of secondary causation — is impossible. Science conducts us 

 to a void which she can not fill. 



It is on other grounds that we are led to believe in a Being who is 

 the Author of Nature. A conclusion so important to mankind in gen- 

 eral is not left to be established as the result of investigations which 

 few have the leisure and ability to carry out. Doubtless, where it is 

 accepted, the study of science enlarges our ideas respecting the great- 

 ness of that Being, and tends to keep in check notions of too anthro- 

 pomorphic a character which we might form concerning him. Still, 

 the subject-matter of scientific study is not, at least directly, theistic, 

 and there have not been wanting a few instances of eminent scientists 

 who not merely rejected Christianity, but apparently did not even 

 believe in the being of a God. 



The religious man, on the other hand, who knows little or nothing 

 of science, is in the habit of contemplating the order of Nature not 

 merely as the work of God, but in very great measure as his direct 

 work. Of course, the concerns of every-day life present innumerable 

 instances of the sequence of cause and effect ; and few are now so ig- 

 norant of the very elements of science as not to allow that the sequence 

 of day and night, of summer and winter, is proximately due to the 

 rotation of the earth about its axis, and the oblique position of that 

 axis with reference to the plane of the earth's orbit. But when we 

 get beyond the region of what is familiarly known, still more when 

 we get outside the limits of well-ascertained scientific conclusions, and 

 enter a region which is still debatable ground, where men of science 

 are attempting to push forward, and are framing hypotheses with a 

 view to the ultimate establishment of a theory in case those hypotheses 

 should stand the test of thorough examination — when, I say, we get 

 into this region, a man such as I have supposed may feel as if the 

 scientists who were attempting to explore it were treading on holy 

 ground ; he may mentally charge them with irreverence ; perhaps he 

 may openly speak of them in a manner which implies that he attributes 

 to them an intention to oppose revealed religion. 



To take a particular example. I can imagine that a man such as I 

 have supposed may have always been in the habit of regarding each 

 one of the thousands and tens of thousands of species into which natu- 

 ralists have divided the animal and vegetable kingdoms as having 

 originated in an independent creative act ; that the supposition may 

 have become entwined among his religious beliefs. Such a man would 

 be apprehensive of any attempt to introduce second causes in explana- 

 tion of the observed fact of the great multiplicity of species. 



Akin to the feeling which I have attempted to describe is another, 

 against which we must be on our guard. The religious man is strong- 



