348 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF 



to that eminently practical and direct end, the alleviation 

 of the sufferings of mankind, have they been able to 

 confine their vision more absolutely to the strictly useful ? 

 I fear they are worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer 

 has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the 

 practical eternity of the duration of the universe ; if the 

 physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated 

 the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the 

 practical eternity of matter and of force ; and if both have 

 alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable 

 order and succession of events, the workers in biology 

 have not only accepted all these, but have added more 

 startling theses of their own. For, as the astronomers 

 discover in the earth no centre of the universe, but an 

 eccentric speck, so the naturalists find man to be no centre 

 of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications 

 of life ; and as the astronomer observes the mark of 

 practically endless time set upon the arrangements of the 

 solar system so the student of life finds the records of ancient 

 forms of existence peopling the world for ages, which, in 

 relation to human experience, are infinite. 



Furthermore, the physiologist finds life to be as dependent 

 for its manifestation on particular molecular arrangements 

 as any physical or chemical phenomenon ; and, wherever 

 he extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging 

 causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest of 

 Nature. 



Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the germ 

 of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, 

 out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that 

 which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual 

 coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism ; of Theism or 

 Atheism ; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, 

 and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to 

 do ; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if 

 the religion of the present differs from that of the past, 

 it is because the theology of the present has become more 

 scientific than that of the past ; because it has not only 

 renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to 

 see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up 

 of books and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs : 

 and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's 

 emotions, by worship " for the most part of the silent sort " 

 at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable. 



