Dec. 1, 1885.] 



* KNOWLEDGE • 



^^MUSTRATEJ) ^MAGAZINEg^ ■ 

 NCE,UTERATURE,& ASli 



lONDOX: DECEMBER 1, 1885. 



THE UNKNOWABLE; 



OR, 



THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE, 

 Bt Eichard a. Proctor. 



EVOLUTIOIs^ OF RELIGION. 



The S«D, the Moon, the Stars, the Peas, the hills, and the plains — 

 Are not these, ^oul, the Vision of Him who reigns .' ^ 



Is not the Vision He .' tho' He be not that which He seems .' 

 Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams .' 



Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb. 

 Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? 



Dark is the world to thee ; thyself art the reason why : 

 For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel " I am I " .' 



Glory about thee, without thee ; and thou fulfillest thy doom. 

 Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom. 



And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see. 

 But if we could see and hear, — this Vision — were it not He .' 



(" The Higher Pantheism ') TES>ysos. 



F one would mark the precise point where the 

 idea cf religion rs viewed by the man of 

 science diverges from the idea of the re- 

 ligionist on the one hand find of the opponent 

 of religion (under which I include the Comt ist 

 notwithstanding his voice for the religion of 

 Hamanily) on the other, one should note it 

 here and thus : — 



The theological school regard religion as a communi- 

 cated gift ; the opponent of religion regards religion as 

 belonging only to the earlier and as yet imperfect stages 

 of intellectu ;1 development ; science recognises an evolu- 

 tion of religion as clearly as she recognises the evolution 

 of mind and thought. 



We owe to Herbert Spencer (the first to present fully 

 to the world of thought the doctrine of universal evolu- 

 tion — of which cosmical and biological evolutions are but 

 chapters) the recognition ( f the oneness of method 

 whereby men in all ages and of every race have formed 

 such religious ideas as have belonged to their time and to 

 their intellectual development. Where the theologip.n 

 speaks of a time when to some superior kind of man the 

 truth as to God was clearly taught, and recognises a very 

 strong distinction between the manner in which the 

 truly-taught and the majority of falsely-imagining men 

 viewed the great mystery : where the opponent of reli- 

 gion (even when he calls himself a believer in the Reli- 

 gion C'f Humanity) speaks of the time of theological 

 error, followed by the era of metaphysical sviggestion, 

 and by the full development of scientific inquirj', as three 

 strongly- demarked periods of human development : the 

 believer in the doctrine of evolution recognises one pro- 

 cess running continuously through the whole history of 

 the development of religion. 



The doctrine of biological evolution teaches that man 

 has developed from lower to higher animal types, from 

 the savage to civilised man, from coarseness and brutality 

 to puritj- and kindliness of conduct, thereby giving us 

 hope for the future, instead of the utter despair which 

 comes from the thought that having originally been 

 created pure and perfect (save for a somewhat imbecile 

 tendency towards disobedience) man has so changed that 

 his heart is now "deceitful above all things and des- 

 perately wicked." But the doctrine of religious evolution 

 speaks of better comfort still ; tends to save us from a 

 more fatal despair ; for it shows men's religions develop- 

 ing ever towards purer and nobler conceptions, until at 

 last all the attributes which savage races assigned to 

 Deity have disappeared. They pictured gods as mighty 

 men-eating chiefs, or as brave but brutal WK.rriors. Later 

 races have imagined one God for their one nation but 

 that God r, despot, a mr.n of war, and unreasoning in his 

 wrath — punishing the innocent for the guilty. Later 

 still, ."advancing races have believed in a Deity who though 

 less despotic and less insensate in anger than the special 

 Deilj- of some Oriental race, they yet imagine r.s acting 

 and ruling in a manner scarcely less unreasonable, and in 

 particular as possessing — only en an infinite scale — a 

 spirit of intolerance akin to their own. But as the evolu- 

 tion of religion proceeds, we see all these anthropomorphic 

 and degrading attributes disappearing from men's con- 

 ceptions tf the power working in and through all things, 

 until at length we recognise that those wiser men of old 

 g;;ve the true answer to the question "Canst thou by 

 Ee:-.rching find out God? " when they said "As touching 

 the Almighty we cannot find Him out ; lo ! these are 

 but a portion of God's Ways ; they utter but a whisper of 

 His Glory : the thunder of His Power who can under- 

 stand ? '■' In this " confession of impotence in the 

 presence of the ilystery of Things." we not only as 

 Herbert Spencer points out, see " Science brought into 

 sympathy with Religion," we see Religion cler.red of 

 '• all the knots that tangle human creeds, the wounding 

 cords that bind and strain the heart until it bleeds," we 

 find the promise of a purifying power in humanity in 

 regard to conduct, seeing that humanity has thus been 

 able to purify the conception of deity which is at once 

 the index vt human character and points the way of 

 human progress. The evolution cf the religious senti- 

 ment has enabled man to pass beyond the limits which, 

 by presenting as the best and most perfect ritle some- 

 thing inferior even to what humanity had already 

 attained, had checked the progress of humanity towards 

 good. The savage cannot advance till he ceases to set 

 his cruel god as the emblem of perfection ; the civilised 

 man cannot gain in intellectual and moral development 

 while he worships an mireasoning Deity cf ill-developed 

 moral character (the invention of less advanced races) 

 as the Supreme Being : in the recognition that all 

 anthropomorphic attributes must be rejected from our 

 consciousness of deity, lies our sure hope for the advance 

 of humanity to all of which humanity is capable. 



BIRTH OF RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS. 



In the attempt to trace the evolution of religion we 

 meet with difficulties not found in the study of the 

 evolution of the body or of the mind. The body itself 

 contains the record of the ancestral past as surely, though 

 not £0 obviously, as it contains the records of its own past. 

 We can place our finger on this bone or this muscle, this 

 nerve or this tendon, as telling of the time when the 

 progenitors of the human race were characterised bv ^:Uch 



