July 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



193 



^ILLUSTRATED J^GAZINE ^ 

 j^!EN€E,UT£RATUtlE, & AR^ 



LONDON: JULY 1, 1887. 



RELIGION AND THE UNKNOWN. 



By Richaed A. Proctor. 



Behold God is great and tee know him jiot. . . . Great tliiugs doetli 

 he whicli ire cannot inu/rrstand. . . . Touching the Almighty we 

 cann«t Jind him out. — Elihu (Jhc approied of God) in the Book of Job, 

 chap, xxxvii. 



\\'ho hath knoirii the mind of the Lord ' — Paul (to the Romans), 

 chajj. si. 



N a kindly notice of my essays on " The TJnknow- 

 mIiIc" in Knowledge, which I s;tw recently in 

 Wiiits's Li'i-rary thiule, the remark is made 

 that though I " object to the term ' agnostic ' 

 a-s inadequately expressing my views," I am 

 in sympathy with those who are recognised 



;is belonging to the agnostic school of thought." 

 I am nut sure that I have ever expressed anj- objection 

 against the term " agnostic," though I admit that no such 

 term can quit« adequately express the \-iews of a school ; but 

 emphatically I am in sympathy with the school called, 

 for convenience of reference, Agnostic. I wish here Iniefly 

 to show why ; ;md more particularly to point out that in all 

 ages and among all races true and reverent religion has 

 been necessarily agnostic* I have expressed this thought in 

 Knowledge in the words, '• A God imderstood is no God at 

 all." I might equally have said, with the same underlying 

 meaning, " A religion which may be presented in terms of 

 the known is no religion." 



So soon as man rose above the merely animal condition 

 he began to be moved by the unknown and by the unknow- 

 able, though as yet he had no means of distinguishing one 

 from the other. He showed the influence of the unknown 

 upon his emotions by the constant effort to picture it as 

 known and underetood. In this eflbrt religion had its 

 beginning and all developments of religion had their origin. 

 What was nearest and simplest moved man first. The river 

 and the forest, the mountain and the sea, rain, wind, and 

 storm, representing unknown and for the child-man un- 

 knowable power, were early regarded as known deities, 

 only mysterious in their attributes as deities, in their nature 

 ivnd qualities, their will and purpose. Men recognised in 

 the very unknowableness of natural phenomena the known 

 fact that in these, at any rate, they might woi-ship a power 

 outside themselves — in other words, Deity. But as time 

 went on, as the life of the huntsman and the tisherman gave 

 place to pastoral life — nomadic ttrst, and then more settled — 

 and pastoral to agricultural life, the forces with which man 



* With this volume of Knowledge the papers and notes on the 

 relations between religion and science which have appeared in 

 Knowledge from the time of its issue as a monthly magazine, will 

 be brought to a conclusion. They will probably be collected soon 

 in book form. 



had just come into more obvious contact, the forces belong- 

 ing to the earth, lost in dignity and impressiveness in pre- 

 sence of the forces which seemed jiresent in the heavens. 

 The sun in his glory and his obvious might, the moon walk- 

 ing in splendour, the planets as they pursued 



Their obvious course, now high, now low, then hid, 

 Progressive, retrograde, and standing still, 



began to be recognised as the really mysterious powers of the 

 universe. These now seemed appropriate objects of worship 

 and adoration, because their movements and their influences 

 seemed inexplicjible, and being thus appai-ently unknow- 

 able might be regarded as assuredly divine. Men now, as 

 before, in what seemed certainly unknowable, found cer- 

 tainly known divinity. And because this way of viewing 

 the heavenly orbs necessarily lasted for many centuries in 

 every race, for thousands, nay, tens of thoustmds of years 

 among mankind, the worship of these mysterious di%-inities 

 — mysterious, yet in the verj' assurance of their mystery 

 regarded as demonstrably divine, affected all races wliich 

 passed beyond a certain stage, to the very heart's core. 

 No matter what advance might sub.sequentlj- be made, no 

 race has ever us a race, shaken ofi" that long established 

 religion which had the dome of the heavens for its temple, 

 the visible orbs of heaven for its deities. In the temples 

 of today, among Jews, Mohammedans, Christians, and 

 Buddhists — anxiously though the teachera of these religious 

 bodies have ende;ivoured to get rid of nature-worship — the 

 ceremonial observances relating to the heavenly bodies 

 remain. Our temples now bear to the great temple of the 

 sky the same sort of relation wliich the Lady Chapels of the 

 Middle Ages bore to the great cathedral beneath whose roof 

 they found a place. 



In the worship of the heavenly bodies, there was the 

 worshij) of the unknown, and, as was thought, the unknow- 

 able. So soon as the movements of these bodies were 

 known and could be predicted they ceased to retain their 

 position as deities, except for the ignorant, who, however, 

 were the many, as they have ever been. Here began, as the 

 ignorant supposed, a contest between science and religion. 

 Science attacked religion, as they understood religion, in the 

 very fact that science endeavoured to explain what, so long 

 as it was believed to be inexplicable, men could worship. 

 Science destroyed the significance and value of their 

 sacrificial system so soon as science learned to predict that 

 at such and such a time the sun would rise again, the moon 

 which had waned would refill her orb, the sim as God of the 

 year would ascend, after his spring passover, to the full 

 glory of the midsummer heavens. Men cannot worship the 

 vernal equinox or the sun's right ascension, as they had 

 worshipped the sun-god at his passover, or after he had 

 ascended to the mid heaven. The " Nautical Almanac " 

 cannot replace the greater and the lesser prophets ; 

 nor can tabular announcements of sunrise and sunset, 

 of the moon's quarters, or of the equinoxes and the 

 solstices, take the place of the morning and evening .sacri- 

 fices, the '• blowing of the trumpet in the new moons," the 

 Feasts of the Pa,ssover and of Tabernacles, or the Fast of 

 the Atonement for the waning of the sun-god. Observation 

 has displaced observance, study has displaced reverence, i-o 

 far as the religion of the heavenly orbs has been concerned. 

 There was in a sense a long-lasting conflict between science 

 and religion, as knowledge displaced nescience, and men 

 found that what they had deemed an inexplicable mysterj — 

 the veritable unknowable — could be interpreted and under- 

 stood. But it was because the worship of the heavenly 

 bodies was no true relijnon that conflict arose with srrowinj; 

 science, and that grown science slew the religion which was 

 based on false conceptions. 



