MIRACLES 



reached its highest development. The authority of 

 Aristotle was paramount in philosophy; it was used by 

 the dominant Church for its own purposes. But the 

 influence of the Christian faith, with all the gay color- 

 ing which the fairy - tales of the Bible added to its 

 structure of dogmas, was seen much more in practical 

 life. In the foreground of belief were the three central 

 dogmas of metaphysics, to which Plato had first given 

 complete expression — the personal God as creator of the 

 world, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of 

 the human will. As Christianity laid the greatest 

 theoretical stress on the first two dogmas and the 

 greatest practical stress on the third, metaphysical 

 dualism soon prevailed on all sides. Especially inimical 

 to scientific inquiry was the Christian contempt of nature 

 and its belittlement of earthly life in view of the eternal 

 life to come. As long as the light of philosophical 

 criticism in any form was extinguished, the flower- 

 garden of religious poetry flourished exceedingly and the 

 idea of miracle was taken as self-evident. We know 

 what the practical result of this superstition was from 

 the ghastly history of the Middle Ages, with its In- 

 quisition, religious wars, instruments of torture, and 

 drowning of witches. In the face of the current en- 

 thusiasm for the romantic side of mediasvalism, the 

 Crusades and Church art, we cannot lay too much stress 

 on these dark and bloody pages of its chronicles. 



An impartial study of the immense progress made by 

 science in the course of the nineteenth century shows 

 convincingly that the three central metaphysical dogmas 

 established by Plato have become untenable for pure 

 reason. Our clear modern insight into the regularity 

 and causative character of natural processes, and espe- 

 cially our knowledge of the universal reign of the law of 

 substance, are inconsistent with belief in a personal 

 God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the 



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