366 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



Thus, then, the attributes and qualities with which 

 man endowed God, are truly attributes of Nature, and 

 all the emotions referred to the one are directly begotten 

 by the contemplation and consideration of the other. 

 Communion with God was communion with Nature, 

 including or supplemented by communion not only with 

 the heights but also with the depths and solitudes of 

 man's own soul. The intuitions of the religious sense 

 are naturally produced in the meditative poet by the 

 contemplation of Nature, at least as naturally as any 

 other class of emotions ; and to the true poet of Nature, 

 who is always, like Wordsworth, the high priest of her 

 worship, the cosmos, supposed by certain theologians to 

 be merely the garment of an indwelling Deity, becomes 

 at last identified as both sign and thing signified with 

 Him, its appearances and symbols become His veritable 

 speech and thought, its laws the expression of His will, 

 and the entire visible universe, with its immanent energy 

 and final unresolvable mystery, becomes God, His living 

 reality and totality. 



8. Does Science object to such a conception of 

 God ? On the contrary, so far as her unaided efforts can 

 go in the framing of such a notion, this is one to which 

 her discoveries are vaguely pointing ; this is the result 

 to which the scientific conception of the cosmos tends, 

 that is to say, the conception, so far as it is competent to 

 Science without the aid of Philosophy or Art to frame 

 it. And is this atheism ? Then the noblest spirits, 

 including the greatest modern poets and eminent theo- 

 logians, are atheists ; then Wordsworth Nature's poet, 

 and Goethe universal poet, then Schliermacher the theo- 

 logian, and Schelling the philosopher, must all be held 

 as atheists a result sufficient to refute the charge. 



Science shows to us an eternal and infinite cosmos, 



