SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 15 



was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of 

 mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen 

 powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It 

 looks upon this little corner of the universe as the 

 special theatre of the celestial powers — powers to 

 whom it has given the form and attributes of men, 

 arid to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. 

 Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to 

 the mass of mankind than that of science ever can 

 be, because the mass of mankind are children, and 

 are ruled by their affections and their emotions. 

 Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes 

 a world of force and law for a world of humanistic 

 divinities. 



Of all the great historical religions of the world, 

 theology sees but one to be true and of divine ori- 

 gin ; all the rest were of human invention, and for 

 the most part mere masses of falsehood and super- 

 stition. Science recognizes the religious instinct in 

 man as a permanent part of his nature, and looks 

 upon the great systems of religion — Christianity, 

 Judaism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, the polythe- 

 ism of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, etc. — as its legiti- 

 mate outgrowth and flowering, just as much as the 

 different floras and faunas of the earth are the ex- 

 pression of one principle of organic life. All these 

 religions may be treated as false, or all of them 

 treated as true ; what we cannot say, speaking for 

 science, is, that one is true and all the others are 

 false. To it they are all false with reference to 

 their machinery, but all true with reference to the 



