IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 33 



unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in 

 the rest of Nature. 



Nor can I find that any other fate has awaited the 

 germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowl- 

 edge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, 

 with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the in- 

 tellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of 

 Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. 

 With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I 

 have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my pur- 

 pose to say, that if the religion of the present differs 

 from that of the past, it is because the theology^jrf _the 

 present has become more scientific than that of the 

 pasty because itjhas not only renounced idols of wood 

 "alffdr'idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of 

 breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and tra- 

 ditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs: and of 

 cherisEmg the noblest and most human of man's emo- 

 tions, by worship "for the most part of the. silent sort" 

 at the altar of the Unknown. 



Such are a few of the new conceptions implanted in 

 our minds by the improvement of natural knowledge. 

 Men have acquired the ideas of the practically infinite 

 extent of the universe and of its practical eternity; they 

 are familiar with the conception that our earth is but 

 an infinitesimal fragment of that part of the universe 

 which can be seen; and that, nevertheless, its duration 

 is, as compared with our standards of time, infinite. 

 They have further acquired the idea that man is but 

 one of innumerable forms of life now existing in the 

 globe, and that the present existences are but the last 

 of an immeasurable series of predecessors. Moreover, 

 every step they have made in natural knowledge has 

 tended to extend and rivet in their minds the concep- 

 tion of a definite order of the universe which is em- 



