MINOR EDITORIALS.
SOCIOLOGY AND THEOLOGY.
Opposition to the sociological method has already come from students of theology, and more friction is to be expected. Much of this conflict comes from a misunderstanding which it is important to correct.
Sociology has for a part of its task the explanation of the phenomena of society. Explanation implies the tracing of the paths of causation in the cosmic order. The word explanation is used with this meaning in chemistry, physics, biology and psychology. Theology is also an effort of the human intellect to explain all phenomena of nature mind and society. But its explanations go deeper than those of the sciences already mentioned, and are required by a distinct intellectual want. Our rational nature asks not only for the immediate causes of events in the cosmic order, but also for the very ground of that order itself and of the forces which appear in the visible and tangible conscious world. These two forms of rational effort are not contradictory nor mutually exclusive.
Mr. Spencer, in his chapter on "The Theological Bias," develops one phase of the subject: "No one need expect, then, that the religious consciousness will die away or will change the lines of its evolution. Its specialities of form, once strongly marked and becoming less distinct during past mental progress, will continue to fade, but the substance of the consciousness will persist. That the object-matter can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who think the 'Religion of Humanity' will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment, alone properly called religious, awakened by that which is behind Humanity, and behind all other things. . . . No such thing as a 'Religion of Humanity' can ever do more than temporarily shut out the thought of a Power of which Humanity is but a small and fugitive product—a Power which
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