M. Renan's recent dialogues, who says that after organizing society, the next duty of thinking men will be "to organize God," it is not easy to conceive. If the Cause of the universe be not above it, but inferior to it, if, as the modern pantheists teach, it is by evolution only that the unknown and unknowable Cause attains anything like self-consciousness, the prayer "Nearer, my God to thee," in the mouth of such a one, must be either a mere empty aspiration after his own share in a universal development which no one can either advance or retard for a moment, or an ejaculation suited to a cast-off belief, and of which the "primary significance" is not only "impaired," but wholly lost. Surely a writer of this kind is trifling with very serious subjects, when he professes that language whose whole scope implies a divine life of the highest imaginable perfection and love in the Creator of the universe, loses none of its meaning in the mouth of one who regards the Cause of the universe as unknown and unknowable, and therefore, of course, as not a proper object for human love at all. But Mr. Fiske is not alone in this use of the language of faith and feeling towards what is not a proper object for any feeling except mere intellectual wonder, or in speaking with the utmost confidence of what the unknown and unknowable Cause is about to do for the human race. Even Miss Harriet Martineau, who confidently expected, and indeed, if we may judge by her language, positively relished, the thought of personal annihilation, — who, indeed, took credit for that annihilation almost as if she were discounting the value of a contingent remainder of slight probability, — regarded it as one of the great advantages of her new freedom that she could be certain, first, that the Cause of the universe was "wholly out of the sphere of human attributes;" and next, that "the special destination of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine government." Yet such benevolent presages for the future of her race were evidently mere leaps in the dark for one who boasted that the ultimate source of being was quite beyond the sphere of human attributes. If the "process of the suns" has ripened men's thoughts, yet it will, to all appearance, rot them too. A Cause which takes no special account of man, except as one phase in the infinite variety of successive change, is just as likely to get rid of the race, as of each individual of the race. You cannot argue from actual historical progress, unless you also go back to the ages which preceded life, and note that in our own satellite — the moon — for instance, there have apparently already elapsed uncounted ages since the last organization such as we know on the earth was extinct. Once launched into the sphere in which human love and faith and hope have no meaning, to indulge glorious visions for our race, except of the most ephemeral and conditional kind, is a sheer and very cheap bit of sentimentalism, like wishing your friend the good luck to pick up a magnificent diamond in the streets, or bidding your betrothed "become the bride of a ducal coronet, and forget me." Of course, it is quite reasonable, on the ground of pure experience, to hope that as improvement has gone on so long, — for so many thousand years, — the same improvement may continue for, at all events, a few hundred years more, in the absence of any cosmic catastrophe which might prevent it. But that is a very different thing indeed from going into raptures as to the far higher destiny which you have, as an agnostic, a right to anticipate for your race than any theist — who believes the Creator to have a special purpose in making man in his own image — has any right to anticipate. That is using unreal words, — playing fast and loose with the unknown and unknowable, in the very way in which Christians are (too often justly) charged with playing fast and loose with the solemn truths they profess.
But perhaps the most curious instance of this tendency of the enthusiasts of humanism to take credit for religious sentiments and affections better a great deal than Christianity itself could justify, is to be found in Mr. Frederic Harrison's contribution to the new "Symposium" in the Nineteenth Century. Mr. Frederic Harrison — one of the most distinguished of the English Comtists, — will hear of nothing supernatural. He rejects all theology, and says religion must be grounded entirely on what is "frankly human." But it must be a great deal more than mere morality: —
- Motality will never suffice for life; and every attempt to base our existence on morality alone, or to crown our existence with morality alone, must certainly fail. For this is to fling away the most powerful motives of human nature. To reach these is the privilege of Religion alone. And those who trust that the Future can ever be built on Science and Civilization, without Religion, are attempting to build a pyramid of bricks without straw. The solution, we believe, is a non-
