theological religion. There are some who amuse themselves by repeating that this is a contradiction in terms, that religion implies theology. Yet no one refuses the name of religion to the systems of Confucius and Buddha, though neither has a trace of theology. But disputes about a name are idle. If they could debar us from the name of Religion, no one could disinherit us of the thing. We mean by religion a scheme which shall explain to us the relations of the faculties of the human soul within, of man to his fellow-men beside him, to the world and its order around him; next, that which brings him face to face with a Power to which he must bow, with a Providence which he must love and serve, with a Being which he must adore, — that which, in fine, gives man a doctrine to believe, a discipline to live by, and an object to worship. This is the ancient meaning of religion, and the fact of religion all over the world in every age. What is new in our scheme is merely that we avoid such terms as "Infinite," "Absolute," "Immaterial," and vague negatives altogether, resolutely confining ourselves to the sphere of what can be shown by experience, of what is relative and not absolute, and wholly and frankly human.
On the contrary, we should have said that what is new in the positivist scheme is that it proposes to foster and cultivate feelings of love and adoration in man towards an object which it does not even pretend to exhibit as possessing any of the characteristics fitted to inspire those feelings. Waive the words infinite, absolute, immaterial, and all other vague negatives as completely as you will, and what is there in the mere procession of events which have made human nature what it is, and us what we are, — if this has been done without purpose, without sympathy, without love for us or for our fellow-creatures here, — to justify even a momentary emotion of love, or a single act of service, towards the chain of natural facts and laws which take the place, we suppose, in positivism of the theist's Providence? We can understand, indeed, the necessity of bowing to the power which unrolls itself in the universe, though not any duty of doing so. It is no one's duty to acquiesce heartily in the succession of day and night, or in the circulation of the blood and the secretions of the body, — any more than in being born. But why am I to "love" the physical providence that adapts me to the world and the world to me? Does any one think of loving the locomotive or the steam that whirls him along the line, or even the sea which bears him on its waves, or the electric current that shoots along the wire? "Love" and "adoration" must be kept for moral qualities of some sort. No one can adore Mont Blanc, though he can admire it, or Vesuvius in eruption, though he may fear it. If our affections are to be cultivated towards the power which controls our lives, we must know something of that power which will entitle it to our affections. If all we know is that it has produced the universe as we see it, including ourselves, with all the evil and all the good in us; and further, that it furnishes us, — unconsciously, we suppose, according to the positivist religion, — with all we have, both that which we have and love, and that which we have and hate; that it will take us away again before long, and replace us by others; and that as it deals with us, so, in all probability, it will deal with our race, and all the races of living things, — extinguish them, when the time comes, in favor of some other régime, — we do not know how any didactic inculcation of love and adoration could induce reasonable men to foster love, and indulge ad oration, towards a being so closely veiled from the gaze of men. Mr. Frederic Harrison seems to us to desire to borrow from a system which he rejects that which is peculiar to that system. The agnostic may justly inculcate the study of nature's laws, and enlarge on the marvellous storehouses of nature's forces, but as to training us to love an enigma, to ad ore those protean forms of natural energy which result now in the conflagration of a world, and now in the plunging of a planet into the frozen sleep of an Arctic winter, — the attempt must be a failure. As there really is a God who loves us behind this mysterious succession of nothingness, life, pleasure, pain, good, evil, death, memory, and resurrection, that God must be the object of the deepest affections and the profoundest adoration. But for one who will hear of no awful will behind the changes of the external world, to ask for love and adoration towards the unknown power which flows through this strange current of phenomena, is to demand what is unreasonable and monstrous. It is simply unreal sentimentalism to require the attitude of mind appropriate towards a God of love and righteousness, from one who believes in no God of love and righteousness, but only in the great procession of natural phenomena, including — though for a span which is hardly worth mentioning in such an eternal procession as that — the phenomena of our human life.
