It is only the second-rate men of science who loudly vaunt their ability to do without religion altogether, and proclaim their fixed and unchangeable resolve for its entire suppression. As well resolve to suppress the Gulf Stream or the eccentricity of the earth's orbit! If the horizon of man's thought is bounded on all sides by mystery, it is in simple obedience to the law of his nature that he gives some shape to that mystery. It were mental cowardice to shrink from facing it; it were positive imbecility to declare that the coast-line between known and unknown had no shape at all. Granted that the line be a slowly fluctuating one, and that conquests here and losses there reveal themselves in course of time, and one day become "striking" to the commonest observer, does that fact acquit of folly the Agnostic statement that, now and here, there is no thinkable line at all, no features to be described, nothing to sketch, no appreciable curves and headlands, no conception possible which shall integrate (for practical utility) that great Beyond whose boundaries, on the hither side at least, are known to us? Men who can only attend to one thing at a time, and whose "one thing" is the field of a microscope or "the anatomy of the lower part of the hindmost bone of the skull of a carp,"[1] may perhaps escape the common lot of manhood by ceasing to be "men," in any ordinary sense of the word. But, for people who live in the open air and sunshine of common life, there is the same necessity for a religion as there is for that mental map of our whereabouts that we all carry with us in our brains. Let any one recall his sensations when he has at any time been overtaken in a fog or a snow-storm, and when all his bearings have been blotted out, then he will readily understand the need which all men feel for a theology of some kind, and he will appreciate what the old-school divines meant when they said that "Theology was the queen and mistress of the sciences," harmonizing and gathering up into architectonic unity all the multifarious threads that the subordinate sciences had spun.
I. One is driven, nowadays, to repeat both in public and private these very obvious reflections, owing to the extraordinary persistence with which certain philosophers think fit to inform us that we are all making a great mistake; that we can do very well without a religion; and that, though it is true "man can not live by bread alone," but must have ideas, yet the creed by which he may very well make shift to live is this—"Something is."[2] In point of brevity there is here little to desire. The Apostles' Creed is prolix by comparison, and although we might fairly take exception to "some-thing," as embodying two very concrete acts of the imagination, and therefore capable
- ↑ Cf. Mivart, "Contemporary Evolution" (1876), p. 134.
- ↑ Physicus, "Examination of Theism" (1878), p. 142: "What was the essential substance of that [atheistic] theory? Apparently it was the bare statement of the unthinkable fact that Something Is. The essence of atheism I take to consist in the single dogma of self-existence as itself sufficient to constitute a theory of things."
