the present century so powerfully that the ideal majesty of infinite time and endless space might counteract a low and narrow materialism."[1]
This experience ought not to be thrown away. No one, who has paid a serious attention to the progress of the modern sciences, can entertain a doubt that all the really substantiated discoveries which have been supposed to contravene Christianity do in reality only deepen its profundity and emphasize its indispensable necessity for man. Never before, in all the history of mankind, has the Deity seemed so awful, so remote from man, so mighty in the tremendous forces that he wields, so majestic in the permanence and tranquillity of his resistless will. Never before has man realized his own excessive smallness and impotence; his inability to destroy—much more, to create—one atom or molecule; his dependence for life, for thought, for character even, on the material environment of which he once thought himself the master. The forces of nature, then, have become to him once more, as in the infancy of his race, almost a terror. And poised midway, for a few eventful hours, between an infinite past of which he knows a little and an infinite future of which he knows nothing, he is tempted to despair of himself and of his little planet, and in childish petulance to complain, "My whilom conceit is broken; there is nothing else to live for." And amid these foolish despairs, a voice is heard which says: "Have faith in God! have hope in Christ! have love to man! Knowledge of this tremendous substratum of all being it is not for man to have: his knowledge is confined to phenomena and to very human (but sufficient) conceptions of the so called laws by which they all cohere. But these three qualities are moral, not intellectual, virtues. For the Church never teaches that God can be scientifically known; she never offers certainty and sight, but only "hope," in many an ascending degree; she does not say that God is a man, a person like one of us—that were indeed perversely to misunderstand her subtile terminology—but only a Man has appeared, when the time was ripe for him, in whom that awful and tremendous existence has shown us something of his ideas, has made intelligible to us (as it were by a word to the listening ear) what we may venture to call his "mind" toward us, and has invited us—by the simple expedient of giving our heart's loyalty to this most lovable Son of man—to reach out peacefully to higher evolutions, and to commit that indestructible force, our life, to him in serene well-doing to the brotherhood among whom his Spirit works, and whose welfare he accounts his own.
Is not this humanizing of the great Existence, for moral and practical utility, and this utterance (so to speak) of yet another creative word in the ascending scale of continuous development, and this socializing of his sweet, beneficent Spirit in a brotherhood as wide as the world, precisely the religion most adapted to accord with modern science?
- ↑ Kalisch, "On Genesis," p. 43.
