To the mathematician the mechanics of the heavens are in no way different from the mechanics of a clock. It is true that the clock must have had a maker; but the mathematician, who investigates any problem connected with its mechanism, has nothing to do with him as such. The spring, the wheels, the escapement, and the rest of the works are all in their proper places somehow, and it matters nothing to the mathematician how they came there. As a mathematician the investigator of clock-motion takes no account of the existence of clockmakers; but he does not deny their existence; he has no hostile feeling toward them; he may be on the very best of terms with many of them; it may be at the request of one of them who has invented some new movement that he has undertaken his investigations. Precisely in the same way the man who investigates the mechanics of the heavens finds a complicated system of motion, a number of bodies mutually attracting each other and moving according to certain assumed laws. In working out the results of his assumed laws, the mathematician has no reason to consider how the bodies came to be as they are; that they are as they are is not only enough for him, but it would be utterly beyond his province to inquire how they came so to be. Therefore, so far as his investigations are concerned, there is no God; or, to use the word above suggested, his investigations are atheous. But they are not atheistic; and he may carry on his work, not merely without fearing the Psalmist's condemnation of the fool, but with the full persuasion that the results of his labors will tend to the honor and glory of God."[1]
The thought contained in this paragraph, and which may be said to be compressed in the word atheous, appears to me to be interesting intellectually, and valuable morally. It is not desirable that the reproach of atheism should be thrown about rashly. That there is such a thing as atheism, and that the atheistic condition of mind may be not only a very miserable, but also a very immoral one, I would not venture to deny; but that charges of atheism are not unfrequently rashly made, and the attitude taken up by scientific investigators is sometimes regarded as atheistic when it is not fairly to be described by that terrible epithet, is also true. Physical science is not more essentially atheistic than arithmetical or geometrical: all three are atheous, not one is atheistic.
Yet God and nature are very close the one to the other: the natura naturans and the natura naturata must necessarily be contiguous. We need a "scientific frontier" between them, a line which shall on no condition be transgressed by those who occupy the territory on one side or the other.
The necessity of keeping this frontier line sacred is perhaps not sufficiently recognized, and there is a great tendency to transgress it; but it is not a mere arbitrary line to be laid down by treaty, as the
- ↑ "Oxford and Cambridge Sermons," p. 280. (George Bell & Sons.)
