Science is perpetually becoming. If at times it closes to piety dear and familiar prospects, it necessarily and constantly opens new ones. If it takes away its crutches, it gives it wings. The contemplation of the harmony of the worlds which moves us religiously is, it seems to me, worth more to modern thought than the fatidical oracle, or the cry of the crow that frightened the good old woman of Rome. The more science progresses the more it puts into things the order and harmony of thought. It can only create a Cosmos more and more intelligible and, consequently, susceptible of an increasingly religious interpretation.
At the same time as science instituted its severest methods, it radically transformed its primary notion of Nature. This was conceived by the Cartesian Rationalism as a finished and coherent whole, a system of identical movements and phenomena which were produced by virtue of the same springs acting in the same circle (the vortices of Descartes). The familiar image under which they loved to represent it was that of a watch, constructed and wound up by the divine artificer once for all. Now, we see this dogma of the immutability of Nature going to join the other dogmas of the past. The theory of the ascensional evolution of beings, which renders miracle useless, shows Nature to us in the course of constant transformation and perpetual travail. Nothing in it is stable or final. Everything is preparatory to something else; each form of life is the preface to a higher form. What then is the hidden mystery which ferments in the bosom of this painful nature and endeavours to expand?
"The more cannot issue from the less," said the schoolmen, and no doubt in abstract logic they were right. But reality smiles at logic. It shows us everywhere the triumph of the opposite maxim. Perfection is at the beginning of nothing. Cosmic evolution proceeds always from that which is poorer to that which is richer, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from dead matter to living matter, from physical to mental life. At each stage Nature surpasses itself by a mysterious creation that resembles a true miracle in relation to an inferior stage. What then shall we conclude from these observations except that in Nature there is a hidden force, an incommensurable "potential energy," an ever open, never exhausted fount of apparitions at once magnificent and unexpected? How can such a universe escape the teleological interpretation of religious faith? For the moment, science may accord nothing more to piety; but piety has no need to ask more from it; for it has already in this way found safeguarded the three things which the old notion of miracle guaranteed to it: the real and active presence of God, the answer to prayer, and liberty to hope.
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3. Religious Inspiration
Passing by the subject of prophecy, which is a species of miracle, and admits of the same kind of explanation, it may be well to touch upon the subject of prophetic inspiration. The ancients represent it as a veritable state of possession. The spirit of the god or demon violently entered into the body of a man or woman, sometimes of an animal, and made of it an organ the more faithful in proportion as it was unconscious. Everybody knows the description given by Virgil of the Cumaean sybil at the moment of vaticination: "The god, the god, she cried," etc. (Aeneid VI. v. 45 et 77.)[[2]] It was a sort of frenzy or sacred delirium in which divine words involuntarily and sometimes unconsciously proceeded from the mouth of the possessed. Madmen, epileptics, idiots, hysterical persons, were regarded almost everywhere as sacred beings, friends and confidants of superior spirits. Their strange malady only seems explicable by the presence in them of one of these spirits.
[[2]] Cf. Plato, Meno. Timaeus, 45.—Cicero, De Divin 1. 2. 18. 31. Aristotle, Problem, xxx. p. 474.
The same ideas were current among the Hebrews, and are to be found both in the Old and in the New Testament. The prophets of Ramah, disciples of Samuel, and Saul himself, putting themselves by contagion into a state of delirium and "prophecy," are in a physical and mental state identical with that of the sybil of Cumae. The demons in possession of the man who was healed by Jesus were the first to divine and to salute His messianic dignity. The poor woman whom Paul healed at Philippi was haunted by "a spirit, a Python." The speakers with tongues at Corinth were thought by those present to be mad, and those at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost looked like drunken men (1 Sam. x. 5-7: Mark i. 24: Acts xvi. 16-20: 1 Cor. xiv: Acts ii. 13).
All these manifestations, formerly held to be supernatural, are now recognised as morbid phenomena, of which mental pathology describes the physiological causes, the natural course, the fatal issue. Even in frightful disorders order has been discovered; laws and remedies have been found for many of these sad afflictions. Formerly they deified these demented and tormented souls; in the Middle Ages, and up to the eighteenth century, they burned them; we pity them and care for them. This is much the best for all concerned.
Preoccupied with guaranteeing the infallibility of the sacred writings, the theology of the Fathers, of the scholastic doctors, and of the Protestant doctors of the seventeenth century, drew from this ancient notion of religious inspiration a dogmatic theory applicable to the divine oracles contained in the Bible. It seemed to them that the more passive the personal spirit of the writers was, the purer would be the word of God that they were charged to deliver when it reached us. At this point of view, the most faithful organ of God, the one that ought to inspire us with the greatest confidence, would be Balaam's ass. "The writer might be stupid," exclaims Gaussen, "but that which came from his hands would always be the Bible." Some have gone further by way of inventing images borrowed from the material order, such as, "the strings of a lyre," sounding beneath the divine bow, "the quills or pens of the Holy Spirit," etc., etc. The theory is familiar. It was developed throughout the Middle Ages until they came to say that God was the author and is alone responsible for the Bible, and for everything that is found in it; not only for the things and thoughts, but also for the words and style; not only for each word, but also for the vowels and the consonants. It only remained that they should have added the punctuation, not the least important matter in a connected discourse. Unhappily, the punctuation is absent from the oldest manuscripts.