6. This position new for Science, not for Religion.
Yet even this third point has, if we will but look to its substantial significance and religious function, been equivalently held and practised ever since the Twice-Born life, the deeper religion, has been lived at all.
(1) The Ascetic’s self-thwarting, and the Mystic’s self-oblivion and seeking after Pure Love, what are they but the expressions of the very same necessities and motives which we would wish to see fully operative here? For we are not, of course, here thinking of anything simply intellectual, and fit only for the educated few. Any poor laundry-girl, who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing, who moves, in alternation, away from this concentration on the Thing, to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary contemplation, and who seeks the fuller growth of her spirit and of its union with God, in this coming and going, to and from the Visible and Contingent, to and from the Spiritual and Infinite, and in what these several levels have of contrast and of conflict; or any lowly farm-labourer or blacksmith or miner, who would proceed similarly with his external determinist mechanical work, and with his deeply internal requirements and spiritual growth and consolidation: would all be carrying out precisely what is here intended.
(2) As a matter of fact, the source of such novelty, as may be found here, is not on the side of religion, but on that of science. For the conception of Nature of the ancient Greek Physicists, and indeed that of Aristotle, required to be profoundly de-humanized, de-sentimentalized: a rigorous mathematical Determinism and soulless Mechanism became the right and necessary ideal of Physical Science. But, long before the elaboration of this concept of the ruthless Thing, and of its blind Force, Our Lord had, by His Life and Teaching, brought to man, with abidingly unforgettable, divine depth and vividness, the sense of Spirit and Personality, with its liberty and interiority, its far-looking wisdom and its regenerating, creative power of love. And for some thirteen centuries after this supreme spiritual revelation and discovery, that old anthropomorphic and anthropocentric conception of the Physical Universe continued, well-nigh unchanged, even among the earlier and middle schoolmen, and was readily harmonized with that Spiritual world. Yet they were harmonized, upon the whole, by a juxtaposition which, in proportion as the conception of Nature became Determinist and Mechanical, has turned out more and more untenable; and which, like all simple juxtapositions, could not, as such, have any spiritually educative force. But Spiritual Reality has now,—for those who have become thoroughly awake to the great changes operated, for good and all, in man’s conception of the Physical Universe during now three centuries,—to be found under, behind, across these Physical Phenomena and Laws, which both check and beckon on the mind and soul of man, in quest of their ultimate mainstay and motivation.
(3) And let us note how much some such discipline and asceticism is required by the whole Christian temper and tradition, and the weakening of some older forms of it.
During the first three generations Christians were profoundly sobered by the keen expectation of Our Lord’s proximate Second Coming, and of the end of the entire earthly order of things, to which all their natural affections spontaneously clung; and again and again, up to well-nigh the Crusading Age, this poignant and yet exultant expectation seized upon the hearts of Christians. And then, especially from St. Augustine’s teaching onwards, an all-pervading, frequently very severe, conviction as to the profound effects of Original Sin, a pessimistic turning away from the future of this sublunar world, as leading up to the great Apostacy, and a concentration upon Man’s prehistoric beginnings, as incomparably eclipsing all that mankind would ever achieve here below, came and largely took the place, as the sobering, detaching element in Christianity, of the vivid expectation of the Parousia which had characterized the earlier Christian times.
Clearly, the Parousia and the Original Sin conception have ceased to exercise their old, poignantly detaching power upon us. Yet we much require some such special channel and instrument for the preservation and acquisition of the absolutely essential temper of Detachment and Other-Worldiness. I think that this instrument and channel of purification and detachment—if we have that thirst for the More and the Other than all things visible can give to our souls, (a thirst which the religious sense alone can supply and without which we are religiously but half-awake)—is offered to us now by Science, in the sense and for the reasons already described.
7. Three kinds of occupation with Science.
Let the reader note that thus, and, I submit, thus only, we can and do enlist the religious passion itself on the side of disinterested, rightly autonomous science. For thus the harmony between the different aspects and levels of life is not, (except for our general faith in its already present latent reality, and in its capacity for ultimate full realization and manifestation), the static starting-point or automatically persisting fact in man’s life; but it is, on the contrary, his ever difficult, never completely realized goal,—a goal which can be reached only by an even greater transformation within the worker than within the materials worked upon by him,—a transformation in great part effected by the enlargement and purification, incidental to the inclusion of that large range of Determinist Thing-laws and experiences within the Spirit’s Libertarian, Personal life.
It is plain that there are three kinds and degrees of occupation with Things and Science, and with their special level of truth and reality; and that in proportion as their practice within, and in aid of, the spiritual life is difficult, in the same proportion, (given the soul’s adequacy to this particular amount of differentiation and pressure)—is this practice purifying. And though but few souls will be called to any appreciable amount of activity within the third degree, all souls can be proved, I think, to require a considerable amount of the first two kinds, whilst mankind at large most undoubtedly demands careful, thorough work of all three sorts.