From the hand of the Author Divine.
CHAPTER XI SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY SUSTAIN THE RELIGIOUS CONCEPT
I contend that science, philosophy and electric evolution sustain the religious concept.
The infinite and eternal power that animates the universe must be psychical in its nature, and any attempt to reduce it to mechanical force must end in absurdity. The only kind of monism which will stand the test of an ultimate analysis, says John Fiske is monotheism. The highest development of psychical life is the end for which the world exists. To the materialist the ultimate power is material power, and psychical life is nothing but fleeting colocations of natural elements in the shape of nervous systems. The psychical nature of God and the immortality of the soul harmonize infinitely better with cosmic philosophy. Prof. John Fiske says: "Evolution brings before us with vividness the conception of an ever-present God, not an absentee God who once manufactured a cosmic machine capable of running itself. It makes God our constant support and nature His revelation, and when all its religious implications are set forth it will be seen to be the most potent ally Christianity ever had in elevating mankind. The progress of evolution now is to bring out the higher spiritual attributes and to set the whole doctrine of evolution in harmony with religion. Then, the assumption that underlies all religion must be true—that what we see of the present life is not the whole thing; that there is a spiritual as well as a material side of life; in short, a life eternal.
"In the whole history of evolution," he continues, "when we see an internal adjustment reach out towards something, it is in order to adapt itself to something that exists. And if the religious cravings of man constitute an exception they are the only exception in the whole process of evolution." This is an argument of stupendous and resistless weight. This puts evolution in harmony with religious thought, and the great religious drift of humanity in all ages, and removes the antagonism that used to appear to exist between religion and science.
The French materialists of the eighteenth century virtually declared: "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the methods of physical science and we will reject all else." But think how chaotic nature was to their minds compared to our present conception, and how different the universe they saw to what we see to-day. And it is not to be wondered at that there was antagonism between science and religion. Anaxagoras maintained that the human race would never have become human if it were not for the hand, and John Fiske says, "man never would have attained his present psychic powers but for religion."
This is truth well stated, and the fact that man is the only creature that has a hand, an articulate voice and an aesthetic nature that is never satisfied, is strong proof that man is infinitely more than a mere animal, or a transient animate machine. The higher intellectual powers were dwarfed in the middle ages, when human life was made hideous by famine, pestilence, perennial warfare and bloody superstitions, fear of witchcraft and eternal torments, and men endured it because they had no experience of anything better. But the change wrought in six centuries is amazing, and shows that human genius and man's possibilities are beyond our comprehension. The genius of Aristotle proved that the earth is a globe, that of Copernicus showed that it was one of a system of planets, and that of Newton undertook to explain the laws and dynamics of this marvelous sun and world system.
Belief in God, and the immortality of the soul, and the compensations of a future life tend to maintain social order and moral rectitude, by enabling men to endure the trials and injustice of this world in the hope of ample compensation in the hereafter. Man steps forth on this revolving globe not of his own volition, but is sent here by some mysterious power on some inscrutable mission to fulfill some divine purpose. He comes as a spiritual wayfarer under sentence of death. Not death to the spirit, but to the transient habiliments of earth-dust he gathers round his invisible spiritual form. When he arrives and gathers his reasoning powers to scan the narrow horizon of his life, he is beset by perplexing problems of poverty, disease, sorrow, sin and death. The "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" often overwhelm him, and he discovers at last that the law of life is the law of growth and development; and all these struggles and trials are intended to evolve character and purify and ennoble the soul. That this is the seed time and nursery of existence preparatory to the harvest of eternal life when he shall drop this overcoat of atoms and be transplanted to the self-luminous bosom and unfading joys of the perfected and celestial sun-worlds. Here he sees incompleteness, fragmentary careers, tragedies, injustice, griefs and farewells, and he hungers for knowledge. His quenchless spirit seeks to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, and comprehend time and eternity, and in agony of soul he asks the age-old question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" Then, if he turn not to the pages of sacred writ for an answer, he will find written on the living pages and animated forms of all nature the promise of another life. He will find it in the returning verdure of spring, in the unfading light of the eternal stars, in the ever-changing beauty of the bending skies, in the mysterious impulse of the untaught birds of the air who start on their vast migrations from the frozen seas of the north to the summer-lands of the sunny south; in the tropic fish, who seek their spawning nests in the clear, cool rivers of the north. The bear and lion, the tiger and elephant, the bees and the insects of a summer day, all have the longings of their natures satisfied. Why should man be an exception? If the Creator of all keeps faith with all other creatures, why not with man?