The other reason for entering upon the discussion of these questions, lies in the incredible thoughtlessness with which a great part of modern educated people, even of such men as do not at all wish to abandon faith in a living God, permit themselves to be governed by the leaders of religious infidelity, and to be defiled and robbed of everything, which belongs to the nature of a living God. By many, it is considered as good taste, and as an indispensable sign of deep scientific learning and high education, and it forms a seldom contested part of correspondence in newspapers, which have for their public a wide circle of educated people, that in referring to the inviolableness of the laws of nature they declare faith in a special providence of God to be a view long ago rejected, and which is only consistent with half-civilized individuals; that they look down with a compassionate and self-conscious smile upon the egoistic implicit faith of congregations who still pray for good harvest-weather, and see in the damage done by a hailstorm a divine affliction; that they criticise it as a sad token of ecclesiastical darkness, when even church-authorities order such prayers in case of wide-spread calamities; that they fall into a passion over the
narrowness and the dulling influence of pedagogues who see in the histories which they relate to their pupils or put into their hands for reading, the government of an ethical order of the world which goes a little farther than the rule that he who deceives injures his good name, and he who gets intoxicated injures his health; that they give a man who still believes in the resurrection of Jesus, to understand that he has not yet learned the first elements of the theory of putrefaction and perishableness. That the adversaries of faith in a God thus express themselves, and try to conquer as much ground as possible for their frosty doctrine, is certainly quite natural; but that even advocates of theism should permit such stuff to be presented to them, and can keep silent in regard to it—nay, that even preachers offer it to their congregations as ordinary Sabbath edification, and that their hearers can gratefully accept it—is certainly a suggestive and alarming evidence of the rapidity with which, in many men who still do not wish consciously and certainly to be thought godless (i.e., to be separated from God), their connection with the source of light and life is decreasing, and of how strongly the fear that they may be looked upon as unscientific and imperfectly educated, overbalances the fear of losing the living God and Father, and therewith the support of both mind and life.
Now, that this faith in a special providence, in a hearing of prayer, and in divine miracles, forms an essential part of Christian religiousness, we do not need to show more in detail; it is an established historical fact, and an object of direct Christian knowledge. On the other hand, we have still to say a word concerning
that which, on the part of those just described, is so strongly contested; namely, about the scientific worth of such a faith, and also about its reconcilableness with the Darwinism theories.
In the first place, as to the faith in a special providence of God, and, in connection with it, as to the possibility of a hearing of human prayer, such a faith is by itself the inevitable consequence of all theism; nay, it is precisely identical with theism; it is that which makes theism theism, and distinguishes it from mere deism—i.e., from an idea of God, which merely makes God the author of the world, and lets the world, after it was once created, go its own way. Now, the theistic idea of God, which sees the Creator in an uninterrupted connection with his creation, is in itself the more scientific one: for a God who, although the author of the world, would not know how to find, nor intend to find, a way of communication with his creation, would certainly be an idea theologically inconceivable. We should, therefore, still have to adhere to the idea of a special providence of God, even if in our discursive reasoning and exact investigation of the processes in the world we should not find a single guide referring us to the scientific possibility of such a direct and uninterrupted dependence of the world on its author. We should then have simply to declare a conviction of the providence of God to be a postulate of our reasoning, which is given with the idea of God itself; and would just as little call this conviction unscientific on account of the fact, that we are not able to show the modalities of divine providence, as in reference to the exact sciences we should contest the character of their
scientific value on account of the fact that they are no longer able to give us an answer exactly where our questions become most important and interesting.
But the ways in which we are able to realize scientifically the idea of a divine providence are, indeed, not entirely closed for us. We have several of them; one starts from the idea of God, others from the empiric created world.
It belongs to the idea of God, that we have to think of the sublimity of God over time and space, of his eternity and omnipresence, in such a way that God, in his being, life, and activity, does not stand in time nor within any limits or differences of space, but absolutely above time and above all limits and differences of space; that he is present in his world everywhere and at any time. He who objects to this, can only do it with weapons to which we have to oppose the objection which the adversaries of the Christian idea of God so often raise against it—namely, the objection of a rejectable anthropomorphism. In contesting the possibility of the idea of an uninterrupted presence of a personal and living God in the entire realm of the universe, the adversaries seem to permit themselves to be daunted by the difficulty which is offered to man in controlling the realms of his own activity. The greater such a realm, the more difficult becomes a comprehensive survey, the more the human influence has to restrict itself to the greater and more common and to neglect the little and single. The more removed is the past which helps to constitute the circumstances of the present, the greater is the human ignorance and oblivion; the more removed is the future, the greater is the human incapability of
influencing it decisively. Such measures ought to disappear, even in their last traces, when we reflect on God and divine activity. If once the idea is established for us of a living God, who is always present in the world created by him, and in whose "sight a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night," the final causal chain of causes and effects may be ever so long, and stretching over this course of the world from its beginning to its end; the single phenomena may be woven together of ever so many thousands and thousands of millions of different causal chains: we nevertheless see above them all the regulating hand of God from whom they all come, and who not only surveys and controls their texture in all its threads, but who himself arranged, wove, and made it. Such a view is not only more satisfactory to the religious need of man, but it also seems to us more scientific, than a view which traces everything back to a blind and dead cause, or even to no ultimate cause at all, and thinks it has entirely removed the last veil, if it pronounces the great word "causal law."
Now, while our idea of God thus tells us that God has in his hand all causal chains in the world, and its million-threaded web in constant omni-surveying presence and in all-controlling omnipotence, our reflection on the world and its substance and course also leads us from the a posteriori starting-point of analytical investigation precisely to the same result; it even leads us to a still more concrete conception of this idea—namely, to the result, that not only the causal chains, in their totality and in their web, but also all single links of these chains,