The church is, both logically and historically, the only defensible Christianity; as Jean Jacques Rousseau long ago admitted in the well-known words: "Prove to me that in matters of religion I must accept authority, and I will become a Catholic to-morrow." There is no controversy to-day between the church and Protestantism which is worthy of serious attention. All that is important has been said on this subject, and Protestants themselves begin to understand that it is far wiser for them to try to hold on to the shreds of Christian belief which still remain to them than to waste their strength in attacks on the church, which, as they are coming to recognize, is after all the strongest bulwark of faith in the soul and in God.
The ground of debate to-day is back of heterodoxy and orthodoxy; it lies around the central fact in all religion—God himself.
The scientific theories of the present time, if they do not deny the existence of God, are at least based upon hypotheses which ignore him and his action in the world; and the few attempts which have been made to construct what may be called a philosophy of science all proceed upon the assumption that, whether there be a God or not, science cannot recognize his existence.
The faith which the elder Mill taught his son—that of the manner in which the world came into existence nothing can be known—is that which most scientists accept. The desire to organize society upon an atheistic basis is also very manifest and very general.
"Reorganiser, sans Dieu ni roi
Par le culte systematique de l'Humanité."
The idealistic philosophy of Germany, invariably terminating in pantheism, is another proof of the atheistic tendency of modern thought.
Mill, in his Autobiography, has of course made no attempt to prove that there is no God. On the contrary, as we have already stated, he has admitted that this proposition cannot be proved; but he believes there is no God, fails to perceive any evidence of design in the universe, and, from a morbid sense of the evil which abounds, feels justified in concluding that the cosmos is not the work of an infinitely good and omnipotent Being.
Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, a work of the same character as the Autobiography of Mill, but which will be read with delight when Mill and his book will have been forgotten, has seen this difficulty, and given expression to it in his own inimitable manner. "To consider the world," he writes, "in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts; the tokens, so faint and broken, of a superintending design; the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'having no hope, and without God in the world'—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution."[255]
But, as Dr. Newman expresses it, ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. Difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. When we have sufficient reasons for accepting two seemingly contradictory propositions, the fact that we are unable to reconcile them should not be a motive for rejecting them. The human race has accepted, in all time, the existence of God with an assent as real as that with which it has believed in the substance that underlies the phenomenon. To a countless number of minds, the difficulty to which Mill has given such emphasis has presented itself with a force not less than that with which it struck him.
Millions have approached the mystery of evil, and have asked themselves