[31] "Harold: A Drama." By Alfred Tennyson. 16mo, pp. 170. Boston: James B. Osgood & Co.
[32] "Castle Windows." By Latham Cornell Strong. 16mo, pp. 229. Troy: H. B. Nims & Co.
NEBULÆ.
—The evolutionists manifestly feel that they are put upon their defence in the matter of religion. As far as they themselves are concerned, they are at peace with their own consciences; but nevertheless they do not sit easily under the charge of atheism which is very generally brought against them by that part of the world to which science does not stand in place of religion. They are now making desperate efforts to show that they have a religion, and Mr. M. J. Savage has written a very clever book upon the subject, entitled "The Religion of Evolution." Mr. Savage is a very pronounced evolutionist; he sticks at nothing in the most extravagant form of the new theory, and the attitude which he would take toward religion is clearly shown in the title of his previous volume on a kindred subject, "Christianity the Science of Manhood." It is safe to say that although Mr. Savage and others like him may call themselves Christians and believe themselves to be so, and may live lives worthy of the name, no man who twenty-five years ago was a professed believer in the Christian religion, and comparatively very few of those who are so now, would accept the term science as applicable to Christianity or to religion at all. For science means knowledge, knowledge of facts, and cautious logical deductions from those facts; whereas the very essence of religion is a faith which holds itself above knowledge and reason, a faith which is not only the substance of things hoped for, but the evidence of things not seen. And this great definition, one of the greatest ever given, applies not particularly to the faith of the Christian religion, but to all faiths—Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, and the rest. The true religionist will sooner accept one of these as a religion than a religion of evolution, or than he will consent to accept Christianity as a science of anything—of manhood, or even of God-hood.
—It is with this view of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and boldly. He takes the position that such a view of religion is unworthy of a reasonable creature, and he brushes it aside with little ceremony and with some dexterity. But his chief difficulty is with the conception which lies at the foundation of all religions—the idea of god. Granted a god, or gods, and religion follows as a matter of course; and conversely, no god, no religion. Therefore the evolutionists, those of them who feel, or who see the necessity of a religion, of whom Mr. Savage may be taken as a fair representative, go about to provide themselves and the rest of the universe with a god, and they do it in this fashion. It is shown to the satisfaction of the evolutionists, and also of very many who have no respect for their theory, that the Mosaic cosmogony—that is, the account in Genesis of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, and all the visible universe—has never been proved, and is incapable of proof, and that it holds its place in popular belief solely because of its supposed connection with Christianity; that it is merely a tradition (from however high and venerable a source), and that it rests upon no knowledge or study of the facts which it professes to explain; that it is in no way connected with Christianity, which would stand on its own merits equally whether the world were six thousand or six million years old, and whether it and its inhabitants were made in six days or six æons; that it—the Mosaic account of the origin of the world—explains nothing, but simply tells dogmatically that God made all and that God did so and so; that no intelligent person would think of resting satisfied with the Mosaic account, had it not come to be regarded as a requirement of religion to do so, but that this has become so fixed that the whole orthodox system is the natural and logical outgrowth of the Mosaic account of the beginning of things: "the prevailing belief about God, the nature and the fall of man, total depravity, the need and the schemes for supernatural redemption, the whole structure, creed, and ritual of the Church, the common belief about the nature and efficacy of prayer meetings, the whole system of popular revivals, limited salvation, and everlasting punishment"—all and each being built on the foundation of the Mosaic cosmogony. Therefore for the vast number of intelligent thoughtful people to whom the Mosaic account of the creation is no longer authoritative, although it may be mythically instructive, the foundation of their religion is gone. It is then assumed that religion must rest upon a veneration for the creative power or agent to which the present cosmos owes its existence, and that as the traditional God or Creator of Genesis has been eliminated from cognition by science, his place in religion must be taken by the power by which he is supplanted. Hence we have the god of evolution and the religion of evolution.
—But what is this god of evolution? In a very remarkable series of papers which have appeared for some months past in "Macmillan's Magazine," upon Natural Religion, remarkable equally for the subtlety and closeness of their thought and their clearness of style, something called Nature is set up as God; Mr. Savage's god, as nearly as we can make out, is the law of evolution—the formative power by which the universe passed from a mass of fluid fire, revolving in space, into suns, and suns and planets, and their inhabitants. In either case it amounts to about the same thing. What is nature? We may be sure the word is not used in the sense which it has when we say that a man admires nature, loves nature, or observes nature, nor in that which it has when we speak of the nature of things or the nature in a work of the imagination, or the nature of man, or "the nature of the beast." What is it then? We are very sure that the "Macmillan" writer, with all his delicacy of thought and command of expression, could not say exactly what he means when he speaks of this Nature which is so worthy of reverence and of love. For this reason, and for no other, we may be sure, he has left the word undefined. This is important; for, as Mr. Savage says in his eleventh chapter, when he proposes the question whether evolution and Christianity are antagonistic, so that one necessarily excludes the other—"that depends upon definitions."
—The truth is that this whole question is one greatly of definitions. What do you mean by God? what by Nature? what by religion? We are inclined to think that if the two parties on one side and the other of the great question of the day were to have a preliminary settlement of definitions, it would become plain that there could be no discussion, certainly no profitable discussion, between them—no more than there could be a fight between a deep-sea fish and a chamois. They would find that there was no ground on which they could meet, no point on which they could come in contact! To one God is, and must be, a person, an individual, who, however spiritual, eternal, omniscient, and omnipresent, is yet as much a person as a man having a will, with purposes, affections, feelings, sentiments, as indeed every spiritual being must have—a being who can be feared, revered, admired, loved. Religion to these men is worship of this person, obedience to his will because it is his, faith in him, love of him. The god of the evolutionists, on the other hand, is, if Nature, a mere manifestation or result; if a law, a mere mode or rule of action. As to the religion of evolution, we cannot, with all Mr. Savage's help, and that of the "Macmillan" writer (who, we are sure, must be a man of mark, or at least one who will become so), discover what it is, except a conformity to what may be called the law of nature; but that is something of which a healthy beast or a drop of water is quite as capable as a man is; and such conformity implies feeling quite as much in one of these cases as in the other. It implies feeling in no case; and religion without feeling, sentiment, and faith is no religion at all in the sense which the word has had from the beginning of its use to this day. The religious man finds in his God a being whom he can love and lean upon, who has a right to his obedience, to whom he can be loyal, whom he can address, calling him Father, as we are told that Christ did. But you cannot love a law. True, David says, "O how I love thy law"; but the law that he loved was the will of the Supreme Being, and he loved it because it was His. It was not a mode of action or of evolution that he loved. Nor can you obey such a law, although you may conform to it; nor can you be loyal to it, for you cannot be loyal to an abstraction. As to fatherhood, this law-god of evolution is the father of nothing except as two and two are the father and mother of four. Therefore, while we regard such books as Mr. Savage's as interesting expositions of the condition as to super-scientific subjects into which modern science has brought many of its votaries, we cannot see that they do anything toward refuting the charge brought against science (as it is among the evolutionists), that it is at war with religion, and takes away all the grounds of religious faith. For that which the evolutionists set up as a god religious people regard as the mere creature of the true God; and what they set up as religion the others regard utterly lacking in all the essentials of religion. It would be much better for the evolutionists to face this whole question boldly, as Mr. Savage does in part, and to say that the result of their investigations is the belief that there is no God, and consequently that there need not be, and in fact cannot be, any religion in the sense in which that word has for centuries been used. Moreover, we cannot see the grounds of one pretence which is made by the evolutionists, and which is implied if not in terms set up in all their writings that are not purely scientific and have what may be called a moral character, such as the book before us. This is that their theory accounts for everything, and is more consistent with reason than that of those who accept with faith the book of Genesis. The evolution theory is, in the words of Mr. Savage, "that the whole universe, suns, planets, moons, our earth, and every form of life upon it, vegetable and animal, up to man, together with all our civilization, has developed from a primitive fire-mist or nebula that once filled all the space now occupied by the worlds; and that this development has been according to laws and methods and forces still active and working about us to-day." But if it be granted, or even proved, that this is true, we cannot see how it satisfies the reason when we come to the question of creation and a creator. For what a stupendous, unutterably stupendous, and almost inconceivable thing was that fire-mist that filled all space and had in it not only the germs and possibilities of suns and moons and planets and our earth, but of man and all his civilization; and those laws and methods and forces according to which the universe and man and his civilization have been evolved from a fire-mist—what inconceivable things they are! Now who made the fire-mist and the law of evolution? We cannot see that reason is satisfied by the substitution of a fire-mist and a law of evolution for the will of a creator and a specific creation of the suns and stars and planets, including the earth, and man, and his possibilities of civilization. The thing is as broad one way as it is long the other. As far as the fact of creation goes, in either case the belief must be a matter of faith, not of reason. With regard to the anthropomorphism of the Hebrew story, that is shared, and must be shared, by all religions—that is, all religious which rest upon the notion of a personal God. The limitations of man's nature, the limitations of language, make anthropomorphic metaphor necessary when a man speaks of a god. Even the evolutionists cannot get rid of the necessity of faith.