< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu
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THEOLOGY UNDER ITS CHANGED CONDITIONS.

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of this article said that we must be Christian agnostics, he used the term agnostic not in the sense in which it is frequently used, and which implies, first, that it is more than doubtful whether the objects of theology exist at all; and, secondly, that it is a pestilent piece of folly to seek for any knowledge about them; but simply in the sense that they must be approached by other paths than those of a speculation which results in the formation of dogmas. The distinguished inventor of the name agnostic has in a recent number of this Review reminded us that "physical science is as little atheistic as it is materialistic." It may be as well to quote the passage ("Fortnightly Review" for December, 1886, page 799):

The student of Nature who starts from the axiom of the universality of the law of causation, can not refuse to admit an eternal existence; if he admits the conservation of energy, he can not deny the possibility of an eternal energy; if he admits the existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of consciousness, he must admit the possibility at any rate of an eternal series of such phenomena; and, if his studies have not been barren of the best fruit of the investigation of Nature, he will have enough sense to see that, when Spinoza says, "Per Deum intelligo ens absolute infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem infinitis attributis," the God so conceived is one that only a very great fool indeed would deny, even in his heart. Physical science is as little atheistic as it is materialistic.

Mr. Herbert Spencer goes further, and dwells upon this eternal energy as the mystery of mysteries, and considers that religion as maintaining the sense of this mystery is one of the most important factors of human life. We are all alike in the admission of a great object of thought to which the name of God has commonly been given. We have all to co-operate in the endeavor to estimate the nature and character of that object.

In the sermon above quoted it was pointed out that literature was one of the channels through which the great objects of theology would in future be approached. The preacher implied, like Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the literary conceptions of God and immortality ("words thrown out at a great subject," to use Mr. Arnold's expression) bring us nearer to the truth than dogmatic statements. It is not very different from what Aristotle says about morals "We must be content in such matters to exhibit the truth roughly and in a figure, and to reach our object by words which describe it in the general and to draw infererences of the same kind; for it is the mark of a man of culture to seek for exactness in each subject only so far as the nature of the thing admits. You do not expect exhortations from a mathematician or demonstration from a rhetorician." But theologians have commonly started in entire defiance of this warning. They have begun with axioms and definitions, and have proceeded to demonstrations. They have said or "proved" that God is just or good, God is personal, God is omniscient and omnipotent; and they have used these phrases not

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