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Natural Philosophy of Religion.

473

consciousness; evidence concerning the nature, meaning, practice, of rites and ceremonies; evidence of their transmission, expansion, restriction, modification; gives a natural explanation of the most sacred and high powers of religion.

The fault, or weak part, in the assumed Natural Philosophy of Religion is, that as the culture of science and art, of history and philosophy, displays a world-long evolution of civilisations wrought out wholly by men in their ascent toward highest development; the same process is assumed as to religion, but the great fact of the Supernatural, on which all religion rests, and without which all religion is vain, is either denied or persistently ignored. Ignored-despite the truth that, from carliest days till now, the universal consciousness, conscience, intelligence of mankind, accepted and accept the Supernatural. Denied despite the fact that Christianity, Mohammedanism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Zoroastrism, and all other Faiths. down to lowest brutal Fetishism, claim Divinity in their origin and continuance.

The folly of ignoring the miraculous becomes more evident when we learn—“the relation of savagery to barbarism and semi-civilisation lies almost wholly in pre-historic or extrahistoric regions. . . . Direct history hardly tells anything of the changes of savage culture. . . . Perhaps no account of the course of culture in its lower stages can satisfy stringent criticism." The philosophy of religion, which professes to account for the origin, nature, development of religion, is confessedly ignorant of that origin, and can trace only a few steps of its backward course. Moreover, Mr. Tylor saysSeparation of intelligence from virtue which accounts for so much of the wrong-doing of mankind, is continually seen to happen in the great movements of civilisation." He adds -"ethnographers consider the rude life of primeval man under favourable conditions to have been, in its measure, a good and happy life." 3 Knowing, further, the fact thus expressed by Bishop Butler-"Mankind are for placing the stress of their religion anywhere rather than in virtue;" it seems, if the doctrine or philosophy of a natural evolution of religion

1 "Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 35: Edward B. Tylor.
2 Ibid. vol. i. p. 25.
3 Ibid. p. 27.

be true, that uncultured ancient men devised supernatural restraints on vice and encouragements to virtue; but that cultured men, "in the great movements of civilisation," through unbelief discard those supernatural restraints and separate intelligence from virtue. The conclusion is irresistible-Religion, resting upon faith in the supernatural, far from being an evolution by advancing intelligence, is that very thing which culture, through unbelief of the supernatural, sets itself to destroy.

Banishment of the supernatural, establishing the throne of reason apart from those high emotional faculties which are the essence of humanity, has brought to trial the long and intricate world-history of right and wrong. Secularism, undertaking accurately to formulate all knowledge, has been forced to admit the remarkable fact that all natural phenomena rest on the transcendental-on the unknown. The tools that opponents of the supernatural perverted into weapons of destruction are being restored to their real use: to clear, trim, adjust, appropriate thoughts and facts for that contentment of religious emotion and satisfaction of intelligence which are the great want of our day.

Some of the facts and processes of thought lie distant from us in time, as the stars are distant from us in space, but the laws of mind, like those of the physical universe, are not bounded by the unaided experience of our senses. History, philosophy, science, bring to view factors of natural philosophy as foundations of positive morality-morality resting on consciousness of the Supreme. Scientific thought which, as by polarising force, separated the natural from the supernatural to the utmost limits of repulsion, now recognises that—as in material things, so in spiritual-the ultimate cause is the Unknown. The end of things and the beginning of things are hidden in impenetrable mystery. We are incapable of understanding the nonentity out of which they were drawn, and unable to comprehend the infinity into which they are translated.

Proceed to the verification of this.

The order in which various stages of doctrine and rite succeed one another in the history of religion, and the fact

Consciousness of the Supernatural.

475 that most of those doctrines and rites are not products of the particular systems sanctioning them—but results of previous systems, carry back religion to that early stage which is prehistoric or extra-historic. Hence, religious feeling springs from that primitive universal desire of the human race to establish a relationship between itself and those superhuman and supernatural powers upon whose will the course of Nature and the well-being of men were felt to be dependent. This roots religion in the beginning of the life of our race, in the deepest recesses and essential elements of our nature, and clothes it with the highest authority which antiquity, reverence, reason, can afford.

The various symbols with which this consciousness clothes itself, the external practices and forms of words, may change and die; but under all the superficial differences are a few certain unchangeable and undying truths. Only three need to be mentioned :

1. The conviction of a Divine and Supernatural Power is always accompanied by an attempted twofold intercourse with that Power: prayer, by which the worshipper communes with Him; and an asserted revelation from Him to the creature. In other words "The religious consciousness regarded as a sense of the presence of the Divine in the universe and among mankind, is found in all stages of human history, and constitutes a primary efficiency in religion, in social life, and in civilisation."1

2. There exists, it is affirmed, an abode in which men abide after death. "Looking at the religion of the lower races as a whole, we shall at least not be ill advised in taking as one of its general and principal elements the doctrine of the soul's Future Life." 2

3. The reality of evil is an abiding conviction. Evil, as to the body, which no industry, no political arrangement, can destroy. Evil, as to the soul, in its weakness and passions. We find it everywhere. It lies in the old Pythagorean doctrine of the metempsychosis. Of Plato it is said—“A tolerably complete doctrinal statement might be gathered 1 "God in History," vol. iii. p. 302: Bunsen.

"Primitive Culture," vol. ii. p. 19: Edward B. Tylor.

from his works of the origin, nature, and effects of sin."1 Polybius would check "the unruly passions and desires of man, by the fear of the invisible and such like tales of horror." Cicero says of the sparks of virtue-" They are quickly extinguished by corrupt habit and thought, so that the light of Nature nowhere appears."3

2

In connection with these universal convictions exist holy places, persons, things; to which are added observances, ceremonies, rites; the outcome of an undeniable fact that God was prominent in the minds of primitive men, that they perceived a Spirit in everything, mysterious ghostliness in all dark space. No tribe nor people has ever been discovered in the whole course of human history that has not a religion of some kind or other. These religions are not indefinitely variable: the great moral truths are substantially the same. The aborigines of Australia were said to have no idea of the Supreme, no object of worship, "nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish;"4 yet in the same book are statements and traditions concerning supernatural beings, of the author of mischief in the form of a serpent, of souls, demons, deities. "No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation from the rest, and the thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilisation, perhaps even of human existence."5

This last statement is not perfectly accurate as to Christianity, which possesses essential truths of its own. Accept, however, as fact, that the similarity found in ancient faiths is so great that it must arise either from the relics of an ancient revelation, or from universal convictions interwoven with the very life of the soul. There is, indeed, sufficient resemblance in Theologies to show that, for the most part, they rest upon a common consciousness of the supernatural; sufficient to

1 "Christian Element in Plato:" Dr. C. Ackerman.
Neander's "Church History," vol i. p. 8.

3 Tuscu. Quæst." lib. iii. in proæm.

4.66

Queensland: "J. D. Lang.

5 "Primitive Culture," vol. i. p. 381: Edward B. Tylor.

Christianity not an Evolution.

477

mark a dim, confused recollection and tradition of a Divine communication; but not sufficient to enable us to gather out of other faiths our Christian Faith. A committee of inquiry could not collect Christianity from theologics, nor a representative council co-ordinate it as the growth of universal consciousness. Christianity is neither a development nor an evolution, it is a revelation and realisation. "It is the blessed disclosure of that mystery which had been sealed in silence since the foundation of the world. . . . It is a bringing home to every living soul of that which had been the dim and latent hope of the poor suffering heart of humanity in all ages and in all times, but which never became an objective reality until angel voices on the slopes of Bethlehem sang of peace and blessedness to mankind."1

There is, consequently, a moral order, a false and a true, a right and a wrong. Indeed, all intelligent intercourse with ourselves and with the outer world rests on our faith that the good is true and the true is good. Not to accept this would conduct a man to insanity, and a race to stupidity: not even in the stupidity of savagery is the moral element absent though scanty. Where formal precept fails, traditional consensus and public opinion exist by which actions are held to be good or bad, right or wrong. Where religion is separated from morals, as it greatly is in barbarism, and partly in some low forms of professedly Christian faith, the sense of morality is never wholly lost from consciousness and life. On this sense of moral order, of the reality of truth, rests the possibility of a Kingdom of God amongst men, the potentiality of our grand creed that God is our Father, Heaven is our Home.

We now transfer our argument to the advance of art and science.

The similarity of early fishing, hunting, warlike instruments, indicates that they were contrived almost instinctively by a sort of natural necessity: these rude beginnings advanced to the improvements of modern skill. Civilisation, itself a work of skill, the joint advance of art and science, effects 1 Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, "Modern Unbelief,” p. 56.

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