Science and Faith

main pn'mnl mystorv as to wliy aTiytliinn^ is at all. There are vast countries on wliieli Christianity has made no inij)ression, there are other countries, and those liiglily civilized, where Christianity is fading. And, once more, is not Catliolicisin extremely improbable after all? It is based upon the belief that God became man — in itself highly improbable — and from that fact flow out with — I must confess — irresistible logic, a number of doctrines and theories that seem to me, when I am in this mood, the redudio ad absurdum of that Incarnation. Take the single doctrine of Transubstantiation, for instance — observe the Devotion of the Tabernacle.... There, in that iron safe, say the pious, in a silver cup made by Messrs. Jones and Willis, is the Eternal Incomprehensible God together with the Soul, the Body, and the Blood of One Who died nineteen hundred years ago, in an obscure Eastern province. Now, is that likely?... Certainly, say the real agnostics, it may he true, and the further side of the moon may be made of green cheese; but it is scarcely reasonable to ask us to sacrifice undoubtedly real pleasures, and to deny those senses by which we are in relations with the sensible world, and to upset our lives, and to devote hours of daylight to prayer, on the supposition that that improbable thing may possibly be a fact.

Ah, how convincing it all sounds when one is in the agnostic mood; and how incredibly mean and unconvincing when one is not!

Now, I cannot explain the mysterious movements of the soul by which I have emerged from that fit of depression; all I can do is to write down the outlines of a few considerations which floated on the surface of those movements.

The principal of them was the thought of the Transcendence of God.

It is quite certain that if God exists at all, He exists in a completely different manner from that in which we exist. Our first conceptions of Him, considered philosophically, must be of the negative order.

He is not as we are; He has not a mind like ours; He does not occupy space; He does not therefore move or change; He does not progress through time; yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow are obviously all one with Him. In fact, of God as He must be in Himself, we can say very little except negations. He is not here cuid there, then atid now; He just is.

But then, on the other hand, we do and are these various things; and, intellectually, we cannot really picture to ourselves an existence in any other mode than ours, or argue about it. When we think we have pictured a spirit, really all we have done is to think of a thin kind of body.... Therefore the gulf between us and God seems impassable. His thoughts are not only higher, but they are actually other than ours in their very nature.

Now, the agnostic, and indeed a great many other people who would repudiate the name, are more or less content with that. They shrug their shoulders — "Yes; if there is a God He is like that; then what is the use of bothering? How on earth can we know anything about Him? Meanwhile here is practical work to be done, and mutton to be eaten, and women to be loved, and books to be read and written, and ordinary civilized life to be carried on; or, if you want more, here is suffering that had better be relieved, and social reforms that might as well be inaugurated — all these things rest on an intelligible basis: then why fret about the Transcendent?"

But it seems to me that they omit a most vital point. Granted all this, we have yet to remember that on our assumption that there is a Transcendent God, the world as we know it came into being by Him; and that therefore the gulf is not actually but only intellectually impassable. Spirit did, as a matter of fact, express itself in matter; and further, therefore, it follows that there is nothing more reasonable than to believe that It should still communicate with us in the same terms. What, then, follows from this but that "Religion," although dealing with and leading to Transcendence, must be for all practical purposes in the same plane of existence as we, and not as God?

Now consider the Tabernacle again, or the Incarnation, for they are both the same

— and are they so unreasonable? True, Messrs. Jones antl Willis made the Ciborium, and pious nuns the bread; but what has that really jrot to do with it? If Transcendent God communicates with man — and it is really unthinkable that He should not

— He is bound, not by His limitations, but by ours, to communicate with us through means that are as material as ourselves.

We see, then — or at least I do — that religion must, from our nature, be inadequate to the Divine Essence, simply because we are in one mode of existence and He is in another; but that does not at all mean that it is in the least untrue or inadequate to our needs. We cannot help materializing everything, picturing spirit under a bodily image, conceiving of God as an old immeasurable man, and so forth; and therefore even revealed religion is bound to be of the same kind. God, in other words, is bound to use Images and things that are within our range. To say that the Devotion of the Tabernacle Is limiting to spirit, Is to imply that It Is unworthy of God to have made matter, If It Is unworthy of Him to use It.

The truth, then, lies in neither of the two extremes of spiritualism and materialism — neither In Mrs. Eddy nor Professor Huxley; nor, again, In that vague invertebrate religion (so dear to the British mind), always oscillating between the two and faithful to neither: but in a frank and full conception of both. It is, of course, the tendency of the religious mind to be exclusive — to dwell either upon the Transcendence of God and to sneer at the reality of sacraments and creeds and the particular devotions of the unthinking pious; or upon the material side of religion, and to think that our necessarily anthropomorphic Images of the Deity are adequate to His Nature and Being. But the truth surely lies In both. God Is Transcendent, therefore no dogma is adequate: God communicates with man; therefore the system of religion that comes from Him — whatever that may be — is ahsohitoly true so far as it goes. The reasonal)l(' Catholic, therefore, seems to me to have all the advantages of both sides. He has all the agnosticism of the agnostic with regard to (iod as He is in Himself; he has all the fervent faith of the Breton peasant in the local manifestations of the supralocal, and the verbal definitions of the Ineffable.

A second point flows naturally out of this.

Intellect plainly is insufficient for religious belief; but so it is also for every other branch of knowledge except the exact sciences. The exact sciences, we must remember, have, properly speaking, no real existence at all except in man's brain; they are abstract, not concrete. There is no such thing, for example, as "two" in the world, as Mr. Illingworth says somewhere: "Two" is always united (except in the brain, and perhaps even there also) with apples or horses or persons. There is no such thing as a line or a point or a circle. These sciences, then, are literally the only ones in which intellect is competent:

in history, geology, art, chemistry, and the rest, a thousand other faculties come in. A man must have predispositions, theories, observations, enthusiasm, faith in the word of others, if he is to make any progress in these other branches of knowledge. And yet, incredible as it may seem, apparently sensible persons demand that unless intellect be used alone in the realm of religion — • religion, which is infinitely more complicated and exhaustive and inclusive than any other realm, since it embraces not only the entire life of man, but even the dealings of a Transcendent God and to some extent His Being — unless intellect is accepted as supreme, they will have nothing to do with it. Enthusiasm is blinding, they say (whereas really it is illuminating); predispositions are the parents of illusion (whereas really they are God-given aids to intuition); theories are full of bias (whereas progress is impossible without them); faith in the word of others is credulity (whereas really it is an exercise of the moral faculty). And so forth. It is surely obvious then, to take yet one more illustration, that ivligioii cannot possibly be "proved." Only the exact sciences can be "proved," in the sense in which that word is commonly used. You cannot demonstrate by chemical analysis the beauty of a picture, or by reference to records the atmosphere of fourteenth-century civilization; by such methods no more can be done than the handling of the grosser materials. But the supreme judgment must be given, not by this faculty or by that, but by the entire man; his sympathy, his intuition, his emotion, his self-knowledge, his experience — not one must be wholly wanting; intellect by itself is powerless; there must co-operate with it all that we mean by character; and character, as w^e know, is the result of living.

Turn, therefore, once more to religion.

Here is a subject which claims to concern the whole of man, and more. It concerns, first, man as he is in himself, his emotions, his morals, his understanding, his thoughts, words, and actions, his social relations, his individual responsibility, his aspirations, his doubts, his hopes; and, further, it claims to concern all that God has done for him; his creation, his redemption, his momentary guidance and illumination. If, then, one single branch of man's activities — art or historical learning — depends for its perfect pursuit upon the entire man; if, for example, falling in love gives him new passion in music-making, or a disappointment a keen intuition into Napoleon's life at St. Helena — how much more is every faculty of his being, in short, his character as he has made it out of his original nature by his subsequent efforts and circumstances — how much more is this to give evidence in his supreme interest? An academic professor, therefore, occupied with mathematics, is open to the peril of one-sidedness; so is the historian, the artist, the sensualist, the philosopher; each in his own realm has cultivated his faculties to an end unworthy of their fullest exercise; he alone is supremely competent to judge of religion who has dedicated his powers to its single cause; who has tried to live, not to himself,

SCIENCE AND FAITH i:>l nor to any one branch of life exclusively, but to the study of the Will of God and to the manner in which He may be served.

"Thou hast hidden these things," cried Jesus Christ, "from the wise and prudent; and hast revealed them unto babes."... "Do the doctrine," He said again, "live the life, and you shall know the truth."...

Dear me! How plain it is just now! I seem to myself to have come up out of a small stuffy room on to the housetop. There I was lastlweek, poking away among fossils and moths' wings and dust and confusion: my intuitions were as rusty tools; my emotions had ebbed; and above all, I was complacently regarding myself. And therefore Christianity seemed to me quite impossible. I was bothered by the Higher Criticism and the geological discoveries of somebody whose name I now forget. And now I have come up; and God's sky is over me, and the breeze is in my face....

It is not that my intellect — such as it is — has ceased to work; on the contrary, it is workinfT; better than ever. I see all that

I saw last week; I remember everything except the name of the geological professor; I am capable this moment of delivering a short disquisition on the authorship of Isaiah; but, thank God, those other frailties are awake as well; my whole character — a poor thing, but all that I have got — is alive again; and I could sooner doubt of my own existence than of the Sacrament of the Altar or the Fructiferous Incarnation of the Son of God....