ASTRONOMY AND THEOLOGY.
IN his recent apology for what he is pleased to call the Positivist "faith," Mr. Frederic Harrison has restated with his usual eloquence the position which we have so often seen taken before, that the Christian faith could not possibly have been first originated in an age that had had a heliocentric astronomy. " To the old theology, the Earth was the grand centre and sum of the Universe, and the other heavenly bodies- were adjuncts and auxiliaries to it. With a geocentric astronomy as the root-idea of science, the anthropomorphic Creator, the celestial resurrection, and the Divine Atonement, were natural and homogenous ideas. No one can conceive the Scheme of Salvation growing up with anythi g but a geocentric system of thought. With a geocentric science and an anthropo- morphic philosophy, all this was natural enough. But with a science where this planet shrinks into an unconsidered atom. with a transcendental philosophy to which the anthropo- morphic is the contemptible, the Augustinian Theology goes overboard." And the Head-Master of Clifton College, speaking as a Christian clergyman, to some extent echoes, and to some extent goes beyond, Mr. Harrison :—" Our whole attitude towards theology," he says, " has been profoundly altered by the conviction that we have attained, though perhaps scarcely formulated, of the unity of nature. It is seen in many ways. The remotest ages of the past are now linked with ours in one continuous physical and biological history, and the most distant stars reveal a kinship to our own sun and earth. Our theology has, therefore, to be a theology not of this planet alone, or of this age alone, but a theology of the universe and of all time. The earth cannot be for us any longer the one stage on which the divine drama is played. It is this thought more than any- thing else which has unconsciously but irresistibly antiquated for us so much of theological speculation. The most marked and direct effect on theology of this conception of the unity of nature, has, of course, come from the alteration it has made in the position of man. Man was formerly regarded as unique, as separate from nature. The earth was a platform on which Adam and his posterity were working out their eternal destiny in the sight of all creation. But man is now seen to be a part of nature, instead of separate from it. The unity of nature has embraced even ourselves. And the effect of this tremendous reversal of ideas must be felt in our theology."* In some respects, then, Mr. Wilson, the Christian clergyman, presents the supposed revolution in our thoughts as even more tremendous than Mr. Harrison had declared it to be. If, indeed, in the ordinary meaning of the words, man had been found to be " a part of nature,"—in the sense of a mere outcome of the energies germinating in nature,—the obvious inference would be far more fatal to our ethics, and therefore to our theology, than any heliocentric astronomy possibly could be ; for then free-will and responsibility world be dreams, and God's laws nothing but more or less potent inducements which must take their chance of producing an effect upon us amongst the crowd of other inducements, without finding in us any free power on which to make a claim. That implies a revolution of a more astounding kind than any that only leads man to think of his own planet as a sort of petty ant-hill among the mighty suns and planets of an infinite universe. But Mr. Wilson also seems to hold that the mere extinction of the geocentric astronomy has vitally affected the whole world of theological conviction, and that if the Jews had but known that there are hundreds of thousands of otber suns in the universe, and, for anything we know, millii6ns of other planets inhabited by races of all possible varieties of physical, mental, and moral stature, there could have been no theology exactly of the type of that which we have inherited from them.
While heartily admitting that if man be nothing but a link in the chain of natural causes, Christian theology must be utterly revolutionised,—a point on which we do not now propose to dwell,—we venture to differ very respectfully from Mr. Wilson in thinking, with him and Mr. Frederic Harrison, that heliocentric astronomy has in any vital respect altered at all the validity of the theological conceptions of the Jewish and Christian revelations. Nay, we would go further, and say that if our astronomy could have been known to the Jews, it would have decidedly reinforced instead of under- mining, the general teaching of their inspired books. Indeed, so far as the Jewish prophets made use of such astronomy as they had, they used it altogether in the sense in which the modern agnostics use their heliocentric astronomy,—to impress upon, man his utter insignificance in creation. When Isaiah wants to make his countrymen feel that princes are mere dust, what does he say ? God, he says, "brought princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. Yea, they have not been planted ; yea, they
• Some Contributions to the Religious Thought of Our Time. By the Bey. James M. Wilson, M.A.., Head-Master of Clifton College. Macmillan and CO. (Bee pp. 253-264.)
have not been sown; yea, their stock hath not taken root in the earth : moreover, he bloweth upon them and they wither, and the whirlwind taketh them away as stubble. To whom, then, will ye liken me that I should be equal ? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high ; and see who bath created these, that bringeth out their host by number ; he calleth them all by name; by the greatness of his might, and for that he is strong in power, not one faileth." When the author of the Book of Job, in urging what another prophet calls " the Lord's controversy," wants to convince Job of his nothingness, what is his most impressive illustra- tion P--" Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades " —[or, as the Revised Version puts it, " Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades ?"]--" or loose the bands of Orion ? Canst thou. lead forth the signs of the Zodiac in their season, or canst thou guide the Bear with her train ? Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavensP Canst thou establish the dominion thereof in the earth P"—language surely, if ever language could be used, which suggests that to control the heavenly bodies implies a force of far mightier scope and mag- nitude than any which is needed only for our little planet. Or take the prophet Amos :—" Ye that turn judgment to worm- wood, and cast down righteousness to the earth, seek him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, that maketh the day dark with night," —a passage which seems a sort of anticipation of Words- worth's apostrophe to Duty :—
"Thou canst preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."
We maintain that the prophets of Judaea used astronomy, so far as they used it at all, entirely in the modern sense, to lower the pride of man, and to convince him, as Isaiah says, that " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Clearly the higher the heavens had been known to be from the earth, the more effective, not the less effective for its purpose, would have been such language as this. We do not, of course, imagine for a moment that the Jewish prophets had any inkling of modern astro- nomy; but this we do assert, that if they had known it in all its physical magnificence, they could hardly have used astronomical images with surer effect for the very purpose for which they did use them,—namely, to make man feel his own utter insignificance in the presence of him who, to cite the striking and almost scientific language of Isaiah, had "weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance."
But we go much further, and deny entirely that if the physics and astronomy of a later age had been familiar to the generation which saw the rise of Christianity, it would have made any such difference in the character of its theology as Mr. Frederic Harrison maintains. He thinks, as we have seen, that it would have been impossible to believe in an Incarnation and an Atonement, for the benefit of our petty human race, if it had been known that our world is one of the mere atoms of the physical universe, and that for anything we know, there may be countless multitudes of worlds far more important and far more advanced in the story of evolution than this little earth. This assertion is the purest and, as we believe, the most groundless of assumptions. Where can you find the mind of the Christian theologian of that early day better set forth than in the Epistle to the Hebrews, whoever may be the writer. And what position does he take up P He begins by stating that the Son of God is the " heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds " (the revisers of our version think that "the ages" may perhaps be the true meaning, instead of " the worlds," though they adhere to the old translation) ; "who being the effulgence of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made purification of sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high-; having become so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they." And then he goes on to argue at length that whereas the higher spiritual orders of being whom the Jews called angels, and who were GOd's ministers, though not bound by earthly conditions, all rank beneath the Son of God, this Son of God nevertheless manifested himself in this petty world of ours to purify us from sin, and obtain for us the blessedness which sin forfeits. Of course, we do not dream of attributing to any writer of the first century speculations like Professor Whewell's on "The Plurality of Worlds." But we do say that such writers had gathered, probably from the time of the Babylonian exile, a very steadfast belief in a.vast hierarchy of beings in power far superior to man, and that their belief in this hierarchy of superior beings in no degree affected their conviction that the redemption of man from sin is a work worthy of the divine Incarnation, and of that divine suffering to which the Incarnation led and in which it was fulfilled. Why should that conviction have been altered, if it had been supposed that this hierarchy of angels, instead of being placed vaguely in the heavens, were the fixed inhabitants of any of those shining worlds of which the prophets had spoken as showing forth the wonderful power of God ? How could any illustration of the utter insignificance of man have carried the belief in that insignificance further than it was carried by teachers who declared that " all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field ; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the breath of the Lord bloweth upon it ; surely the people is grass ; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand for ever." It seems to us that had the Hebrew teachers of the first or any previous century been told that there are in creation myriads of planets infinitely greater than our world, and possibly inhabited by beings as much more exalted than man as their dwelling-places are greater, they would not have been staggered in the very least. They would have said that if in such worlds what corresponds to human sin had taken place,—which would, of course, be matter of pure conjecture,—they had no doubt that the mercy of God would equally have provided something corresponding to human re- demption ; but that, at all events, we cannot ground any but the most worthless objection to what we do know, on con- jectures as to what we do not know. We do know what God is, and what sin is, and what redemption is, and we must act on what we do know. To disbelieve in a revealed spiritual power of which we stand in the greatest need, only because physical astronomers have suggested that there may be countless other races needing the same aid that we need, or even needing it more, but of the answer to whose need we can know nothing because we know nothing about the real existence of it would be as frivolous as to shut our eyes to the actual light we have and ignore its existence, only because we may conjecture with some plausi- bility that countless other beings in other worlds need light as much or more than we do, while we have no absolute assurance that, if they do need it, they have it in the same rich abundance. If the ants in an ant-hill were capable of duty and sin in the sense in which we are capable of it,. why should not they, too, yearn for and obtain redemption ? And to show that we are ants in a moral and spiritual ant- hill, relatively to the infinite universe around us, far from showing that we can afford to ignore the mercy of God, only because we are such poor creatures, would only show that we are all the more bound to accept with gratitude that which prevents us from being poorer than we need be,—poorer especially in that highest of all blessings which reconciles us to the spirit of God.
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