The Diminishing Road I certain quarters, it has become the fashion
to say X that there is no longer any conflict between Science and Religion. On the other hand, in a recent volume which, for all its brilliance, is comprehended only too completely by the darkness, Mr. Julian Huxley affirms that the conflict between Science and Religion is now approaching its acutest stage. The contradiction is only another illustration of the intellectual chaos of the present day.
Anglican leaders, like Dr. Barnes, in their anxiety, to prove themselves men of broader mind and better taste than the unfortunate Bishop Wilberforce, have been embracing the ,chimpanzee with a passion, that is almost indecent, and have been eagerly claiming the very intimate relationship that Huxley repudiated. " Our first cousin," they cry enthusiastically, though the most thorough- going evolutionist of the sterner sort can find no more scientific justification for this telescoping up of vast periods. of time than he can _find for supposing that the World was created iri six days, -These religioui leaders, and some recent men of science: with a deplorable lack of precision in the expression of their meaning, are reirnposing, in the name of " evolution," another and a cruder form of. the Mamie legend_ upon a world that has been taught to bow the knee at the very name of Science. It is a cruder legend,- for it has none of the symbolic value of the older story. Milton was quite definite about the defects Of his " process of speech " in relation to the " immediate acts " of God. Man is no more-ay.first cousin of the chimpanzee than he is a third cousin- of the porpoise, or a nephew at five removes of the giraffe, or a distant connexion, by marriage of the black-beetle. In view of the almost unthinkable periods of time required for the development of all those different forms• Of life, the' terms of intimate relationship of which some of the Anglican leaders are so. enamoured are far More misleading.than anything in Genesis. - While certain men of science are beginning to talk with clerical- voices and seem to think that the religious sense can feed on that, these leaders are beginiiing to talk with the menacing nOte. of itineteentheentury graterialisin ",We advise you not to be too sure that science ere long will not be able to create life, and perhaps intelligence, in the labora: tory." " Eternal life has nothing 'to do with duration: It is a state of mind." So far as the human race is concerned, it is apparently a very transitory state'; and, in this new wriggle away from the idea of permanence; the world is losing something that its greatest spirits once counted as far more certain than anything on this ephemeral planet. The irony of the situation is that the surrender of the religious leaders to agnosticism has inspired their opponents with no compunction, but iather with .a .desire to press the advantage home, and take no prisoners. Moreover, the anxiety to chant
" At the name of Science every knee must bow,"
has no real relation to the love of truth. In many cases it is merely a new form of intellectual pride. The idea of the personality of God is the creation of man, says Mr. Julian Huxley. And what else are the ideas of _ Science ? Of the universe as a self-rimning machine, for instance,? The truth or falsity of those ideas is not settled by their origin. The plain fact is that, in recent years, in every depart. ment of thought, we have been following a diminishing road which eventually runs out into nothingness. Science, in direct defiance of its own first axiom, has everywhere been explaining the greater by the less. Darwin's theory of evolution in almost every detail seems to be true as far as it goes, but it omits by far, the greatest factor in the process. Some of the Anglican leaders who accept that theory seem to think that there is great virtue in the word ".gradual " ; as if the production of Beethoven or the works of Shakespeare out of the gaseous matter of which the planet was once composed were explained by the " gradualness " of the process. No theory of evolution has explained. anything. At one end of the process we have a cloud of gas, and at the other end we have West- minster Abbey, with all that it implies, and we say that all this has grown up out of the action and re-action of the chemical elements in that original cloud of gas, without any deeper Power moving through, directing and inspiring the process. It is not enough to place this Power in regions which, at present, are outside the recognized reign of " law." In their anxiety not to repeat former mistakes the religious leaders have become blind to the strength of the positions which they are abandoning ; and, on every side, the world is losing its highest values. Science tells us that all matter is composed of infinitesimal planetary systems of electrons and protons. Magnify in imagination the human countenance you love best till it appears to you as a Milky Way of such systems, and you will have lost all its real values, and everything that can speak through human eyes. Incidentally, you will have lost the material world also. It is along this dimin- ishing and descending road from the greater to the less that Science is leading us, with perfect truth so far as its own particular results are concerned, -and in exactly the same way it is losing the religious significance of the universe. But it seems to be forgotten that all roads go in two directions. There is also the ascending road from the less to the greater, in which alone true explana- tions can be found.
• The highest that we know here—indeed, the only reality of which we have immediate knowledge—is that of personality. Science claims that human personality is more and more controlling nature. Supreme person- ality, we may therefore suppose, would have supreme control in every detail. The Highest Reality of • all, in which all the explanations reside, if the human intellect were capable of discovering them, cannot be less than personal. We cannot identify -God with a universe in which nothing is self-sufficient, or its own explanation. Behind all these contingent shadow-shows we are driven at last by inexorable logic to that which is its own ex- planation, and is sufficient to itself and all that it has produced. When we ask what the attributes of that Being must be, we are forced to believe that they are above reason and beyond nature as it is known to science. What is this, after all, but the Super-natural Maker of heaven_ and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, of whom the Nicene Creed teLs us, and whom St. Augus- tine found, not in the discourses of the Platonists, but in the voice of the Supreme Personality, infinite in perfection, speaking to what was highest in his own personality, and saying, " Come unto Me " ?
It is when Science turns her face in this ascending direction that she wears the impassioned expression which is poetry, reflects in her face the glory of the Divine Centre of the universe, and cries, with Pasteur, " 0 salutaris hostia ! " It is along this road that poet after poet has become aware of a real Presence :— " A Something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns . ; ; A motion and a Spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought."
You are enabled, then, to see, not electrons and protons in the human countenance, but the expression of the human affections ; and in external nature :- " To see a world in a grain of sand, A heaven in a wild-flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of the hand, And eternity in an hour."
Even the most " scientific " of the bishops would hardly repudiate this claim, with regard to a real Presence behind the " accidents " of the smallest particle of the material universe. Seen rightly, the very existence • of the smallest grain of dust is an inconceivable miracle, an impossibility that has somehow hapt--)ened, where, logically, there should be nothing at all. It seems more than a little odd, therefore (if they believe what they say they believe), that, in the special circumstances of the Eucharist, religious leaders should condemn as a necessarily foolish superstition the one public recognition of this ultimate and miraculous fact ; a little strange that they should loosely -brand as " a magical process " the one common approach, "-not vaguely and in the void, but here and now," through definite, concrete, hicaliied instances, to the Spiritual Reality behind the veil ; and that, while they are ready to follow all the interwoven spells of the late Professor Bradley (for that is a matter of intellectual pride), they should particularly repudiate the profoundly vital and triumphant analysis of Appearance and Reality, " Wherever the Sacrament of the Body firOken, the Blood shed, is offered, received and pleaded," in what even Carlyle called the " one relic of religion now left in Europe."
ALFRED NOYES.
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