THE

FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGION

CHAPTER I

GOD

RELIGION is the recognition of God, and of the relation between Him and man. It therefore implies the belief that there is a God.

There have been always, and there are now, some persons who deny the existence of God, and who are therefore properly called Atheists. Probably the number of these is not very great, and not greater now than it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. But there has come recently into prominence a modified form of unbelief called Agnosticism. The name (which merely means 'ignorance' or 'knowing-nothing') was invented by Professor Huxley with the design of indicating that

B

he did not assert either that there is a God or that there is not, but only maintained that there is no sufficient evidence for either proposition, and that he had no certain conviction either way. This position has been adopted by a good many other persons of some scientific reputation, and consequently it has attracted a certain amount of popular support-avowed or unavowed. Obviously, however, such refusal of belief is incompatible with the idea of religion, and hence it demands the careful consideration of believers.

The proposition of agnostics is that nothing is to be accepted as proved unless it is either perceived by our senses or deduced by strict reasoning from their observation. Yet in their own teaching the deductions of reasoning which they accept carry them a very long way into the region of the unknown. When Newton saw the apple fall he conceived the idea that the cause must be the same as that which regulates the motion of the moon round the earth, of the earth round the sun, and extends its government to the remotest stars. Yet gravity, or attraction, is a thing absolutely unknown in itself to our senses, and we only suppose it to exist by observing certain facts, and reasoning

CHAP. I]

EVIDENCE OF GRAVITY

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that such a force, if it exists, would account for the facts. No one, however, professes to be an agnostic of the force of gravity, or of its vital property of diminishing as the square of the distance of its influence. The same character of our knowledge applies equally to all the other forces which we call those of nature: cohesion, friction, chemical affinity, heat, light, electricity, and every other process which we daily perceive. We call them 'laws,' and some persons fancy that this name explains them, but it does not in the least. It only expresses that certain phenomena recur, and that we assume a certain cause to exist because the facts which we perceive lead us to suppose its existence.

If it be said that these are only forces and not bodies, and that forces are necessarily impalpable, we have only to go a step further to find a body, a form of matter, universally accepted in science though our senses cannot discover it. When we see an object it is because, as we say, rays of light come to our eyes from it, either directly, if it is luminous, or by reflection from a source of light. But what are rays of light? Till some two hundred years ago they were supposed to be something emitted from a source of light, corpuscles' as

Newton called them. But it was suggested by Hooke and afterwards by Huyghens that as sound has been found to be caused and transmitted by waves or vibrations of the air, which affect the nerves of hearing, so light might be caused by waves or vibrations of some substance far more attenuated than air, and that these vibrations reaching the optic nerves produce the sensation of light. To this supposed matter there was given the name ether. But as light traverses all space, and penetrates many dense bodies, such as water, glass, crystals of various kinds, &c., it follows that the ether must be present throughout all space, and must permeate solid substances, while at the same time it is of so impalpable a nature that it does not retard by resistance or friction the motions of the heavenly spheres. It is therefore beyond our power of weighing or measuring, or in any way appreciating by our senses. But on the theory of its existence, and of its being capable of being thrown into vibration, and so affecting our sight, mathematicians are able to explain nearly all the phenomena of light which our senses or our instruments discover, and on this reasoning alone ether is accepted by all men of science as a real form of matter. Nor does their faith even stumble