James Thompson Bixby

“ In the next place, science has been most helpful to religion in purifying its faiths and guiding its reverences. Now, this is a service that Faith much needs to have some one to do for her. For, sublime as are her aspirations, her intellectul vision is but dim. Her eye fixed on the heavens to which she would climb, she cannot discern distinctly the steps by which it is reached. She needs science ever to be at hand to direct her. In her mounting instinct, Faith stretches up her hand and clutches and clings to whatever she comes across. ”

“ Faith raised her reverence, then, to a divinized humanity, a company of human gods—Jove, king of heaven, and Juno, queen; Mercury, messenger of the gods; Cupid, inspirer of love; and so on. But, again, with the growing comprehension of the unity of all Nature, man rose to the idea of a single supreme deity, a Jehovah—the eternal—I am Brahma, the one reality, of which all else are masks and shadows—and thrust down the other deities into the position of divinities, spirits, and devils. ”

“ Or consider that interest in Nature that is such a powerful spring of physical inquiry. Consider that sacred claim of his vocation which the true servant recognizes—such a sense of it as leads a Lyonnet to spend his life counting the 40,000 muscles in a caterpillar's body! Is it not the Christian spirit, the belief, that is, in the brotherhood of man and the duty of self-sacrifice—the feeling of filial loyalty to a Divine Father, all of whose works are significant, and all of whose service is noble—that, as much as or more than anything else, has given birth to it? ”

“ Gradually-increasing knowledge pulled one after another of these rounds also out of the hands of Religion, and her yearning fingers that must clasp something reached up still higher on the ladder of divine apprehension, until at last she grasped the conception of the universal, eternal action of One Infinite Perfect Being, without parts, without partiality, and without shadow of turning, to be worshiped only in spirit and in truth.
Science, to be sure, in this process of purification, has destroyed a great deal that has been very dear to Faith. ”

“ All this science has ejected from the belief of enlightened men. Instead of a fall of the human race, and increasing ruin in the world, science has shown the gradual upclimbing of the race from cave-dwellings and garments of skin to the luxuries and enlightenments of our present civilization. Men of science have been over the whole earth and scrutinized the whole heavens, exploring every dark corner and strange event. ”

“ Religion ought to obtain, from wider knowledge, greater purity and enlargement. She ought to learn from physical discovery the importance of going at once to facts and thoroughly studying-them, instead of sitting in her study patching dogmas out of scriptural shreds. She should learn from science the method of studying facts, as well as its importance, how to criticise, to sift, to throw away the chaff and keep only the solid grain. ”

“ Religion may remain long in this groveling stage, as it did among the Egyptians and Assyrians. But sooner or later, as knowledge increases, the powerlessness and the worthlessness of such things for the worship of thinking men are seen. Faith reaches up her hand to higher objects—the invisible but potent wind, the outstretched sky, the ethereal fire, the sun that warms and lights the whole earth. ”

“ Science has mined in caverns and found man's tools and weapons among the bones of mammoths. It has deciphered hieroglyphics and found arts and history already venerable before the date when commentators admitted that Adam was created. It has learned how vast beds of chalk and limestone, miles in thickness, have been manufactured by microscopic creatures; how from a fiery cloud the globe gathered to a molten ball, and on the molten ball formed the crust that now suspends us above the still furnace-heated interior. ”

“ It is to the understanding that the great achievements of physical inquiry are commonly referred. Science is spoken of as a domain of dry light and clear-cut facts, and religion is contrasted with it as the realm of emotion. But how could the intellect have ever gained its great victories without the aid of the heart? how could the senses have ever penetrated into Nature as they have done, had they not been carried on the wings of the spirit? ”

“ So, under the sunbeams of science, the dumb matter, the frozen thought of the Creator, melted into intelligible accents and spoke forth its secrets. Sun and cell, magnet and crystal, have each found a tongue and told the world of facts, exhibited to it achievements that, if predicted a thousand years ago, would have seemed like nothing but a chapter out of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. ”

“ In the glowing, gaseous nebula, in the curdled, nucleated fire-mist of the embryonic star, in the more consolidated, but still molten, heaving mass of our sun, in the ring-girt Saturn, the still steam-enveloped Jupiter, the sunny summer-time of our own planet, are discerned by the modern physicist the various stages through which every planetary system passes. ”

“ Science has expelled witch and elf, nymph and demon, and thus depopulated the supernatural world; but in the place of this uncanny brood, the thought of whose capricious intervention paralyzed the will and debauched the heart, the universe has been filled with the presence of One, Eternal and Infinite, from whose perfect law we can never escape. ”

“ While surrounding nations looked upon Nature in dread, and in blind superstition sacrificed their own little ones to the meteor or the volcano, the Hebrew, tracing all things up to the power of the eternal I am, beside whom there is no other god, found in all the forces and marvels of Nature fountains of good cheer and grateful praise. ”

“ Who would cut down to six ordinary evenings and mornings the activity of Him who inhabiteth eternity? Who would relinquish the confidence and hope inspired by the unswerving progress of that single divine purpose that links the ages together? ”

“ The rigorous probing that science has given to Nature does not remove any of its wonderfulness, any of its perfection, but rather has disclosed new marvels behind those which first struck man's attention. The widening of the circle of the unknown has only served to confront us with deeper and deeper mysteries. ”

“ Bacon aptly says, "resembles that to the kingdom of heaven, where no admission is conceded except to children."
Another condition of success is the spirit of industry that is unswerved by love of ease or idea of labor's dishonor. Another, again, is the candor that will look on all sides of a case, and listen to every objection—consecration to truth as the primary object. These are the qualities which men of science set forth as the requisites for walking within the veil of the temple of Nature. ”

“ If Nature no longer is the object of human dread, yet, as the useful storehouse whence we draw food and treasure, as the friendly Titan who performs for us tasks beyond our unassisted power, it holds a higher place. If the astronomer's lens has dissipated the ancient heavens, it is to show us system behind system of celestial bodies, blazing at immeasurable intervals in the depths of illimitable space. If geology has taken away the idea of a creation finished once for all in a certain six days of the year b. ”

“ And similarly science ought to obtain the help of religion to elevate and perfect it. From the ideal aspirations of faith science should enlighten its vision and ennoble its aims. It should not restrict its studies merely to the lower realm of facts. Science fails to fulfill its appointed mission in the world if it ceases its researches on the threshold of the grandest discoveries open to it, the questions above all in interest to humanity. It should learn from theology to study the laws of mind and soul as well as those of matter ”

“ With the multitude of national and local gods, and even tribal or family divinities, which prevailed in the classic world, the minds of men were constantly diverted from that unity that is the scarlet thread in every royal cable of science. But monotheism, establishing unity in the divine realm, gave unity also to the order of Nature. ”

“ THE antagonism between Science and Religion has become a commonplace of literature. Both preachers and physicists have narrated with bitterness of spirit the battles which they have fought, the wrongs which they have suffered, the complaints which they have to make, the one against the other. The combative have plunged into the mêlée, and with slashing pen or tongue given it new asperity and new sources of grievance. The peaceful have endeavored by various reconciling schemes to persuade the combatants to lay down their arms. ”

“ Now, these triumphs of science have not redounded merely to the empty glory of their hero, but they have been solid contributions also to the benefit of man and to the glory of God.
What other argument for the existence of God has done more for theism than the argument from design? In the admirable harmonies and adaptations of the world, the natural theologian finds the most convincing illustrations of a Supreme Intelligence anterior to the universe. ”

“ The Hebrew poet does not depict Nature as a self-dependent object, glorious in its individual beauty, but always as in relation and subjection to a higher spiritual power. Nature is to him a work of creation and order—the living expression of the omnipresence of the Divinity in the visible world. Hence the lyrical poetry of the Hebrews, from the very nature of its subject, is grand and solemn, . . . and develops a rich and animated conception of the life of Nature. ”

“ It is a singular fact that the Greek and the Roman, in spite of their great intellectual acuteness, accomplished so little in the penetration of Nature's secrets. With the strong love of the beautiful that distinguished the one, and the profound sense of law that marked the other, one would have supposed that they would have felt more the charm and loveliness of the outward world, and have taken a greater interest in discovering its unchangeable ordinances. ”

“ Among the Greeks, while the feeling of devotion to the state, or rather city, was intense, the sentiment of the general welfare or the cause of humanity hardly existed. It was only with the advent of Christianity that the idea of mankind as one great family, each one of whom must labor for all the rest, came in. This idea has been the nurse, not only of modern civil freedom, but of modern science. ”

“ Since neither science nor religion can claim an exclusive sovereignty over the field of knowledge; since that domain cannot well be partitioned off between them, the true way is to unite them in a perpetual alliance. Take the testimony of both religion and science. Presume that there is a certain proportion of truth in what each has to offer. Weigh in the scales of reason what each presents. Accept that which is most solid, from whichever side it comes ”

“ Learning little by little all this, science has been compelled to put the date of the cosmic beginning back into an antiquity that, in comparison with the Mosaic work, seems an eternity.
And in thus prolonging the age of man and the world, science has altered our conception of the method by which the universe came into existence. It can no longer be looked upon as created out of nothing, at one grand tour de force ”

“ Our own earth, formerly the grand, immovable stage to which the wandering sun and stars were only decorations, has been shriveled into a petty pellet of cosmic stuff, dislodged from its fixed and central position, and sent whirling on its way as one of the smaller satellites in the train of a central body, which central body, though as much larger than it as a cart-wheel is than a pea, is yet but one of more than 20,000,000 suns contained in its own part of space ”

“ Christianity took up and diffused this grand view of the relation of Nature to God and to man. Though the appreciation of Nature's beauty, order, and dignity, was swamped for a time by the tide of Oriental asceticism, Grecian metaphysics, and transformed polytheism, it rose gradually above it, and established itself firmly in the mind of Christendom. ”

“ Christianity gradually diffused itself, and, wherever it was adopted as the religion of the state, it not only exercised a beneficial condition on the lower classes by inculcating the social freedom of mankind, but also expanded the views of men in their communion with Nature. The eye no longer rested on the form of the Olympic gods. The Fathers of the Church, in their rhetorically correct and often practically imaginative language, now taught that the Creator showed himself great in inanimate Nature no less than in animated Nature ”

“ Tyndall, at London, in 1869, "to separate moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that, in nine cases out of ten, moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force which push his intellect into action." The reading of the works of three men, he proceeds to say—Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte—neither of them friendly to the scientific spirit, carried him victoriously through mathematical studies and physical investigations, and made him the man of science that he is. ”