"I say to thee, do thou repeat To the first man thou mayest meet "That he and we and all men move As broad as the blue sky above; "That doubt and trouble, fear and pain "That weary deserts we may tread, "Yet if we will one Guide obey, "And we, on divers shores now cast, Shall meet, our perilous voyage past, All in our Father's house at last." - RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, The Kingdom of God. VII SOVEREIGNTY daries of science. THE questions about the world which science The bounconsiders and answers, all have to do with secondary causes. Beyond that sphere she does not need to go, and within that sphere her wisdom is sufficient. We come to her like curious children. We "want to see the wheels go round." We want to know what the wheels are made of. She tells us, and there she stops. All that we have a right to ask of her is that she shall be true to facts, and that she shall confine herself to them. When the astronomer Laplace was reproached for not mentioning God in his treatise on the dynamics of the solar system, he answered, "I had no need of that hypothesis." And this reply was just, as Mr. John Fiske has pointed out, because "in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of phenomena, it would not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally the source of all phenomena." 1 1 Christian Literature, January, 1896, "The Everlasting Reality of Religion," p. 306. The great questions lie beyond them. But the moment we take this reasonable and modest position (and it is a great pity that theology has not been more ready to take it), we perceive that curiosity in regard to single groups of phenomena by no means satisfies or exhausts the activity of the questioning spirit in man. There is a deeper curiosity in regard to the relation of these single groups of phenomena to each other, and to ourselves, and to the possibility of a meaning, a purpose, an end, underlying all things and all their workings. Out of this deeper curiosity rise the questions which are most urgent and vital, questions which, when we consider them abstractly, are philosophical, and condition the unity of our intellectual life; but when we consider them personally, they are religious, and upon their answer our spiritual peace and moral action absolutely depend. How are we to think about the things that we know? What are we to believe in regard to the things that science tells us we cannot know, but which we still feel are necessary conditions of all intelligent and right conduct? Is there an invisible unity beneath all the visible diversity of phenomena? What is the nature of that unity, personal or impersonal, conscious or unconscious? Is there anything behind the mechanical working of |