sure, must be a man of mark, or at least
one who will become so), discover what it is, except a conformity to
what may be called the law of nature; but that is something of which a
healthy beast or a drop of water is quite as capable as a man is; and
such conformity implies feeling quite as much in one of these cases as
in the other. It implies feeling in no case; and religion without
feeling, sentiment, and faith is no religion at all in the sense which
the word has had from the beginning of its use to this day. The
religious man finds in _his_ God a being whom he can love and lean upon,
who has a right to his obedience, to whom he can be loyal, whom he can
address, calling him Father, as we are told that Christ did. But you
cannot love a law. True, David says, "O how I love thy law"; but the law
that he loved was the will of the Supreme Being, and he loved it because
it was His. It was not a mode of action or of evolution that he loved.
Nor can you obey such a law, although you may conform to it; nor can you
be loyal to it, for you cannot be loyal to an abstraction. As to
fatherhood, this law-god of evolution is the father of nothing except as
two and two are the father and mother of four. Therefore, while we
regard such books as Mr. Savage's as interesting expositions of the
condition as to super-scientific subjects into which modern science has
brought many of its votaries, we cannot see that they do anything toward
refuting the charge brought against science (as it is among the
evolutionists), that it is at war with religion, and takes away all the
grounds of religious faith. For that which the evolutionists set up as a
god religious people regard as the mere creature of the true God; and
what they set up as religion the others regard utterly lacking in all
the essentials of religion. It would be much better for the
evolutionists to face this whole question boldly, as Mr. Savage does in
part, and to say that the result of their investigations is the belief
that there is no God, and consequently that there need not be, and in
fact cannot be, any religion in the sense in which that word has for
centuries been used. Moreover, we cannot see the grounds of one pretence
which is made by the evolutionists, and which is implied if not in terms
set up in all their writings that are not purely scientific and have
what may be called a moral character, such as the book before us. This
is that their theory accounts for everything