ound, without light, without colour, a
solitude traversed only in every direction by an inconceivably complex
web of silent and impersonal forces. That, if I understand it aright, is
the general conception of the world which modern science has substituted
for polytheism.

[Sidenote: But while they commonly discard the hypothesis of a deity as
an explanation of all the particular processes of nature, they retain it
as an explanation of nature in general.]

When philosophy and science by their combined efforts have ejected gods
and goddesses from all the subordinate posts of nature, it might perhaps
be expected that they would have no further occasion for the services of
a deity, and that having relieved him of all his particular functions
they would have arranged for the creation and general maintenance of the
universe without him by handing over these important offices to an
efficient staff of those ethers, atoms, corpuscles, and so forth, which
had already proved themselves so punctual in the discharge of the minor
duties entrusted to them. Nor, indeed, is this expectation altogether
disappointed. A number of atheistical philosophers have courageously
come forward and assured us that the hypothesis of a deity as the
creator and preserver of the universe is quite superfluous, and that all
things came into being or have existed from eternity without the help of
any divine spirit, and that they will continue to exist without it to
the end, if end indeed there is to be. But on the whole these daring
speculators appear to be in a minority. The general opinion of educated
people at the present day, could we ascertain it, would probably be
found to incline to the conclusion that, though every department of
nature is now worked by impersonal material forces alone, the universe
as a whole was created and is still maintained by a great supernatural
spirit whom we call God. Thus in Europe and in the countries which have
borrowed their civilisation, their philosophy, and their religion from
it, the central problem of natural theology has narrowed itself down to
the question, Is there one God or none? It is a profound question, and I
for one profess myself unable to answer it.

[Sidenote: Whether attained by inward or outward experience, the idea of
God is regularly that of a cause inferred, not perceived.]

If this brief sketch of the history of natural theology is correct, man
has by the exercise of his natural faculties alone