these words, which seemed once to express
elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which,
thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus
not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and
popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it appears,
instead of being the sterling product of plain experience, is the
overflow of an immature philosophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled
speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific method"
(p. 8). And then, moreover, there is that great political movement which
has so largely and directly affected the course of events and the
organization of society on the Continent of Europe, and which in less
measure, and with more covert operation, has notably modified our own
ways of thinking and acting in this country. Now the Revolution in its
ultimate or Jacobin phase, is the very manifestation, in the public
order, of the tendency which in the intellectual calls itself
"scientific." It bitterly and contemptuously rejects the belief in the
supernatural hitherto accepted in Europe. It wages implacable war upon
the ancient theology of the world. "It delights in declaring itself
atheistic"[28] (p. 37). It has "a quarrel with theology as a doctrine.
'Theology,' it says, even if not exactly opposed to social improvement,
is a superstition, and as such allied to ignorance and conservatism.
Granting that its precepts are good, it enforces them by legends and
fictitious stories which can only influence the uneducated, and
therefore in order to preserve its influence it must needs oppose
education. Nor are these stories a mere excrescence of theology, but
theology itself. For theology is neither more nor less than a doctrine
of the supernatural. It proclaims a power behind nature which
occasionally interferes with natural laws. It proclaims another world
quite different from this in which we live, a world into which what is
called the soul is believed to pass at death. It believes, in short, in
a number of things which students of Nature know nothing about, and
which science puts aside either with respect or with contempt.

These supernatural doctrines are not merely a part of theology, still
less separable from theology, but theology consists exclusively of them.
Take away the supernatural Person, miracles, and the spiritual world,
you take away theology at the same time, and nothing is left but simp