ttle cultivated that the affairs of this world are regulated
by a God of justice. The exaggerated idea of a special Providence, the
basis of Judaism and Islam, and which Christianity has only corrected
through the fund of liberalism inherent in our races, has been
definitively vanquished by modern philosophy, the fruit not of abstract
speculation, but of constant experience. It has never been observed,
in effect, that a superior being occupies himself, for a moral or an
immoral purpose, with the affairs of nature or the affairs of humanity."

Kenan has elsewhere said that the negation of the supernatural is a
dogma with every cultivated intelligence. God, in short, has faded into
a metaphysical abstraction. The little ghosts vanished long ago, and now
the Great Ghost is melting into thin air. Thousands of people have lost
all belief in his existence. They use his name, and take it in vain; for
when questioned, they merely stand up for "a sort of a something." The
fear of God, so to speak, has survived his personality; just as Madame
de Stael said she did not believe in ghosts, but she was afraid of them.
Mrs. Browning gives voice to this sentiment in one of her poems:

And hearts say, God be pitiful,
That ne'er said, God be blest.

The fear of the Lord is, indeed, the beginning and the end of theology.

When the Great Ghost was a reality--we mean to his worshippers--he was
constantly spoken of. His name was invoked in the courts of law, it
figured in nearly every oath outside them, and it was to be seen on
nearly every page of every book that was published. But all that is
changed. To speak or print the name of God is reckoned "bad form." The
word is almost tabooed in decent society. You hear it in the streets,
however, when the irascible carman calls on God to damn your eyes for
getting in his way. There is such a conspiracy of silence about the
Great Ghost, except in churches and chapels, that the mention of his
name in polite circles sounds like swearing. Eyebrows are lifted, and
the speaker is looked upon as vulgar, and perhaps dangerous.

Thus theology gives way to the pressure of science, and religion to the
pressure of civilisation. The more use we make of this life the less we
look for another; the loftier man grows the less he bows to ghosts and
gods. Heaven and hell both disappear, and things are neither so bad nor
good as was expected. Man finds himself in a universe of necessity.
He hears no re