EVOLUTION AND EFFORT. CHAPTER I. THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. WHEN in the lusty vigour of our youth we first discover the logical defects of our creed, it is with a triumphant sense of escape from bondage that we enrol ourselves among freethinkers. This plunge into unbelief is a necessary phase through which most young men pass who at all struggle to free themselves from parental and educational control. It is a leap from the shelter of the nest into the freedom of the air, the discovery of strong pinions and the joy of self-reliance. We little know then over what a dark, tempestuous, and unknown sea we have stretched our wing. But when, after calamity has darkened our lives, some ritual of baptism or marriage or death brings us once more within the walls of the church we had in younger days with so light a heart abandoned, our memories are moved by old associations recalling, perhaps, a vanished hand or a silenced voice; the words of Scripture which familiarity had once sterilised for us become alive with new meaning; the music through which it had once been a weariness to have to stand brings an indistinct but no less consoling message to our ear; and there comes to us through all these channels the enquiry whether indeed this Christian dispensation is in truth as much to be ignored as we once in the pride of our youth imagined. Unfortunately, the occasions on which such enquiries are started in our minds are few, and the forces engaged in stifling them many. Amongst these last there is none, perhaps, so potent as the socalled conflict believed to exist between science and religion-the conflict which once drove us from the Church, and which must, so long as it lasts, keep us exiles from its cathedrals, its ceremonials, and its consolation. Important, then, above all other questions to one who has lived the arid life of an agnostic, is the enquiry just what this conflict between science and religion is; what are its limits and what is to be its final outcome. For, however rational the attitude of the agnostic may be, there come moments when a pang at the heart tells him that "man cannot live by bread alone," and he asks himself whether he is always to be driven without rudder or compass over a black and coastless sea and never cast his anchor a single day. What, then, is religion, what science, that they have joined issue with one another to the destruction of so much that seems useful and precious in the world? Science is easily defined: it is knowledge of the laws of Nature. Nothing can be more simple, nothing more necessary, than such knowledge as this. Even the orthodox will admit that we owe it to God as well as to ourselves to study and know his laws. But before man knew much about natural laws he was deeply concerned with what, for want of a better name, we may call supernatural laws. At another time it will be interesting and indispensable to trace with brevity, though with care, the development of this instinct which sets us upon an enquiry as to how we came into the world, why we are here, who made us, and to what end; but, above all, as to the problem of pain, its justification, and how to escape it, if at all. But at this time let us content ourselves with noting that out of these questionings there sprang up among men various hypotheses regarding the Creator, the immortality of the soul, the hereafter, which became inseparably connected in the mind with ethics or conduct because they were all concerned with the same thing-the higher nature of man. These rules of conduct were gradually developed by the necessities of social life; but they were necessarily associated with the religious instinct, because both religion and social life call upon man for the exercise of the same faculty, viz., self-restraint. Religion, then, gradually covered two very distinct domains—that of metaphysics or theology, and that of conduct or ethics. It is the domain of conduct which concerns us first. |