CHAPTER II. THE MESSAGE AND PROMISES TO MANKIND. For §1. SCIENCE is the true revelation to men-the only revelation that men have ever received or can receive. Nature reveals only the secrets which her patient worshippers, after a careful interrogation and close observation, have had the skill to extract from her else close and impassible breast. She has only revealed the "open secret" of her laws to her devoted inquirers, who have carefully watched the ways of her present behaviour, and have detected the marks of her past behaviour; reserving a final secret at her heart which none can fathom or discover. This secret is incommunicable by her; nor could it be understood by mortal ears if it were otherwise. The fancied whispers of inspirations by the prophets and founders of religions were but the private imaginings of individuals, which the ardour and vehemence of their own souls, conjointly with the spiritual wants and fears of their fellows, intensely desirous of a revelation, permitted to pass for such in rude, uncritical, and credulous ages. Men wanted a revelation, a voice from the void; and the revealer, himself a representative man, more intensely feeling the want than the others, after long and lonely religious contemplation, believed that to him was communicated the secret, and he secret. came forward to supply the want. But he had not got the Nor did the philosophers succeed better. The cloud-constructed systems of the great metaphysicians who attempted, by a different route and fashion, by the might of their own reason, to take by storm the secret that they knew had not been voluntarily revealed, came no nearer to disclosing the actual truth of things or the final reality and mystery at the bottom of them. The religions and absolute philosophies alike report only the reveries or imperfect imaginings of the individual, which were mistaken by one for the voice of Revelation, by the other for the last truth of Reason and Nature. The revelation of science is, indeed, much less precise and circumstantial than that of the religious founders; but it more accords with facts, with the historical fact as witnessed to by marks which geology reads, and with the present actual facts and laws which, during the human historical period, we believe to have been never different. The chain of established scientific truths and laws contains a less sublime scheme and conception of the universe than the grand systems of Plato, or Leibnitz, or Hegel; but it is at least more simple and level to our intelligence, it is much closer to the actuality of things, and it always admits of verification. The scientific conception of the universe can be compared with the actual facts; it is merely gathered and generalized from these facts; while the scientific story of Nature's development challenges disproof or refutation, by confrontation with inexplicable facts and by every applicable inductive or deductive test. Science may be open to correction in detail, but she believes she holds the substantial truth. In the case of the philosophical systems, they have either no counterpart, being constructed wholly from the imagination, or if there be any original corresponding to the philosophers' scheme, it admits of no comparison with the copy. The truth of Nature is the systemmaker's reading of her, deduced from abstract principles conceived in his own breast, and shaped together by his own mental constructive power. But that the systems do not read either the truth or reality of Nature is proved by their contradictions with each other, as well as by their own internal inconsistencies. The truths of will save the § 2. Science will bring not only material but spiritual comforts and alleviation. It will bring both truth and fruit: truth, in itself; fruit, from its indefinite adaptability to the material wants and wishes of men, as well as from its further application to the conduct of life. Science in itself is the true, in its application is the good. science will save you; in the sequel they world; they alone can do so. They will save your soul, in the only sense in which it can be saved-by pointing out to it the right way of life; by giving to it a fuller, freer, better life on the earth, the only certain theatre of its existence and activity; by giving to it light, by supplying it with sustaining and strengthening truths; in a word, by showing it the universal empire of law, which embraces both it and the cosmos, the knowledge of which is the sum of truth, and to accommodate ourselves to which is the sum of wisdom and virtue. And this truth will not only save you, it will set you free, as it is ever the work of truth to do. It will set you free by delivering you from the vain fears and terrors and superstitions which so long held the soul of man in degrading bondage, adding their formidable terrors to the miseries of life. It will further set you free within the bounds of natural law, by enabling you to accomplish your desired ends the surer the more you know the unvarying course of things, to which on the one hand your aims must be accommodated, but which on the other can be indefinitely turned to serve you. Our perturbed spirits shall at length find rest under the reign of ascertained truth and universal, unvarying law. Our minds shall also be at peace with respect to the final insoluble mystery of the universe, into which not even the angels can penetrate. We shall give up the attempts to solve it, accepting it as a final fact, and being content with a knowledge of the general laws of phenomena. This knowledge of the order of the world, of what we can know and of what we must be content to be ignorant of, will bring back to us our banished peace of mind. The sweet serenity of spirit, the most precious jewel of our souls, will return to us again. We shall take heart of grace, and, knowing the liberal terms that Nature allows to the wise, knowing at least more clearly than men ever knew before the conditions under which we live,-fixed and immutable in some directions, alterable in others, and by ourselves for our advantage, -we shall once again, as men born under former happy civilizations, put on a cheerful courage, and find enjoyment in existence. We shall no more go round bewailing our evil conditions, asking who will show us any good? Our new-born pessimism shall disappear, direful and phantasmal as our old superstitions. The spirit of man shall get rest after its long and searching probation, after all this feverish agitation and disquietude, prolonged for three centuries, respecting the nature, the origin, and the final destination of the soul. Resignation, the last, the greatest, and most difficult of the virtues, will follow under the new dispensation of natural law holding all things, the world, and man, and society in its embrace. Resignation to the unalterable evils of lifewhich the old Stoic strenuously tried to inculcate upon himself, which the religion of Islam prescribes as its central precept, which Christianity supplicates from heaven, becomes almost for the first time a possible and natural frame of mind to man; the lesson of science being borne in upon his mind from all sides and by countless instances, that the course of nature, the laws of the universe, and the laws of life, from which certain evils must result, are fixed and unalterable. It is natural, when we know that the order of the world is carried on under laws which will not change for our wishes or our prayers, to be resigned to the special evils which the general laws bring with them. It is natural to try to be resigned to the inevitable in any case, and it is wise; but when we learn that some of the inevitable ills are the result of general laws which bring a greater sum of good; that others of our ills are not inevitable, but reducible in amount through the beneficial help of these very invariable laws and the unchanging nature of things and properties of matter; and that finally both the greater good, and the continual diminution of evil within limits, are only obtainable on the twofold condition of the invariability of the laws joined to our knowledge of them;-then the spirit of resignation to the order of things, which is demanded. from us on account of the residuum of evil, becomes tempered with gratitude on account of the larger good. When we reflect that the particular evils from which we suffer and from which no deliverance can be obtained, are natural effects of the general order, parts of the total chain of cause and consequence which binds the cosmos together; and that to ask for an exception in the operation of natural |