We hear the boast that no song of Hebrew seer can withstand this modern
wisdom, that the superstition of Bible faith shall vanish like starlight
before the rising sun. To science every opinion shall submit. But wait.
It is dogmatism against belief after all, authority against authority,
and the one in a lower region than the other, with vastly inferior
sanctions. Natural science declares the present result of its
observation of the universe, investigation brief, superficial, and
limited to one small corner of the whole. Yet these deliverances are to
be set above the science which deals with existence on the highest
plane, the spiritual, solving deepest problems of life and conscience,
finding perpetual support in the experience of men. The claim is
somewhat large; it lacks the proof of service; it lacks verification.
Science boasts greatly, as is natural to its adolescence. But at what
point can it dare to say, Here is final truth, here is certainty? We do
not repel our debt to the discoverer when we maintain that natural
science is only watching the surface of a stream for a few miles along
its course, while the springs far away among the eternal hills and the
outflow into the infinite ocean are never viewed. Are we taunted with
believing? Those who taunt us must supply for their part something more
than inference ere we trust all to their wisdom. The "Force" that is so
much invoked, what is it so far as the definitions of science go?
Effects we see; Force never. All statements as to the nature of force
are pure dogma. It is declared that there are necessary and eternal laws
of matter. What makes them necessary, and who can prove their
everlastingness? Using such words men pass infinitely beyond material
research--they infer--they assert. In the region of natural science we
can affirm nothing to be eternal, and even _necessity_ is a word that
has no warrant. It is only in the soul, in the region of moral ideas, we
come on that which endures, which is necessary, which has constant
reality. And it is here that our belief in God as universal Creator, the
Source of power and life, the One Agent, the King eternal, immortal and
invisible, finds root and strength.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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