SCIENCE DRIVES US TO RELIGION.
By T. S. King
If I were in the danger of becoming skeptical, I believe that a fresh and vivid appreciation of the scientific revelations concerning our globe would appall me into faith. To think of this ball whirling and spinning about the sun, and to be an atheist! Its covering less in comparative thickness than a peach-skin, and its pulp a seething fire, and to feel that we are at the mercy of the forces that lash it like a top around the ecliptic, and of the raving flames that heave and beat for vent; not more than an eighth of its surface inhabitable by man; seas roaring around him, tropic heat smiting his brain, polar frosts threatening his blood, inland airs laden with fever, sea winds charged with consumption; hurricanes hovering in the sky, earthquakes slumbering under our feet; the conditions of life dependent on the most delicate oscillations of savage powers over which the wisest man is as powerless as the worm,—to think of these, and not to have any confidence or belief in a Power superior to these pitiless forces, not to have an inspiring faith that the land was made for human habitations and experience, and is sheltered by a ceaseless love from the hunger of the elements! Why, I could as easily conceive of a person making his home unconcerned in an uncaged menagerie, as a man at rest in nature, seeing what it is, and not feeling that it is embosomed in God! Go to nature, my brother; go to the unroofed universe; go to the awful pages of science, not to learn your religion, but to learn your need of it—to learn that you are houseless without a sense of God as overarching you by his power, pledging his care to you, twisting the furious forces of immensity into a protecting tent for your final home.—T. S. King.