And God waits for us, for all of us who have the quality to reach him.  He has need of us as we of him.  He desires us and desires to make himself known to us.  When at last the individual breaks through the limiting darknesses to him, the irradiation of that moment, the smile and soul clasp, is in God as well as in man.  He has won us from his enemy.  We come staggering through into the golden light of his kingdom, to fight for his kingdom henceforth, until at last we are altogether taken up into his being.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

1.  The scientific atheist

It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God, the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.  It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme instability of absolute negation.

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who was a very typical antagonist of all religion.  He died only the other day.  He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin.  A decade or more ago he wrote a book called “The Nature of Man,” in which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about life.  They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our discussion of sin, they will be referred to again.  But it is not Professor Metchnikoff’s intention to provide material for a religious discussion.  He sets out his facts in order to overthrow theology as he conceives it.  The remarkable thing about his book, the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive theology as he conceives it.  The development of his science has destroyed that right.

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology is modified through these changes.  When he comes from his own world of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.  He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with it fifty years or more ago.

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the general scheme and method of our thinking.

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual, maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death of its constituent individuals.  Natural History, which began by putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and importance the individual adventure.  “The Origin of Species” was for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.