For just consider the case sincerely, and say what would be the worth of a God if he were there, with his work accomplished arid his world run down.  He would be worth no more than just that world was worth.  To that amount of result, with its mixed merits and defects, his creative power could attain, but go no farther.  And since there is to be no future; since the whole value and meaning of the world has been already paid in and actualized in the feelings that went with it in the passing, and now go with it in the ending; since it draws no supplemental significance (such as our real world draws) from its function of preparing something yet to come; why then, by it we take God’s measure, as it were.  He is the Being who could once for all do that; and for that much we are thankful to him, but for nothing more.  But now, on the contrary hypothesis, namely, that the bits of matter following their laws could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them?  Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible?  Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in?  And how, experience being what is once for all, would God’s presence in it make it any more living or richer?

Candidly, it is impossible to give any answer to this question.  The actually experienced world is supposed to be the same in its details on either hypothesis, “the same, for our praise or blame,” as Browning says.  It stands there indefeasibly:  a gift which can’t be taken back.  Calling matter the cause of it retracts no single one of the items that have made it up, nor does calling God the cause augment them.  They are the God or the atoms, respectively, of just that and no other world.  The God, if there, has been doing just what atoms could do—­appearing in the character of atoms, so to speak—­ and earning such gratitude as is due to atoms, and no more.  If his presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity.  Nor would indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage.  When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him a common hack.

Thus if no future detail of experience or conduct is to be deduced from our hypothesis, the debate between materialism and theism becomes quite idle and insignificant.  Matter and God in that event mean exactly the same thing—­the power, namely, neither more nor less, that could make just this completed world—­and the wise man is he who in such a case would turn his back on such a supererogatory discussion.  Accordingly, most men instinctively, and positivists and scientists deliberately, do turn their backs on philosophical disputes from which nothing in the line of definite future consequences can be seen to follow.  The