Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 25:98 (Apr 1868)
Article: The Natural Theology Of Social Science
Author: John Bascom

BSac 25:98 (April 1868) p. 270

The Natural Theology Of Social Science

Rev. John Bascom

No. III

Value And Natural Agents

In proportion as order becomes complete, and the forces through which it is secured fundamental, the mass of men cease to be greatly impressed by it. There is required too much reflection and breadth of vision for its easy, instant apprehension, and thus an ingenious conjunction of very limited things close at hand more impresses them than laws undergirding the universe, and reaching, like cables of steel, back through the entire precincts of time. While the effects of God’s greatest works are thus in a measure lost to the common mind, they are often in a still higher degree wasted on the scientific intellect. Principles of order, so pervasive, so permanent, so inflexible, lose their personal character, become a nature of things, and wholly separate the mind of man from God, or interpose between us and him immeasurable stretches of secondary causes, hopelessly cutting us off from his providence, and leaving us afloat on an ocean of forces, so broad as to put its nearest shore beyond our faith and hope. Secondary causes thus come to assume a form so necessary, so independent, so imperturbable, as to make an inquiry into them the sole office of thought, and their contemplation the entire range of the spiritual eye. Such a feeling of the remote, intangible, impossible character of the spiritual and the divine may consolidate itself into a system, become a dogma of the intellect, settle down around the soul like a cold and cloudy sky, cutting it off forever from the light and warmth of the Divine presence, and those reaches of infinite power in which the universe itself is held.

We need, therefore, constantly to be on our guard against

BSac 25:98 (April 1868) p. 271

those personified abstractions which the mind is ever setting up in such words and phrases as “nature,” “law,” “the forces of nature,” “the nature of things.” These are the giants of the mist which the mythological imagination of science — in its way as superstitious as any poetic fancy that has gone before it — conjures up, and with them hides from itself the only Self-sufficient One. Men give an efficiency, eternity, and wisdom to matter which they deny to mind, to the creature, which they withhold from the Creator.

So little are we possessed of creative power, so inseparable is the association in our minds between what is, what we everywhere find, and what must be, that we overlook the wisdom of the divine plan in its supposed necessity, and come to think order indigenous because it is so pervasive and perfect. Not, therefore, till our weak wits can contrive some other possible way in which the world might be made, or...