Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/189

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ECONOMICAL ATHEISM
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told untruths about it; and consequently that scientific discovery has disproved revelation. But that is what I have called a highly anthropomorphic argument, and it may safely be left to the apologists to demolish. Assuredly it is not a sort of argument likely to be met with in the cultured and logical future. But it was an argument which commended itself very widely to the uncultured and illogical past, and great efforts were made to deal with it. These efforts were really inimical to religious faith. Religion having been declared to rest upon the irrefragable rock of Holy Scripture, there appeared to many excellent people an urgent necessity that science should be set right, that the theory of Evolution (by which was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must be disproved: otherwise all faith must go by the board, and the world must descend into pure materialism. The Biblical criticism produced in Germany, and apparently received in the very heart of the Christian camp, seemed to plain men not merely to assail this irrefragable rock but to strike at the roots of religion itself. Atheism, having become unfashionable, was exchanged from an "agnosticism" of which the popular conception was not a great deal more philosophical. The whole question of religion was conceived to hang together. The Bible was the Word of God: if the Bible could not stand, God must fall. And the stability of