MAN'S RECOGNITION OF THE REIGN OF LAW

Primitive peoples lived in a world of chaos; they were unable to grasp the unity of nature or to recognize the unity of intellect and will that lie back of all natural phenomena. Wherever they recognized regularity or felt purposeful change, they attributed the cause to a local deity made after their own image and likeness. It was natural, therefore, that they should worship the heavenly bodies and that they should have gods of the winds and waves, gods of the regularly recurring seasons, gods of the forests and the streams.

As man's intellect developed, his gods decreased in number and assumed their places in a celestial hierarchy such as we find described in the mythologies of Greece and Rome. The phenomena of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of pleasure and pain, of love and hate, of good and evil, quite naturally led man into some form of dualism. In the sublime doctrine of Monotheism, held by the Chaldeans and the chosen people, we find the first clear recognition of unity in the power that governs the universe. But man recognized God as the Creator and Ruler of the universe long centuries before he discovered that there is a unity resident in nature or that natural law is intrinsic.

It is not easy to determine the exact underlying causes that led various peoples toward the doctrine of monotheism. How much of this progress is due to scattered fragments of primitive revelation? Much of it may be undoubtedly traced to the psychological characteristics of various peoples. Thus Dr. Allan Menzies,' speaking of the religion of India, says: "The Indian gods were too little defined, too little personal, too much alike, to maintain their separate personalities with great tenacity; nor did they lend themselves to a monarchical form of pantheon; no one of them was sufficiently marked out from the rest,

1 History of Religion, New York, 1897, p. 334 ff.

or above the rest, to rule permanently over them. Yet the sense of unity in Indian religion was very strong; from the first the Indian mind is seeking a way to adjust the claims of the various gods, and view them all as one. An early idea which makes in this direction is that of Rita, the order, not especially connected with any one god, which rules both in the physical and in the moral world, and with which all beings have to reckon." There is here a definite groping towards unity and it would also seem that the unity in question is objective, that it is nothing else than the sum total of natural law in the physical and moral worlds. It is not perceived as emanating from the deity but as imposing limits to the powers of the various gods. Elsewhere, however, the growing recognition of order in the world carried with it, for the most part, a recognition of the unity and personality of the First Cause.

In the development of human thought, as in the development of all else in nature, the movement is from the general to the particular, from the simple to the complex, from the large movement to the details which it carries. Perspective is necessary for the perception of large outlines and for the recognition of fundamental truths; and so man saw order and regularity in the movements of the heavenly bodies long before he saw the same order and regularity beneath the details of the complex phenomena that surrounded him. He recognized law in the regularly recurring tides without suspecting that the same rigid law governed the movements of the stormtossed billows. Newton sent a thrill of exultation through the world, not by discovering the force of gravity, but by discovering that the apple in its fall obeys the same law that holds the planet in its orbit.

Copernicus banished from the heavens the crystalline spheres of the Ptolemaic System and the endless complexity of cycle and epicycle and laid the foundation of modern science by framing a theory to fit observed facts instead of endeavoring to bend observed facts into conformity with existing theory. Galileo, Kepler and Tycho Brahe developed the heliocentric hypothesis of Copernicus and

formulated the laws that govern the movements of the members of the Solar System. That these astronomers, however, recognized the intelligence displayed in the planetary movements without having traced them to their immediate underlying cause, is illustrated by the fact that Kepler assigned an angel to each planet to guide it in its course. With Newton's discovery of the universality of gravity, all bodies in the universe were seen to move in obedience to one universal law. As a consequence of this new development of science, astrology gave place to astronomy, alchemy made way for chemistry, and man at last recognized the reign of law throughout the realm of inanimate nature.

But this movement of thought did not end here. From the universality of the laws of nature to their intrinsic character the transition was easily and readily made. Thus, once the nature of light is understood, the law of its distribution is seen to follow as a necessary consequence. Since light radiating from a luminous point moves in straight lines, the quantity of light falling on equal surfaces must be inversely as the squares of the distances of these surfaces from the source of light. In like manner, that all bodies move as if attracted by one another directly as their masses, and inversely as the squares of their distances, is seen to be more than an empirical formula. The law governing these movements is internal, not external. It is an expression of intellect, not of will; it is included in the essence of bodies and is indifferent to their existence. Upon the recognition of the intrinsic character of the laws governing its phenomena inanimate nature became a province of applied mathematics.

The recognition by men of science of the intrinsic character of the fundamental laws of nature soon led to very serious consequences. Men who occupied themselves with the study of natural phenomena, while neglecting to study Christian philosophy were often led to deny the Dominion of God over Nature and they sometimes lost sight of the very existence of the Creator. On the other hand, those Christian philosophers who neglected the study of nature, not infrequently felt themselves called upon to

deny the inviolability of natural law in order to vindicate God's Supreme Dominion over Nature. The misunderstanding which thus grew up between the representatives of Christian philosophy and the men of science was responsible for much of the Atheism and Agnosticism that has prevailed among men of science during the past two centuries, and it is at least partly responsible for the neglect of the natural sciences and the hostile attitude towards them which is sometimes to be found, even to the present day, among men of deep religious convictions and meager scientific attainments.

It is not surprising, indeed, that the Dominion of God should be a more potent factor in the world than the findings of science to the faithful believer who knows how the winds and the waves obeyed the voice of Jesus and how disease and death were subject to His rule. But there is no conflict between the laws of God and the laws of nature. In every chapter of the warfare between science and religion the conflict may be traced to an abuse of authority. A man's authority can never be legitimately transferred from one field of science to another. The ablest jurist does not, through his knowledge of the law, acquire authority in the field of medicine, and the most eminent of physician may be the merest tyro in the field of theology. In like manner, the most profound of theologians may be totally devoid of ability in the interpretation of the laws governing the phenomena of nature. Owing to the limitations placed upon human intelligence, it is not surprising that a man may attain certainty in his chosen field of research without being in the least able to reconcile his findings with equally certain findings in unrelated fields of truth. Indeed one may often find truths in the same department of science that the human mind is utterly unable to reconcile. Thus the concept of a straight line and that of a circle are so contradictory to each other that it is not possible to hold them both in the mind as identical, nevertheless we accept without question the statement that a straight line is a circle with an infinite radius. In like manner, the Christian believes the statement that there are three

persons in God and the other statement, which he cannot reconcile with it, that there is one nature in God. His failure to be able to unite these two statements mentally does not, however, prevent him from believing both statements and he looks forward to the time in the life to come when in the Beatific Vision he may comprehend these truths that remain a mystery to him while he dwells in the flesh.

According to Christian philosophy, the Being of God is the primary source of all truth and of all existence. It is this same truth held in the mind of God that constitutes the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity through Whom all things were made and without Whom was made nothing that was made. This same truth, in so far as it has been externalized by the will of God in the creative act, is the essence of all created things. Again, it is this same truth that man incorporates into his own mind when he comprehends the laws of nature, and that he in turn bodies forth in the creations of art. God is truth; and this Truth is eternal and unchangeable, whether it be in the Being of God, in the Divine Intelligence, or whether it be reflected in the essence of created things, in the mind of man, or in the creations of art. It is the mode of being or existence in the created world that is contingent upon the will of God. Whether the world exists or ceases to exist depends wholly upon the will of the Creator. St. Augustine writing on this subject says: Conservatio est creatio continuata, the conservation of the world is the creative act continued. This is only another way of expressing St. Paul's thought "In God we live, move and have our being."

The laws of nature are the expression of God's intellect in the world; the forces of nature are the expression of God's will in the world. It is surely not denying to God a perfection to say of Him that he cannot sin; that he cannot act untruthfully; that His will in its activity cannot be divorced from His intellect.

The Christian does not believe that creation expresses the sum total of God's power or the sum total of His activity in the world. The doctrine of the Concursus