t
live, and civilization can only live, by religion?" And now let us
proceed to see what is the hope set before us in this book: and consider
whether the Natural Religion, which it unfolds, is such a religion as
the world can live by, as civilization can live by.

III.

The author of "Natural Religion," it will be remembered, assumes for the
purposes of his argument, that the supernatural portion of Christianity
is discredited, is put aside by physical science; that, as M. Renan has
somewhere tersely expressed it, "there is no such thing as the
supernatural, but from the beginning of being everything in the world of
phenomena was preceded by regular laws." Let us consider what this
involves. It involves the elimination from our creed, not only of the
miraculous incidents in the history of the Founder of Christianity,
including, of course, His Resurrection--the fundamental fact, upon
which, from St. Paul's time to our own, His religion has been supposed
to rest--but all the beliefs, aspirations, hopes, attaching to that
religion as a system of grace. It destroys theology, because it destroys
that idea of God from which theology starts, and which it professes to
unfold. This being so, it might appear that religion is necessarily
extinguished too. Certainly, in the ordinary sense which the word bears
among us, it is. "Religio," writes St. Thomas Aquinas, "est virtus
reddens debitum honorem Deo."[33] And so Cardinal Newman, somewhat more
fully, "By religion I mean the knowledge of God, of His will, and of our
duties towards Him;" and he goes on to say that "there are three main
channels which Nature furnishes us for our acquiring this
knowledge--viz., our own minds, the voice of mankind, and the course of
the world, that is, of human life and human affairs."[34] But that, of
course, is very far from being what the author of "Ecce Homo" means by
religion, and by natural religion, in his new book. Its key-note is
struck in the words of Wordsworth cited on its title-page:--" We live by
admiration."[35] Religion he understands to be an "ardent condition of
the feelings," "habitual and regulated admiration" (p. 129), "worship of
whatever in the known Universe appears worthy of worship" (p. 161). "To
have an individuality," he teaches, "is to have an ideal, and to have an
ideal is to have an object of worship: it is to have a religion" (p.
136). "Irreligion," on the other hand, is defined as "life without
worship," and is sai