ickness,
prayer for restoration to health is offered in the churches and homes.
If God is a personal agent affected by the desires of his worshipers,
this act is perfectly logical. Yet the nature of sickness is now so
well known that we see in it a cause and effect relation of a definite
sort. Knowledge of impersonal agency is undermining the faith in
super-human agency. Perhaps the fact that such prayers have never
stayed a plague, while active measures of a scientific sort have done
so, has had something to do with the purely formal and traditional
character of such prayers among civilized men. Another instance which
has caused many cynical comments is the appeal to God to bring victory
to the nation in time of war. Both combatants pray to the same deity
with about equal fervency and, at the same time, make as careful
preparations as possible for the actual warfare. The religious
ceremonies appear to play the part of an emotional accompaniment for
the grimmer proceedings on the battle-field. To the soldier, God
stands for the element of chance; otherwise, the main precept is to
keep the powder dry.

When we enter the domain of science, we at once realize that a
different conception of agency is held. The universe is regarded as a
closed system of causal {118} relations which spring from the nature of
its parts. It is a systematic and self-contained world whose
activities can be explained by the discovery of laws which constantly
hold and which grow out of the stable properties of nature itself. As
the result of a close and accurate study of the various aspects of
nature, science has come to the conclusion that the large bulk of the
world is lifeless and that its parts react in habitual or mechanical
ways which are invariable. The planets circle about the sun in
accordance with the pull and haul of forces which work in the same
direction from year to year and lead to the same mathematically
describable result. By means of measurements and calculations,
celestial mechanics has been able to predict eclipses centuries ahead
and to test historical records in regard to those which happened
thousands of years ago. The paths of comets have been calculated and
their return to the solar system foretold. Thus the mass-movements of
the universe have been seen to be mechanical in nature and expressive
solely of the energies and configurations distributed throughout its
parts. The events which happen are inevitable