"Pass over the
earth," says Plutarch; "you may discover cities without walls,
without literature, without monarchs, without palaces and wealth;
where the theatre and the school are not known; but no man ever saw
a city without temples and gods, where prayers and oaths and oracles
and sacrifices were not used for obtaining pardon or averting evil."
Given man and environment as they are, and a belief in God is a
necessary result. But you may ask, if we are to worship a personal
God, why might not a conscious and religious hydra, with equal
right, worship an infinite stomach, and the annelid a god of mere
brute force?
There stands in Florence a magnificent statue by Michel Angelo. A
human figure is only partially hewn out of the stone. He never
finished it. If you could have seen the master hewing the chips with
hasty, impatient blows from the shapeless block, you would have been
tempted to say that he was but a stonecutter, and but a hasty
workman at that. Even now we do not know exactly what form and
expression he would have given to the still unfinished head. But no
one can examine it and hesitate to pronounce it a grand work of a
master-mind. In any manifestly incomplete work you must judge the
purpose and character and powers of the workman or artist by its
highest possibilities, just so far as you have any reason to believe
that these possibilities will be realized.
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