Morning journal and courier., 1880-06-28

The Baccalaureate Sermon
 Delivered by President Porter Of Yale fn
 the College Chapel, Sunday, June ssth, 1880.
 Having no hope and without God in the world | Ephesians IT., 12
 | This descriptive phrase when condensed to
 its utmost might be read thus: Hopeless be- cause Goddess. Each of these words is suffi- ciently significant when taken alone. When coupled together their force is more than doubled To be Goddess is to fail to acknowl- edge Him whom men naturally own It is to l refuse to worship the Creator and Father in
 heaven, whom the right-minded and loyal hearted instinctiyely reverence. It is to for
 sake God and therefore to be God-forsaken, | as the homely phrase is, that is, to be one whom the sunshine warns with no heat and the rain blesses with no refreshment, because l in the wide world which God has made he
 finds no living and loving God. No wonder I that such man IS without hope, that he IS l chased with those ''to whom hope never comes that comes to all
 The condition of the persons here describ | ed was simply negative They had been without God and nothing more. Possibly l they did not deny or disbelieve in God. They might have been so occupied with the world 1 itself in its brightness and beauty, that God ! was absent from their thinking. Possibly
 one or another might have had daring enough
 to say there is no God. Perhaps, though not probably, in those times, some held that ! God could not be known, and invested this dogma with religious halo to which they
 responded with mystic wonder. To them all 1 there was no God and in them all there was
 no hope. So wrote our apostle out of the fresh and vivid experience of the hope l which had co me to him from the new and | vivid manifestation of God to himself-a hope | which thrilled every fibre of his being with | electric life. Since his time men in all gen. | erations have been thrilled with the same joy
 ous hope, and just so often as God has been l forgotten or denied has hope left the hearts
 and habitations of men. But in all these ! times ignorance of God has been more com 1 monly regarded as a calamity or @ sin. In | our days. is well known, it has taken | new form. Ignorance of God has been taught | as a necessity of Reason. The unknowable- ness of God has been formulated as 6 Phil osophy. It has even been taught as The ology and hallowed as a Religion. The sub | imation of rational piety has been gravely set forth as that blind wonder which comes from conscious and necessary ignorance of God. In contrast win this new form of worship with the confident joyousness of Christian faith has been called as the impie-
 ty of the pious, andthe old saying has almost reappeared in anew guise that even for philosopher ignorance is the mother of de- votion."
 I do not propose to argue concerning the | truth or falsehood of these doctrines I shall l spend no time in discussing the logic or phil osophy of the Atheistic Agnosticism which is | somewhat currently taught and received. I
 shall simply treat of it in it's practical tenden- 1 cy as being destructive of hope in man, and,
 therefore necessarily leading to the degrada- l tion of his nature and the lowering of his | life.
 I. Without God there is no well grounded l hope for science. This may seem to be l very daring or very paradoxical assertion. There is more truth in 1t, however than is usually discerned. Inasmuch as it is in the
 name of science that ignorance of God is ex- alted into supreme wisdom, it may be worth while to inquire what would the effect upon science be, could 1t cast out God from all its thinking. say could it do this, for it would be very hard to do so. Our newly fedged agnostics are apt to forget that all modern science has been prosecuted in the
 broad and penetrating sunlight of faith in one living and personal God, and that not single theory has been proposed or experiment tried in nature, except with the distinct recognition of the truth that wise and loving mind at least may uphold and di- rect the goings on of nature. The most pas ionate atheist cannot deny that this is the con viction of most of the living and breathing men about him. The most restrained agnos- tic cannot but know and feel that the theory which he strives to cherish is rejected by most of the women and children who look up into the sky and walk on the earth The simple teachings of Christian theism are ca pablo of being expanded into the grandest conceptions that science ever attempted to formulate, so grand that human reason is overwhelmed with their sublime relation ships and the human imagination is dazed to
 blindness when it would picture them. The first proposition of the creed which the in fant pronounces with confiding simplicity, "I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth"--is easily expanded in to those conceptions that the man necessari- ly and intuitively supplies as the background upon which science traces all it's propositions, and through which 1t connects it's theories and proceeds to it's conclusions
 That science must have faith and hope appears, whether we consider 1t as an inter preter, an historian, or a prophet. Though it begins with facts, it does not stop with facts. Though it begins with the seen, it looks beneath the visible and strives after the invisible. So soon as it compares and ex- plains, it connects the sensible and interprets events by forces and laws, byhypotheses and heories. Let 1t test it's the ories by expert ments thousand times repeated what it tests is what 1t has gained by interpretation, that IS, what IS not seen but believed. Fol lowing the unseen on the lines of interpre- ting thought, it is led into the very presence of thinking God.
 Having gained some insight into the pres ent by this process, science applies this in sight to history, going backwards into the motest past and unrolling it's records whether written on indestructible tables of stone or suggested by the casual deposits of heaps of refuse. But history of every kind, even of nature, is interpreted force and law, and force, to be interpreted by law, must be order
 ly in its actings; and order in nature if it
 does not require directing God, is, to say the least best explained by such a God Els pecially if the great law of evolution or de- velopment is accepted, and so long story of progress is traced in the past there emerees and shapes itself into being plan, thought
 wide enough to embrace all the events which have successively germinated into being and long enough to provide for their gradual sue
 cession. This requires single mind as wide as that of one forecasting God, and as un-
 wearied as his unsearchable understanding But science is also prophet. It revels in
 it's confidence in the future It believes that it's interpretations of the present and its solu- tions of the past will be surpassed by the dis coveries that are to be that both nature and man shall continue as heretofore, obeying the same laws as from the beginning, and that the revelations already made of both shall be lost sight of and forgotten in the products of force and law which the future shall dis close, and that in all this progress one reye- lation shall prepare the way for another, as naturally and as gently as the dawn brightens into the sunrise. Here is hope, ardent, con- fident, passionate hope. and, we may add, rational and well grounded hope. On what does this hope rest-this hope for the stabil- ity of natures laws and the promise of it's fu- ture? We need not answer by any abstract analysis or refined philosophizing. We con- cede that it is not necessary for success or eminence in any special science that this fun damental question should be raised. We know that for enIinence in any speciality, the nat ural faith and hope of men in science as in- depreciation and history and prophecy, is alto gether sufficient, and this need not be ex- banded into faith in God. We do not object in the least that science stops short in it's ex- plantations of phenomena at molecules, and motion, and inertia and, attraction, and heat, and electricity, and heredity, and development, and variation, and environment. But we do contend that atheistic agnosticism gives no solution of those explanations that are essen tial to science which is so satisfactory as the creed of Christian theism, We also contend that the personal thinker is more than the sci enlist who interprets and prophecies, and the living man demands and accepts 8 personal God as the best solution of all the problems which every special science raises, but which Snecia1 Scienca ean so1va