"Prove all things: hold fast that which is good." PAUL. "Let knowledge grow from more to more, But vaster." TENNYSON. The truth-seeker is the only God-seeker. The curse of both religion and science, in all ages, has been the thought that there was somewhere an ultimate, -a place to stop. Here we are, finite minds in the midst of infinity. And, for the finite that is moving toward infinity, there is nowhere a place to anchor, but only the privilege and the opportunity of endless exploration. Beneath all the various, wide-spread, and disconnected labors, discoveries, and experiments of the great body of scientific workers, there is the common belief that all scientific truth is one; that the universe is all of one piece; that distant truths are only different parts of one divine pattern that runs all through the whole visible garment of God. This scientific faith is grander than any that the religious world has yet attained. But we must come to this. Religious truth is one, as God is one. Go forth, then, ye religious explorers, and seek only for truth; knowing that all truth-seekers are brothers, and must come to hand-clasping and looks of recognition by and by! S. "I apprehend that there is but one way of putting an end to our present dissensions; and that is, not the triumph of any existing system over all others, but the acquisition of something better than the best we now have." CHANNING. "It is popularly said abroad, that you have no antiquities in America. If you talk about the trumpery of three or four thousand years of history, it is true. But in the large sense, as referring to times before man made his momentary appearance, America is the place to study the antiquities of the globe. The reality of the enormous amount of material here has far surpassed my anticipation. I have studied the collection gathered by Prof. Marsh of New Haven. There is none like it in Europe, not only in extent of time covered, but by reason of its bearing on the problem of evolution. Whereas, before this collection was made, evolution was a matter of speculative reasoning, it is now a matter of fact and history as much as the monuments of Egypt. In that collection are the facts of the succession of forms, and the history of their evolution. All that now remains to be asked is how, and that is a subordinate question." - PROF. HUXLEY, before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, August, 1876. THE RELIGION OF EVOLUTION. I. SCIENCE AND RELIGION. THE phrase, "the conflict between religion and science," has become a very common one in in newspaper, magazine, in public address, and in sermon; and it represents | the observed fact that there is a grand division running through the thinking minds of civilization, on one side of which stand the advocates of religion, and on the other the advocates of science. Not, by any means, that there are no religious men on the scientific side, and no scientific men on the religious side, but that this division does represent a real and general fact, and that these two sides. stand in a certain antagonism to each other. But yet, strange as it may seem, I suppose it to be still true that there is not a scientific man living who would claim that a real truth of science can by any possibility come into conflict with a real truth of religion; and there is not a religious man living but would confess that it was simply an impossibility that a real religious truth should stand in antagonism to a real scientific truth. But the antagonism of the attitude still remains, because it is true that on 1 both sides there are large bodies of men that are very much more concerned in establishing their positions than they are in finding out what is the truth. It seems to me a very strange thing that any man should be willing to hold such an attitude as this, either on the side of science or religion. There is no possibility of its being for the permanent interest of any man that he should be able to establish himself in a falsehood; for though he may build him a house as wide as the earth, and as high as the heavens, if its foundation be in the sand, the floods of the eternal movements of the divine forces will some time undermine and sweep it away. There can, then, be no interest in any man's holding to a position that is not true; so that one might suppose that the chief anxiety of men would be, not to prove that they were right, but to find out whether they were right. And yet I have met men among my own personal friends, who would tell me candidly, and with their whole hearts, that so dear to them had become the positions that they had inherited, even if they were false, they did not wish to find it out; they did not wish to be disturbed; they did not wish. to be compelled to re-adjust their thinking to any new truths: for it is one of the inevitable facts of the world that a new truth is an "unsettler" everywhere. It comes in to disturb and to shake old institutions, and to demand of men that they do not build forever their house in the place where their fathers builded, but that they regard it simply as a tent, to be folded and taken with them on a forward march towards something which is higher and grander and broader in the way of truth. This fact to which I have alluded—that there is this antagonism between men on account of their being anxious to establish their own positions rather than to find out truth-I suppose to be true in a larger degree of the defenders of religion than it is of those that stand on the side of science; and I conceive that there is a very natural and, in one sense, a satisfactory reason for it. You cannot make any scientific man feel anxious about any supposed scientific truth on the ground that its truth or falsity will endanger the welfare of his soul, either in this world or in any other world. But when a man has inherited some religious belief that is intertwined with all the sacred associations of the past, with the present affections of the soul, and with all the dearest and grandest hopes of the future, it seems to him, when you touch it, that you are unsettling the universe, that you are sweeping away from him every thing that is dear, every thing on which he has been accustomed to rely. You take away the anchor of his soul; you cut the cable which bound him to any sure hope and abiding-place, and he is set adrift to float, nobody knows where. I say, then, that it is natural to a person who has had a training like this that he should be jealous of the incoming of something that claims to be scientific truth, that conflicts with what he has been taught to regard as religious truth. Now, in order that we may understand something of the principles of this conflict that has been going on since the dawn of civilization, and in the midst of which we are |