understood, but we never penetrate the secret of existence, "Which, dive we, soar we, baffles still and lures."

The more our comprehension of phenomena enlarges, the more does the inscrutable Reality, of which all sense perception is only the sign, deepen and widen on the mind, humbling while it exalts; inspiring with awe and worship the contemplative soul. This is the fruit and highest end of science to teach man worthily to adore.

How perverse then, and blind, is that unbelieving, irreverent spirit that marks much of the so-called learning of our times. It boasts of being free from superstition and slavish credulity. It would banish God and miracles from nature, and faith and awe of the Unknown from the reasonable mind. Compte affirmed that theology belonged only to primeval ignorance, and that, passing first into metaphysics, it was destined to vanish under the clearer light of the positive philosophy. In nature he found no God; no supernatural presence and providence; nothing but phenomena, and their laws. Of course, if he did not find these, they could not be there; for what secret could escape the eye of such a DemiGod of intelligence as Augustus Compte. So Deity is read out of the list of entities, man no more immortal, the spiritual world a fiction, religion a bug-bear of tyrannical priestcraft, and worship of the Deity a sentiment without an object. And this is what men call science, and trumpet abroad as a new Gospel; the emancipation and upbuilding of the race. It is not science but the knowledge that puffeth up; wasting the moral energies, dwarfing the majesties of manhood and turning this grand temple of nature, built for the worship of the eternal into a curiosity shop or a house of merchandise. Hang science if it have nothing better to teach us than this! I would rather, as Bacon says, "believe all the fables of legend and Talmud and Alcoran, than that this universal form is without mind." Shall we, for whom this age has made such wondrous discoveries in the fields of matter and mind; who are taught to explore the world without and the world within; to regulate the moving spheres, and tell how the planets swing, to solve the elements and

Because science has

divide the beams of light, and cage the lightning in a jar and send it forth a messenger of tidings round the world, shall we gain from all this enlarged intelligence less of reverent impulse and inspiration, to exalt and expand the soul, than did the ignorant pagans of old? corrected and enlarged our conception of nature, and many things once referred to supernatural agents have been explained, and their mode of coming to pass understood; because the divinities are now banished from Acadian groves, and Eolus no longer in his mountain cave chains or lets loose the winds, and Neptune has abandoned the empire of the sea; because human life is no longer implicated with the courses of the stars, and a comet is not dreaded as a messenger of wrath, and plague and famine are known effects of natural causes, stayed by drainage, not by prayer; and miracles are unlooked for in the territories of sense, is there, for this reason, nothing to be believed and adored? Because astronomy, with its glass, has

* Thrust far-off

The heaven, so neighborly with man of old,

To voids, spare-sown with alienated stars,"

If

does it any the less declare the glory of God to us, than to the Chaldean shepherds and the nightly visions of the Hebrew poet-king? Because geology patiently spelling out the unwritten record on the rock-ribbed earth has brought into discredit the Mosaic cosmogny, with its days and dates, and pushed the beginning into a period indeterminately remote, and shown us its building-not the work of a week, but of incomputable ages, is the origin and constitution then any less wonderful and in need of an infinite Creator? Darwin were to establish on satisfactory evidence—which seems to me as yet all too slender to support such conclusion, -man's descent from some lower form of animal, and all animal from the plant, and all plants from an original germ, are we then in the presence of any less a mystery than has confronted the thought of all ages? That original cell, in which is deposited the possibilities of the vast kingdoms of vegetable and animal life, now spread over the surface of the

earth, that original cell, I say, in whose infinitessimal compass is packed a universe of mortal and possibly immortal beings, is no object of ready comprehension for us, to be thought of with careless irreverence as a familiar thing. The existence of such a world-teeming seed, requires a cause of power and wisdom equal to that of building a universe outright. Let us understand this. The growth of intellect will never supersede faith, or quench devotion, but the more it penetrates the secrets of nature and the laws of its evolution and ongoings, the more grand and adorable will appear that inscrutable Reality of which the whole visible universe is but the manifestation. True science, not only by teaching us the limit of our faculties and inspiring a humble spirit, but by banishing from the mind the idols of superstition, can never fail to be the handmaid of religion. As knowledge increases, nature becomes more and more an illuminated temple in which faith converses with and worships the Invisible.

III. A third use of true science is to create a sense of the need of, and faith in, divine revelation. Some will think, doubtless, that the exact opposite of this statement is the truth. Grant that science begets humility and reverence, and so makes men religious in a way, it certainly has no tendency to prepare the mind to accept revealed religion. Is not science in open war with the scriptures? Has there not ever been, and is there not now, an irreconcilable antagonism between the belief of the Bible and the reception of scientific ideas? I have no time to enter on a full discussion of this most vital question of the times—the relation of Science to Revelation. A few words on this point, however, I will venture to utter. It is not with the Bible, but with a false theory of the Bible, that science can ever be at war. If it be claimed, as it once was, and now is by many, that the Bible is, in all parts, of co-equal authority, its every statement absolute truth; if belief in the Bible means belief in the correctness of all its statements and theories of the origin and phenomena of the material world, and the way man came into existence upon the planet; then surely the mind, trained

in scientific knowledge, cannot believe it; for such a mind knows some of these representations concerning natural things are not true, and may have reason to expect that further investigation will prove others not to be. When the sacred writers had occasion to speak of the outward world, they adopted the language and conceptions of nature current in their day. Many of these conceptions were erroneous, and, as science progresses, must be discredited and discharged. These are not the real subject matter of revelation; they are merely its frame work and setting. The infallibility of the Bible pertains only to that matter which constitutes its essence and the end for which it was given; to instruct mankind in moral and religious truth; to tell us how to live and do the will of God; in a word, to make man "wise unto salvation." If faith in the Holy Scriptures, as the word of God, means that God inspired men to declare to the successive generations. moral and spiritual truth, and to make statements respecting his purposes, ways and acts in respect to man-which things are the real revelation, and all the Bible stands for-in a word, that the scriptures of the Old and New Testament are an infallible guide in religious faith and practice—then I think the study of science is calculated to encourage such devout belief. For, in the first place, there is nothing in the knowledge of phenomena and their laws which can disprove the existence of a God such as the Bible sets forth. There may be such a God. Indeed the attributes ascribed to the Deity in the Bible are such as a thorough study of nature would incline the scientist to assign to that First Cause which, in all of his investigations he assumes. And, in the second place, the true scientific spirit, which evermore forbids to fill up the chasms of its ignorance with conjectures and imaginations, but requires that men stop where the evidence stops, and beyond that neither affirm or deny anything, is sure to develop in the mind a sense of need of a supernatural enlightenment to answer those "obstinate questionings" concerning the Unknowable which advancing knowledge of the cosmos perpetually conjures into consciousness, but can never answer; and in case it has any reason to believe such

revelation has been given in the Bible, it disposes such a mind to study its pages with the docility of a little child and to render to Faith the things that are Faith's.

The flippant and superficial wit of Voltaire found matter of derision in the fact that the author of the Principia, had written a commentary on a book of the Scriptures. To his conceit of reason, it seemed an amusing instance of the union of intelligence and credulity in the same mind. But that sober, cautious, profound thinker, to whose reflective mind the mystery of revolving worlds was opened, and the track and speed of the sunbeam on its journey to kiss the violet, was too conscious of his ignorance to dare construct a theory of the universe a priori; too thoroughly scientific in his method of thought to affirm or deny anything of that invisible realm which transcends the reach of finite faculty. Without some authentic tidings of that infinite world which eye hath not seen, and of which the visible gives only far-off intimations to our listening faith, he knew we could know nothing of it. But finding something in his inmost consciousness that linked him in mysterious union to the Being above all being; something that physical science could not explain, and which the Bible did explain, (answering all those intimations of an origin and destiny of wider scope than sense, putting to rest those "obstinate questionings” and unstilled desires" of the immortal nature,) how reasonable, how philosophical, in this masterly genius, to seek in the Bible light to relieve the darkness of natural knowledge. No better proof than this example is needed to show that the truly scientific spirit affiliates with the religious, and a study of nature creates a sense of the need of, and encourages a faith in, a divine revelation.

66

It is true that some brilliant discoverers in the realm of nature are inclined to deny and scout the very idea of a book revelation of God. But the skepticism of science must not be overstated. Have we not Boyle and Oersted, Davy and Faraday, Herschel and Newton, Hitchcock and Hugh Miller, names second to none among the lights of science, to say nothing of many others living, who are de