XV.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

"There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all."-1 CORINTHIANS Xii. 6.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY has given the scientific inquirer a choice between three theories. "Either he must believe that the innumerable variety of creatures now existing, and all the forms of the long geological series, have been spontaneously generated without any particular reason, or that each has been produced by a special creative fiat, or we must accept the doctrine of Descent."

But as this accomplished professor tells us he has "all his life had a horror of limiting the possibilities of things," I submissively ask, "Is it the province of science to tell me what I ought to believe or what I ought to know?" Whichever of these alternative theories be adopted, if no other is possible, I still fall back on the higher truth, "There are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all things in all."

A conflict between the claims of religion and the claims of science upon the allegiance of the human

mind, as though they were naturally exclusive and antagonistic, is a conflict that no wise man would desire to provoke. For it would be a conflict raised upon a false issue. Each can pursue its own way, if it will only bear in mind its own limitations, without violating the territory of the other. "If it is borne in mind,” said Sir Joseph Hooker in his presidential address at Norwich, "that the laws of mind are not yet relegated to the domain of the teacher of physical science, and that the laws of matter are not within the religious teacher's province, these may then work together in harmony and with good will." And he quotes Mr. Herbert Spencer's dictum, "If religion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of facts, that the power which the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." I suppose he means that it has depths which science, with its instruments, cannot penetrate.

"There is in reality," said Sir James Paget in an admirable address on the relations of Theology and Science, delivered at the Clergy School in Leeds last December" there is in reality no article of any of the Christian creeds which can be the subject of direct scientific inquiry. . . The disputes begin in questions in which knowledge is neither clearly revealed nor clearly within the present reach of science,-in such questions as the method of creation; the relation of man to the lower animals; the nature and relation of mind and matter, or free will and law; or the possible nature and conditions of states of conscious existence other than those in which we live. No one can

justly maintain that either revelation or science can supply nearly exact knowledge on these matters, or can make us sure of what may be inferred from what we think of them."

And he adds, "In these discussions it is generally believed that one side must be in the wrong. Yet in many of them both may be right, and their opposition may be due to their both being ignorant of some intermediate truth which, when gained by increasing knowledge, will combine the truths they now hold apart. ... Both sides are right in that which may be claimed as well-ascertained knowledge; and distant inferences on one side should not be allowed to weigh against knowledge or great probability on the other. If it be maintained, as an inference from facts in science, that miracles are impossible, or a resurrection, or that God became man, so let it be; from the purely scientific point of view such things seem impossible. But from the religious point of view we may hold them to be not only possible, but sure; and the religious conviction has a right to be no less strong than the scientific. . . . Science cannot infer or define all possibilities."

Surely the great statement of St. Paul which I have prefixed to this discourse, and which contains the idea that I meant to run through the whole of it, and to redeem it from the charge of irrelevancy, is not in conflict with any great principle of science. Man may not be able by scientific processes to find out God; his microscope and telescope and chemical experiments stop on the verge of the "inscrutable," and cannot penetrate its abysmal darkness; but if another

faculty can discern through the darkness "the hands that reach through nature, moulding help," there is nothing that compels us to reject these inferences of faith, which are not irrational, which rest upon their proper evidences, which in one form or other may be found universal, and which have commended themselves to minds which found no natural repugnance between science and piety. "Did the Christian mysteries give him no trouble?" was a question asked of Sir D. Brewster upon his death-bed. "None. Why should they? We are surrounded by mysteries. His own being was a mystery; he could not explain the relation of his soul to his body. Everybody believed things they could not understand. The Trinity or the Atonement was a great deep; so was Eternity, so was Providence. It caused him no uneasiness that he could not account for them. These were secret things that belonged to God. He made no attempt to reconcile the sovereignty of Grace with the responsibility of man they were both true. He could wait to see their harmony cleared; they were not contrary to reason, however incomprehensible. . . . He thanked God the way of salvation was so simple; no laboured argument, no hard attainment was required. To believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ was to live."

For the idea of God is neither unphilosophical nor unscientific. In two essays, published some years ago in the Fortnightly Review on "the Nature of Atoms," and "the Origin of Force," the late Sir John Herschel -an illustrious and venerable name--distinctly arrives at the conclusion that, except upon the hypothesis of a

presiding mind-a hypothesis based on the phenomena of our own consciousness and the ascertained powers of our own will—the organisation of atoms and the derivation of force are both inexplicable and inconceivable. Certainly this hypothesis does not seem to me less reasonable or even less scientific than the theory of Lucretius, who, in a famous presidential address, was matched against Bishop Butler, and meant, I think, to have the best of the argument, who held that the atoms-the “primordia rerum "—had their source of motion in themselves, and that, by virtue of a certain "clinamen" that is given to them, and with the help of certain little hooks which are attached to each, they form their affinities-the atoms with most hooks forming the matter of greatest density-and so constitute the actual elemental substances of the world!

"But miracles," some one may say, "both from the scientific and from the philosophical point of view, are impossible. You cannot expect me to believe them." I cannot, of course, force you to believe them; nor am I prepared to say that a Christian faith cannot exist without a belief in them as miracles. And I quite feel the à priori objection to them as violations of, or at least variations from, known law. But, as Sir James Paget says, "science cannot define or infer all possibilities." Paley's position is impregnable: "Only believe that there is a God, and miracles are not incredible." And as to the philosophical objection to them, the same strong reasoner says, "There is a want of logical justice in a statement which, while affirming the incredibility of miracles, suppresses all those circumstances of ex