Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/470

456. And I know no study whatsoever more able to help a man to acquire that inductive habit of mind than natural history.

True, it may be acquired otherwise. The study of languages, for instance, when properly pursued, helps specially to form it, because words are facts, and the modern science of philology, which deals with them, has become now a thoroughly inductive, and therefore a trustworthy and a teaching science. But without that scientific temper of mind which judges calmly of facts, no good or lasting work will be done, whether in physical science, in social science, in politics, in philosophy, in philology, or in history.

Now, if this scientific habit of mind can be gained by other studies, why should I, as a clergyman, interest myself specially in the spread of physical science? Am I not going out of my proper sphere to meddle with secular matters? Am I not, indeed, going into a sphere out of which I had better keep myself, and all over whom I may have influence? For is not science antagonistic to religion? and, if so, what has a clergyman to do, save to warn the young against it, instead of attracting; them toward it?

First, as to meddling with secular matters. I grudge that epithet of secular to any matter whatsoever. But I do more; I deny it to any thing which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most insignificant atom of dust. To those who believe in God, and try to see all things in God, the most minute natural phenomenon cannot be secular. It must be divine; I say, deliberately, divine; and I can use no less lofty word. The grain of dust is a thought of God; God's power made it; God's wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or qualities it may possess. God's providence has put it in the place where it is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation of the universe. The grain of dust can no more go from God's presence, or flee from God's Spirit, than you or I can do. If it go up to the physical heaven, and float (as it actually often does) far above the clouds, in those higher strata of the atmosphere which the aeronaut has never visited, whither the Alpine snow-peaks do not rise, even there it will be obeying physical laws which we hastily term laws of Nature, but which are really the laws of God; and if it go down into the physical abyss; if it be buried fathoms, miles, below the surface, and become an atom of some rock still in the process of consolidation, has it escaped from God, even in the bowels of the earth? Is it not there still obeying physical laws, of pressure, heat, crystallization, and so forth, which are laws of God—the will and mind of God concerning particles of matter? Only look at all created things in this light—look at them as what they are, the expressions of God's mind and will concerning this universe in which we live—"the voice of God," as Bacon says, "revealed in facts"—and then you will not fear physical science, for you will be sure that, the more you know of physical science, the