Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/171

Rh when it is uttered as science, as it is here, it is quite another matter. When it is declared that a man, say like Emerson, when compared with the general of the Salvation Army, is a crystal compared to a flower, and the declaration is made in the name and with the authority of science, it is time to protest. In fact, to aver that the finest specimens of the race who lived before the advent of Christianity, or who have lived since, and honestly withheld their assent from the Calvinistic interpretation of it, came short of the higher life and the true destiny of man, as much as the stone comes short of the plant, may do as the personal opinion of a Scotch professor, but to announce such an opinion as the result of a scientific demonstration is an insult to science and an outrage upon human nature.

It is told of Dr.Johnson that he once silenced an old Billingsgate fish-wife by calling her a parallelogram. Professor Drummond calls the merely moral man a hexagon (see chapter on classification), and there is just as much science in the one case as in the other. It is a mere calling of names, and the retort in both cases is liable to be, "You're another!" That there is a fundamental difference between the crystal and the cell we all know, but to call Plato or Marcus Aurelius a crystal, and Luther or Calvin living organism, is purely gratuitous. To science Paul is no more alive than Plato. Both were master-spirits, both made a deep and lasting impression upon the world, both are still living forces in the world of mind to-day. Theology may see a fundamental difference between the two, but science does not. Theology may attach its own meanings to the terms life and death, but science can attach but one meaning to them, the meaning they have in the universal speech of mankind. Theology may say that "he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son hath not life"; but is the statement any more scientific than it would be to say, "He that hath Confucius hath life, and he that hath not Confucius hath not life"? If Christ was the life in a biological and verifiable sense, then the proposition would carry its own proof. But the kind of life here referred to is a kind entirely unknown to science. The language, like the language of so much else in the New Testament, is the language of mysticism, and is not capable of verification by any process known to science. The facts that confirm it, if facts there are, lie entirely outside of the domain of scientific inquiry, direct or indirect.

As a matter of fact, and within the range of scientific demonstration, the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian, between the moral and the orthodox citizen, in our day, is as little as the difference between Whig and Tory, or Republican and Democrat—a difference of belief and of outward observance, and in no sense a fundamental difference of life and character. Is it probable that a scientific commission could establish any essential differences, say between Professor Tyndall and Professor Drummond, any differences which the latter owed to his orthodoxy that enhanced his worth as a man, as