Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/180

166 of science." I have already admitted that vaticination is not in my line; and I can not so much as hazard a guess whether the spirit of prophecy which has descended on the bishop comes from the one or the other of the two possible sources recognized by the highest authorities. But I think it desirable to warn those who may be misled by phraseology of this kind, that the antagonists in the present debate are not quite rightly represented by it. Undoubtedly, Dr. Wace is a heologian; and I should be the last person to question that his whole cast of thought and style of argumentation are pre-eminently and typically theological. And, if I must accept the hideous term "scientist" (to which I object even more than I do to "infidel"), I am ready to admit that I am one of the people so denoted.

But I hope and believe that there is not a solitary argument I have used, or that I am about to use, which is original, or has anything to do with the fact that I have been chiefly occupied with natural science. They are all, facts and reasoning alike, either identical with, or consequential upon, propositions which are to be found in the works of scholars and theologians of the highest repute in the only two countries, Holland and Germany, in which, at the present time, professors of theology are to be found, whose tenure of their posts does not depend upon the results to which their inquiries lead them.

It is true that, to the best of my ability, I have satisfied myself of the soundness of the foundations on which my arguments are built, and I desire to be held fully responsible for everything I say. But, nevertheless, my position is really no more than that of an expositor; and my justification for undertaking it is simply that conviction of the supremacy of private judgment (indeed, of the impossibility of escaping it) which is the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, and which was the doctrine accepted by the vast majority of the Anglicans of my youth, before that backsliding toward the "beggarly rudiments" of an effete and idolatrous sacerdotalism which has, even now, provided us with