Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/725

Rh hold that religion is essentially an attitude of mind and heart, a seeing of the invisible, an instinctive recognition of a supreme moral authority, a sense that every human being is called to nothing less than holiness of life. They reverence the Scriptures because in them, as in no other body of writings in the world, the realities of religion are both expressed and implied. They do not demand of the Bible perfect agreement with either scientific or historic truth; they are content if they find in it the spiritual basis of human life, a scheme of thought that links the individual human being with an infinite origin and an infinite destiny. From their standpoint the value of the Bible for the highest moral purposes would in no way be increased if every word in it which touches on scientific or historical questions had the seal of all the academies in the Old World and the New.

It is not a difficult thing, nor does it require much wisdom, to harry a man whose independent thinking and moral earnestness have forced him to take a different attitude toward some great question from that which is adopted by the multitude. It is easy to present his views in an invidious light, but a more useful task would be to show that all that is essential and precious in religious belief can exist as well in a philosophical as in a popular form. With such a thesis it may not be quite so easy to "score," but it is a pity when the standards of the reporters' room invade the desk of the literary or theological editor. It is upon such men as we have mentioned, men of competent scolarshipscholarship [sic] and earnest spirit, that the task is laid of purifying and liberating the religious consciousness of the age; and we do not hesitate to say that when, from the vantage height of modern knowledge, they affirm with deep conviction the indestructibleness of the religious sentiment and the everlasting reality of its object, they render a service which, from a religious point of view, can not be overestimated.

 

a stout volume of nearly a thousand pages Mr. Jackson, the leader of the Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Expedition of 1894-'97, puts into permanent form the record of three years' observations made in Franz-Josef Land, a region beyond the eightieth parallel of latitude, which was accidentally made known to the world twenty years before by the drift of the Tegethoff, the ill-fated vessel of the Austrian expedition of Payer and Weyprecht. As such it is a substantial contribution to arctic literature, and from it much important detail will be obtained by those seeking further adventure in the quest for the pole, and a mass of material, geographic and otherwise, pertaining to the region which forms the subject of the work before us. The meteorological data, covering as they do a longer continuous period of observation in the extreme North than has heretofore been possible, and fittingly supplementing those recorded by Nansen for an almost equal period, will be specially prized by the scientist, even if the facts of the air are not considered to be the main object of arctic