Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/756

736 condemned by men who have not carefully read the many treatises for and against evolution, and who have not sound conceptions of the true grounds of the learned authors. The writer once heard a divine vigorously controvert the doctrines of Darwin, and exhaust his resources of invective upon the unfortunate believers in the evolution theories of the present, much to the edification of the regular churchgoers, who, for the most part, had never read the books which were criticised, but had a general idea that Darwinism, socialism, and communism, were equally pernicious to the welfare of society. The occupant of the pulpit, upon seeing that he swept his audience with him, elevated himself to his full height and exclaimed, "If they believe that man descended from an ape, let them take a monkey from the Zoological Gardens, and, by a process of natural selection and cultivation, make a man of him. Surely this is not unreasonable to ask!"

I often hear sermons from men who admire the progress of science, yet who do incalculable damage by drawing wide and unwarrantable inferences and conclusions from scientific facts. These inferences are often made by men who are well read in the scientific literature of the day, but who do not regard the limits of scientific generalizations, and take steps which the scientific hearer would not dream of taking. The hearer, knowing how defective the preacher's judgment is in his inferences from science, naturally doubts the clearness of his pastor's judgment on even purely theological points. The attempt to reconcile science and religion is like an endeavor to measure two constantly-expanding scales by comparison with each other. It does not seem to be recognized that a scientific man can have a religion apart from his science: that it is not necessary for him to apply the exact laws of his particular science to his religious convictions, or to test the logic of his belief by the methods which he has found necessary and invaluable in scientific investigations. Many scientific men who are considered atheists are far from being so. It is compatible for a man to be a logical reasoner in an exact science, and yet to refuse to apply the touchstones, which serve him in his science, to his religion. He recognizes that his religious belief is an inherent want of his nature. Strict logicians may laugh at him, and claim that he is inconsistent; he himself feels that his tests fail; he cannot reason; he must receive much on faith. Nothing, therefore, is so disagreeable and demoralizing to the man who is loyal, both to his religion and his science, as to hear the attempts of preachers to reconcile an incomplete knowledge of Nature's laws—for, at the best, we are only on the boundaries of the science of Nature—with the great mystery of revealed religion. It were better that the subject should be left untouched; that the minister should be pronounced not in step with progress, than that he should awaken the spirit of opposition and distrust in the minds of the thinkers on scientific problems.

Such are some of the evils of a superficial exposition of science