Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/102

92 that in the beginning the heaven and earth were created, not by a thousand conflicting deities, but by one supreme and indivisible, and that He hath given all things a law that shall not be broken? And we may compare the vast infinities of time and space, that long ascending order, that gradual progress demanded by geology, with the words in the sublime ninetieth psalm, read at the burial service: "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday which is past, and as a watch in the night." Surely the view of the gradual preparation of the earth for mankind is grander than that which makes him coeval with the beasts which perish, and we ought to honor the archæologist who by unhasting, unresting research revealed in all their length and breadth the genealogy and the antiquity of man and of his habitation. He rent the veil and showed the long vista of the temple of the Most High, not made with hands—"Apparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt." Not the limitation but the amplification of the idea of God is the result of the labor of such a student, and not the descent but the ascent of man is the outcome of his speculations. If, as he used to say, we have in our bones the chill of the contracted view of the past in which till now we were brought up, the enlargement which he effected of that view ought to give a warmth, a fire to our soul of souls, in proportion as we feel that we are indeed not the creatures of yesterday, but the heirs of the ages and worlds that have perished in the making of us.

As to the likeness of the general spirit of the method of science to that of the Bible, the Bible is a model to the student in its slow but increasing purpose of revelation, through sundry times and divers manners, warning each succeeding age to have its eyes open and every member of the human race to be the disciple—that is, "scholar," as the founder of Christianity called his followers. To invest the pursuit of truth with the sanctity of a religious duty is the true reconciliation of religion and science. Such a union has been the special glory of the great school of English geologists, and the two pioneers of the science at the time when it had to fight its way against prejudice, ignorance, and apathy, were both honored dignitaries of the English Church; and now within these walls there rests beneath the monument of Woodward one who was the friend of Sedgwick and the pupil of Buckland. He followed truth with a sanctified zeal, a childlike humility. For discovering, confirming, rectifying his conclusions, there was no journey he would not undertake. From early youth to extreme old age it was to him a religious duty fearlessly to correct all his own mistakes, and he was always ready to receive from others and reproduce that which he had not in himself. In his mind science and religion were indivisible. The freedom of religious inquiry in the national Church, the cause of humanity in the world at large, were to him as dear as though they were his own personal and peculiar concern. There is unusual solemnity in the thought of his passage into the eternal world, on which, as in a shadow or