Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/75

Rh can only touch here upon this wide subject. If I were to seek an argument against the modern deniers of a Divine Maker and Providence, I should turn to science itself as furnishing its best ground. The result of our study of Nature, it is justly claimed, is only the knowledge of phenomena; but in this claim science has rid us forever of the notion of material substance; it has resolved all into one original, persistent Force; it has thus lifted matter into a domain above the physical, and by its own induction brought us back to the necessary truth, which we can only interpret by our own personal intelligence and will. If evolution, whatever its amazing chain of growth, is forced to admit that the principal world-stuff has in it the capacity of all the thinking, conscious, moral being begotten from it, evolution is but a vague name for the living action of a living God. And when I sum, again, our results as to the human organism, all our knowledge of the fitness of the cerebral mass and each fibre of the spinal net-work to the motions of the unseen life, so far from proving thought a function of the brain, or will a shock of the nerve-power, has only refined the body into the perfect vehicle of the indwelling spirit. Nothing is more satisfying to a believer in facts above Nature than that chapter on the "Substance of the Mind," where the apostle of English Positivism, Mr. Spencer, gives us as the outcome of his analysis, that when we talk of material or spiritual substances, it is indifferent whether "we express those in terms of these, or these of those;" yet, as thought cannot be dissected like the gray matter of the brain, it is sounder science to say that the living force is another than the physical fact.

But I cannot linger on these questions. Enough if I look forward in this light to the most harmonious results. We need not expect at once a reconciliation of all discords. Much must be done before that is reached. The clergyman has to learn fully that the Word of God is to be studied as the oracle of the great truths of man's spiritual history, not rashly made the rule of exact science. The naturalist must learn that there are facts of conscience and of human life more sacred than the guesses of his theory, which he must touch with reverent hands. Indeed, I have sometimes thought if the clergy could ramble with Mr. Huxley over the glaciers, and Mr. Huxley would take an excursion into the fields of Christian history, we should have better clerical sermons, and better "lay sermons." Science will work its own cure at last. It is not probable that there will be less prayer on account of Mr. Tyndall's "prayer-gauge," so long as it is the bidding of the heart of man. It is not probable, if, as a witty doctor has lately hinted, we measure the varied genius of Homer, Spenser, or Beranger, by the slower or quicker respiration, that we shall read the "Iliad" or "Faerie Queene" with less delight. It is not probable that all our discoveries of the ape period will kindle our interest so much as the history we remember far better of the struggles and divine triumphs