and angrily to denounce the new conceptions of Divine existence which they are introducing! Religion cannot aim a blow at Science without wounding herself. If Religion forbids us to trust God's own handwriting on the tablets of Nature, how can she expect the world to accept the revelations which have come to us in each case through the distorting medium of human faculties? If Religion forbids us to trust the original documents which are open to every one's inspection, how can she expect us to receive the record which has descended to us down a long line of transmissions, transcriptions, and translations, at the hands of fallible men? If Religion refuses to receive the corrections of Science, and repulses her proffered assistance, how can she escape the pitfalls of superstition, how can she rise to the intellectual heights where she can see the divine truths with unobstructed vision?

For Faith, though she be the great heaven-climber, climbs with but half-open eye, in only a twilight light. The pure and exalted spiritual truths which Religion enjoys to-day were by no means the original immediate perception of an infallible faith-faculty, nor the primæval possession of a privileged recipient, but they have been attained only by the efforts of thousands of generations who have successively "felt after God if haply they might find him;" and thus groping, straining their in ́tellectual eyes, have so refined and purged the inward sense that the ever-present reality has become clearly perceptible. Not by a single bound has Religion sprung to the mount of vision, but step by step she has patiently

toiled upward. "The glimmering wonder of original fetichism; the wider feeling expressed in Nature-worship of an omnipresent secret of power; the higher consciousness breaking forth in historical, prophetic religions, of the connection between this reverence for the Supreme Majesty and all loyalty of soul," not only has each of these been a phase through which Religion has had to pass, but the transition from one to the other has been by numberless gradations; and it has been because of the criticisms and discoveries of Science, more than anything else, that this ascent has been made. It is only as the tides of wider knowledge have worn away terrace after terrace of the alluvium of superstition, that Religion has mounted to the loftier and immovable rocks of fundamental truths. It is only as physical inquiry, with iconoclastic hammer, has broken idol after idol, that Faith has transferred her embrace to the purer objects worthy of worship. And as Religion is indebted to Science for this progress of the past, so for the future it is only by the same aid that she can expect further advancement. Instead of turning to Science the cold shoulder, Faith should not only welcome, but invite her co-operation.

THE CLAIM OF SCIENCE TO POSSESS EXCLUSIVE KNOWLEDGE AND RIGHTFUL SUPREMACY.-THE FAITHS OF

SCIENCE.-ITS

GROUNDS AND METHODS SIMILAR TO

THOSE OF RELIGION.

THE time, however, has gone by for Science needing much help against Religion. At the present day the physicists can very well take care of themselves against the religious. The religious world, to a considerable extent, is learning to lower its pretensions. The old claims of the exclusive possession of an absolute knowledge, and of a rightful supremacy in all matters of belief, are fast dropping away. Science, by the most intelligent in the religious world, is coming to be recognized, not as a subordinate, but as an independent power; not as a hostile rebel, but as a friend and fellow-labourer. But, unfortunately, as the one side is dropping its dogmatism, the other side seems to be picking it up and clothing itself with it. The infallibility now to be feared is not so much that of the pontiff, who fulminates his excommunications from the Vatican, as that of the scientific popes, who essay, from professors' chairs, to lay down the precise boundaries within which Belief may now walk. The oracle that now claims an

exclusive insight and certainty, that looks upon other avenues to truth with contempt and disbelief; that would absorb, if it could, all other authority in its own, is not so much Religion as Science.

Look, for example, at the very word science. At the present day it is commonly employed in reference to physical knowledge. Such an expression as the "science of religion," or the "science of God," strikes us as unusual. It seems to involve a figurative extension of the word beyond its proper sphere. Yet, until a hundred or two hundred years ago, science denoted merely knowledge in general, or, in a more special sense, systematized knowledge of any kind. Shakespeare speaks of " music, mathematics, and other sciences." In the middle ages, the science par excellence—which would have been supposed to be referred to, if the general word was used for some particular but unspecified branch of knowledge -was the science of theology. To express the science of Nature it would have been necessary to join with it some qualifying adjunct.

The change in the use of the word indicates a great revolution in thought. It is an interesting historical witness to the wonderful achievements of physical investigation, and to the lofty claims that it makes at the present day. "I alone," modern Science tacitly says, by the very name by which it designates itself, "I alone am scientia-real knowledge; all else is more or less guess-work."

And this is not merely a tacit assumption, an unconscious arrogance, but a claim which men of science

nowadays are very fond of publicly proclaiming. The certainty of science is contrasted with the uncertainty of other branches of pretended knowledge, especially with that of religion. Science, it is declared, is most careful in its requirements of proof before it gives credence, Religion most careless. Science carefully examines Nature and life to see what things really are, builds up its laws by an inductive accumulation of fact upon fact, and then demands that every generalization be experimentally verified before it is accepted as true. Religion, on the other hand, with pious credulity, mounts any vaulting hypothesis that the Church may order her to ride, leaps heroically upon it, up mist-formed high-priori roads, toward the highest heaven, and, as she whirls through the dizzy heights, lets down link after link of deduction with as much confidence as if the chain were fastened to some immovable support. Auguste Comte classes religion with metaphysics, as but "products of the world's crude infancy." "Science," says the great positive philosopher, "conducts God with honour to its frontiers, thanking him for his provisional services." Huxley presents against Religion the charge that "with her the belief in a proposition, because authority tells you it is true, or because you wish to believe it, which is a high crime and misdemeanour when the subjectmatter of reason is of one kind, becomes under the alias of faith the greatest of all virtues when the subjectmatter of reason is of another kind;" and he would enforce upon us the wise advice, as he calls it, of Hume: "If we take in hand any volume of divinity or school