tory of extinct species, physical investigators have fancied that Bacon and the modern instrument-makers have supplied them with the keys of universal knowledge, and with unhesitating confidence have pronounced from their scientific platforms just what the world must believe about divine personality, goodness, spiritual existence, and such other profound problems as the great Christian thinkers have spent their lives in finding and expounding the best solutions of. It is not strange if the religious world should be considerably amazed, and somewhat indignant, at the crude structures which have resulted. when these scientific Babel-builders, taking atom and molecule for their only architectural materials, have essayed to push up their materialistic towers into the very heaven.

Now, this ignorance of themselves and each other has, and must, as long as it lasts, work evil to both religion and science. Unacquainted with the strength of each other's positions, they are prone to treat each other with indifference or contempt. Knowing not their own proper domain, or that of the other, they will be likely to encroach upon territory that is not their own, or consider themselves invaded or insulted without cause. The sight of blunders and bungles committed in these foreign excursions, tends to destroy their authority and respect for their knowledge in their own home-province. "Nothing leads thinking young men of scientific tendencies," says Prof. Trowbridge, "to neglect church-going more

than wrong-headed and illogical deductions from science by their pastors." And, similarly, I may add, "nothing leads Christians to dislike and ignore scientific teaching more than the gross misrepresentations of pure religion too often given by scientific lecturers." It is those who are most ignorant of modern investigations, and most unfitted by their whole education to discern their bearing, who most freely launch the theological thunder-bolts at them, as impious and godless. And it is those who know least of the essence of religion and the grounds on which it is based, who sneer at them as old wives' fables, unworthy the serious consideration of any savant. Every such uncalled-for attack on one side or the other widens the breach between them. Could each know the other more thoroughly, most of this, I believe, might be escaped. As one of our American preachers said recently in an address to medical students, "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."

1

Ignorance of themselves and each other is, then, the first and main cause of that antagonism between science and religion which, though it can have no de jure reign, has yet had an undeniable de facto

1 Delivered to the graduating class of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1875, by Rev. E. A. Washburn, D. D.

existence.

From this main cause there have flowed two subordinate ones:

1. A confounding of both religion and science with other things.

2. The claiming by each of exclusive knowledge, and, in consequence of it, a supremacy over the other.

These must be examined somewhat in detail.

First, ignorance of the true nature of religion and science has led to confounding them with other things. All science, certainly, does not deserve the sneering appellation which some clergymen are fond of employing-of "science falsely so called." But not a few things that pass for science have no real claim to the title. They are but metaphysical fallacies, probable hypotheses, or conjectures spawned in the fertile fancy of scientific dabblers, embraced by anti-religious prejudice, and wind-blown by conceit and love of sensation into every puddle of superficial Nature-knowledge.1

So it is also with religion. It is not all falsehood and masquerade; nevertheless, there is much, popularly set down as religion, which is no more religion than it is science. Now it has been bound up with one system, now with another. When

1 "There is a great deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading philosophy ('oppositions of science falsely so called ') abroad in the world at the present day."—(Dr. Carpenter's Address at Brighton, in 1872, as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.)

Christianity first raised its head, it was told that polytheism alone was religion. When Protestantism first ventured to send Christians directly and personally to the Bible and their own private judg ment, religion, it was declared, meant simply the Roman Church, and all else was infidelity. In Augustine's day, Christianity was made inseparable from the doctrines of predestination and fatalism. In Abélard's time it was bound up with the metaphysics of realism; in Roger Bacon's, with the philosophy of Aristotle; in the days of Vesalius, with the medical treatises of Galen; in the lifetime of Galileo, with the astronomy of Ptolemy. To-day it is the orthodoxy of the Council of Trent or the Westminster Catechism that is cemented to religion, and any attack on the one is assumed to be undermining the very foundations of faith and morals.

Now, it is this false science, and this false religion-this confounding of other things, different in character, with these two great factors of human welfare (a confusion the more readily occurring because of the sanction that both the scientific and the religious worlds have given to it), that has led to the belief that there is a natural antagonism between physical inquiry and spiritual faith. These other powers may be natural opponents to Science, or natural opponents to Religion, or natural opponents to each other, and, walking in the guise of Science and Religion, readily give the appear

ance of a continual and rightful conflict between them.

There are metaphysical doctrines, for example, that are inimical to the very existence of religion; and these metaphysical doctrines may happen to be adopted by certain scientific authorities, become current in scientific circles, and be expounded as if they were scientific truths. Auguste Comte, for instance, laid it down as the characteristic of the advance of knowledge from the Theological and Metaphysical stage to the Positive or truly Scientific stage, that it should be recognized that only phenomena, their coexistences and sequences, were knowable; and Causes, especially the First Cause, beyond the possibility of our knowledge. Herbert Spencer, Prof. Tyndall, Prof. Huxley, and many other popular scientific authorities have, again and again, in scientific lectures and treatises, taken occasion to lay it down as one of the fixed things which the physical inquirer should recognize and respect, that the Supreme Reality is utterly unknowable. Were these, indeed, truths of science, then Religion would have no enemy more to be dreaded; for, if the God whom she has worshiped and prayed to, and taken as her lawgiver, and believed that she has held communion with, is absolutely unknowable—then, indeed, no place is left for her on the earth. Not "worship, mainly of the silent sort," as Prof. Huxley advises, but the absolute suppression of every worshiping instinct and reverent thought, becomes