fore it is the citadel of Christianity, rather than her outposts, that needs to be defended. The wise Christian will turn his arms from these petty skirmishes about tapers and genuflexions, millinery of priests and wording of creeds, the sense of Hebrew numerals and the supernatural efficacy of drops of water, to ward off the blows of a nearer enemy-an invader who is pushing his way already with uplifted battle-axe into the Holy of Holies.

In former assaults upon religion, it was cynics, and worldlings, and doubters of every thing, who led the attack. Jest and jibe, scoff and sneer, were the favorite weapons of attack. Believers had only to stand firm in courage and patience on the unassailed foundations of their faith, and the strong currents of man's instinctive yearnings would before long turn the tide of popular opinion the other way, and bring the Church safely through its peril. Today, however, the objections presented against religion are brought forward in no frivolous spirit, from no mere feverish mental excitability or love of innovation, but in the sincerity of an earnest loyalty to truth, out of a serious desire to get at the reality of things, through all illusions and at all risks. It is not ridicule, but reason, that leads the assault. The weapons are not the clown's bells and grinning mask, but the astronomer's spectroscope, the biologist's flask. The scales in which Christianity would now be tested are not those of universal skepticism, but of cautious, critical weighing of historic evi

dence and scientific proof. This method, of course, is a slower one than that of the French encyclopedists. Religion has not to fear that any such rapid and radical revolution can now occur in the belief of Christendom as was wrought in France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But it is a much more dangerous course to its adversary. The ground it gains it keeps. Like an Alpine glacier, its slow, gigantic plane grinds to powder the most flinty obstructions, and never loses a foot of ground that it has once taken. For four hundred years Science has driven the Church from post to post. The sphericity or the flatness of the earth, the mobility or stationariness of the globe, the six days' creation, the six thousand years' age of the world and of man, the universal deluge-these all have been battle-fields where the scientist and the ecclesiastic have met in conflict, and in every engagement it has been the ecclesiastic that has been worsted, and the scientist that has been victorious. The result is, that science to-day holds such a position that the belief of the next century may be said to lie in its hands. The facts that its distinguished savans establish to-day, in six months will be read in every newspaper and magazine in the civilized world; in ten years will be incorporated in our school-books, and planted in the forming minds of our children; in thirty years will be the creed of every educated man; and, before a century has passed, will be the universal belief of all classes. If Christianity cannot harmonize

herself with science, it is much to be feared that the fate of the Ptolemaic system of the universe will, at no very distant period, be hers; at least, no one can doubt that the future of Religion would be vastly more sure and prosperous if she could make science an ally instead of a rival.

Nor for science, either, is it a matter of indifference what its relation toward religion is. While science stands, or is believed to stand, in an attitude of hostility to religion, it carries an unnecessary burden, which impedes no little its progress. The antagonism, whether it be real or only supposed, weakens its power and circumscribes its sphere of influence. It diverts its attention from its proper work to uncalled-for polemics. It vitiates the impartiality of judgment and equanimity of temperament which are required of it. Moreover, it is only, I venture to say, when science can gain the inspiration of the religious spirit, and be led forward and upward by such a conviction as animated Kepler, that, in tracing out the laws of Nature, he was thinking God's thoughts after him—it is only when pursued in this mood, I believe, that science can do its best work.

To bring, then, these two poles of modern thought into harmonious relations with each other, is a work of prime importance. On it depend the integrity and coördination of those two factors of man's higher existence the aspirations of his soul and the perceptions of his intellect for whose development all

other things are but instrumentalities. It is one of those questions that cannot be discussed too much. It may be worn threadbare, but it cannot be shoved out of sight. The multitude of writings and publications concerning it but show how profound and universal is the interest in it. It is because of this interest that I venture to contribute a few thoughts, designed, if possible, to clear up some of the complications and remove some of the oppositions of the controversy. My purpose is not, I wish it to be únderstood, to smooth over any real difficulties, to bridge any natural hiatuses, or to accommodate or compromise any inherent antagonisms. Such work is always, I believe, useless, if not mischievous. Nor is it to do, what so many have essayed, to show detailed coincidences or particular correspondences between the present results of science and the testimony of the Scriptures; to demonstrate how the six days of creation answer to the epochs of modern geology; to exhibit the agreement of ethnography with mankind's descent from a single couple; to illustrate by modern hygiene the wisdom of the Levitical regulations; or to disclose, in expressions of Job, or David, or Isaiah, anticipations of modern discoveries. A flexile and ingenious interpreter, not over-scrupulous about twisting words and forcing facts, can always do this. As Prof. Huxley has said, "One never knows what exegetic ingenuity may make of the original Hebrew." In that grand storehouse of thought and imagination, that vener

able encyclopædia of all the poetry, science, history, and philosophy, in which the Jewish mind flowered under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, in that Bible whose original and proper name, we should always remember, is, the Books (Ta Biẞa), not the Book-in that grand storehouse it is always possible to find plenty of parallels, more or less strong, for almost every conceivable notion. Each past

generation has found there its favorite theories: in Tertullian's age, the materiality of the soul; in Augustine's, the flatness of the earth; in the time of the schoolmen, the Aristotelian philosophy: fifty years ago, the cataclysmal systems of geology, the Cuvierian distinction of species, the creation from the dust and primitive enlightenment of man by direct exertion of supernatural power; to-day, it is but little more difficult to find in the same pages authority or allowance for the nebular hypothesis, the evolution theory, and the savage if not animal origin of civilized man;' to-morrow, again, the same method of interpretation may show the coincidence of the Scriptures with whatever newer discovery Science may have made, or imagined that she has made. The

The Rev. Mr. Mahin, for instance, in a communication to THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, p. 487, August, 1875, says: "Even the modern doctrine of evolution-Darwinism, if you please-is as nearly taught in the first chapter of Genesis as in the revelations of modern science; and spontaneous generation seems to appear on the very face of the statements of Moses as therein recorded. Read verses 20 and 24: And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly,' etc. 'And God said, Let the earth bring forth,' etc."