contributions, or subscriptions shall be considered as applicable to such Royal Personages, nor shall they be liable to serve in any office of the Society.

8. Your Committee submit these recommendations for the approval of this General Meeting, in order to serve for their guidance in framing the Regulations and Byelaws of the Society; which they propose shall be laid before a Special General Meeting of the Members and Associates, for adoption or otherwise, early in the next session, to commence in November.

Conclusion.

9. In conclusion, your Committee beg leave to state that they have considered it undesirable to cumber this Report with the details of their various proceedings, or of the efforts they have made for the proper organization of the Institute, or the advancement of its interests. The present meeting will doubtless be anxious to listen to the Inaugural Address about to be delivered, which will form the real commencement of our public acts as an organized body. The First List of Foundation Members and Associates, enrolled within a year from the first proposal to found this Society, and before it has really done anything, may be taken as a fair augury of future progress, and as a proof that the labours of your Committee have been crowned with some measure of success.

10. Should this Report be adopted,-as your Committee venture to hope:-should their past acts be thereby approved, and their present status confirmed, as the authorized and regularly constituted Council of the Victoria Institute or Philosophical Society of Great Britain, with power to do all they may consider proper for advancing the interests of the Society, and for completing their own constitution as its Council, by adding to their numbers, choosing other or additional Vice-Presidents and Honorary Secretaries, or other officers of the Society; and generally by being authorized to manage its affairs by engaging the services of paid officers or servants, hiring apartments, and making any other arrangements they may deem advisable to promote the objects of the Society; your Committee, as the Council of the Society, will proceed with renewed zeal in this important work, and in enrolling new Vice-Patrons, Members, and Associates, on the terms already set forth.

11. For the short remainder of the present Session, your Committee only propose that a few General Papers shall be read,

as introductory to subjects which come within the province of the Society. Due notice of the titles of these papers, and of the dates upon which they are proposed to be read, will be given. The first will be "A Sketch of the Existing Relations between Science and Scripture," by George Warington, Esq., Member of Council, and will be read on the evening of the 4th of June. Ladies will be admissible at the reading of these General Papers, which will be analogous in character to the Lectures referred to in the 5th Object of the Society.

12. Finally, your Committee most earnestly trust, that all the labours of the important Society which is this day publicly inaugurated, may not only tend to promote the real advancement of a true Science of Nature among mankind; but that, in the words of the motto which your Committee have adopted for the Institute, they may always also be undertaken and prosecuted ad majorem Dei gloriam.

By order,

J. REDDIE,

Hon. Sec.

THE REV. HENRY HARE then moved the following Resolution:

That the Report of the Committee be adopted, printed and circulated; and that the Committee be now constituted as the Council of the Institute, with full power to do all that they may think proper for its management, for the ensuing year.

THORNTON HUNT, Esq., seconded the Resolution, which was carried unanimously.

THE NOBLE PRESIDENT then called upon the REV. WALTER MITCHELL, M.A. (Vice-President), who read the following Inaugural Address:

MY LORD SHAFTESBURY AND GENTLEMEN,

It is in deference to your expressed wishes, but with a profound sense of my inability to do justice to the subject on which I am called upon to address you, that I venture to inaugurate the proceedings of the VICTORIA INSTITUTE. I feel emboldened, however, by the belief that the objects of this Society are too noble and great in themselves to suffer in any degree from the weakness of their exponent.

No one who watches the expression of thought by the cultivated intellectual classes of this country, through its literature, can deny that the opinion that science and revelation are directly opposed to each other has been spreading with fearful rapidity.

Those who cultivate the dry details of science are a small minority compared with those who pursue the more alluring and pleasing paths of general literature. The majority of those who constitute the reading and thinking class of England agree to accept without much difficulty any opinion or hypothesis dignified by the name of science. They neither feel capable, nor do they care to investigate the pretension of the scientific dogma to be accepted as truth. They regard only the popular reputation of the promulgator as a man of science. "If any new proposition," says the Saturday Review, "comes with the authority of an established professor of the science, we accept it with the confidence with which a Roman Catholic might take the decision of the infallible Church." This confession of the Saturday Review may be taken as a fair expression of the practice of most of the non-scientific class of Englishmen, and also of those who are mere dilettanti cultivators of science.

If men, therefore, who have attained a certain position of rank in the scientific world enter the arena of popular literature or address the thinking world in popular lectures, and boldly maintain that science and Scripture are irreconcilable, their dicta are at once received as if they were founded upon absolute and incontestable demonstration. The foundation of the Victoria Institute is in itself a caution to the unscientific world to pause in the acceptance of such propositions without careful investigation. A body of men who have cultivated, some or other of them, nearly every branch of human knowledge which goes under the vague term of science, have here united themselves in the assertion that, so far as they have investigated the questions of philosophy and science, they have not found the principles of philosophy, or the laws and facts of science, presenting any real discordance with the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture. They go, however, a step further. They are students, both of the book of Nature as displayed in the works of the Creator, and also of that book which they believe to be a revelation of the highest truths by that same Creator to His creature, man. Their faith that these books are by the same Author has been unshaken by their pursuit of knowledge. They hold this faith upon higher principles than those of mere scientific demonstration or mere philosophical induction. They are not afraid that any discord or discrepancy can really be found between true philosophy or sound science and revelation; and therefore they are willing, nay, anxious, to investigate, with care and with that love of truth which lies at the root of their religious principles, all the objections that are urged, either as philosophical or scientific, against the Bible.

Here, however, our opponents may meet us with the objection that we are not free to enter into an unprejudiced discussion of these questions; that we are already pledged to the issue; that we approach the questions debated as advocates rather than calm and dispassionate judges; and, to a certain extent, I am willing to accept this issue. We are not prepared to abandon our faith as Christians; we do not believe that it is necessary to assume the position of Deists, or, as the most advanced advocates of freedom of thought would have us, assume the position of Atheists, in order to discuss calmly and dispassionately the problems of philosophy or the laws and phenomena of the world of sense. As Christians, as honest believers in the Bible as a record of revealed truth, we know that, in the history both of modern philosophy and modern science, avowed Christians have taken no mean or insignificant place. I will go further, and say, that Christians have held the highest place as discoverers of the laws of nature, interpreters of the phenomena of nature, and careful and honest observers of those facts upon which science is based.

We have derived our faith in revealed religion neither from cold philosophical thought nor from the feeble inductions of science, but from the highest source of all truth the revelation of God to mankind. We regard this faith as His gift, the gift of the Spirit of Truth; and, when we know how distinguished Christians, who have held and do hold this faith, have been in the paths of philosophy and science, we ask why we should not investigate the pretensions of modern philosophers and modern professors of science when they call upon us, as lovers of truth, to abandon our faith. We believe that our honest investigations of these objections will tend to strengthen the faith of those who have not the time or do not possess the necessary scientific education to investigate such questions for themselves.

If asked why the Victoria Institute should be founded for such investigations, I think I could give a very sufficient answer from my own experience. I know no other society or institution where such subjects could be discussed.

A purely theological society would not feel competent to entertain the scientific side of the discussion. A purely scientific society would repudiate the theological aspect. Not long ago I had to address a theological meeting, composed entirely of clergymen, on the very subject of the supposed opposition between science and revelation. As a cultivator of some branches of science, I pointed out that the supposed facts on which the opposition was founded were no facts at all; that they were crude hypotheses, raised without proof and

without demonstration to the rank of natural laws; that a host of facts, many of which I mentioned, were directly opposed to them; that some alleged facts I could demonstrate by plain arithmetic, to go no higher in mathematics, to be false. And how was I met by my rationalistic opponents? That they were incompetent, from their ignorance of science, to enter at all into the scientific view of the question. They regarded authority rather than discussion from abstract principles or the facts and phenomena of nature. That some whom they esteemed as scientific authorities differed from me, and therefore I was told that I must discuss the science of the question, even where science and revelation were supposed to come into collision with each other, before a purely scientific body. These men were in a minority; but, if such a minority could be found among a small body of theologians, I think I could adduce no stronger evidence of the want of such an institution as that we are now inaugurating.

The supposed opposition between science and revelation may be divided into two great divisions,-an opposition of principles; an opposition of facts. This controversy is an old one, and has already been well fought out in the literature of this country. In its old phase this opposition was so completely answered by the advocates of revelation that the controversy for the time ceased with all but the avowed sceptic and infidel. With the progress of science, and metaphysical rather than physical discussion, the old controversy has been revived under a somewhat different aspect; though in reality its true character is scarcely, if at all, altered.

Philosophical principles and assumed facts of new sciences are now once more set in formidable array against the claims of revelation to the acceptance of a well-educated or rational man. The principle of modern rationalism which has been thought by some so destructive to the claims of revelation in the written Word of God, has been imported, as an accepted principle and law of truth, into the realms of purely physical science. A false principle, borrowed as if an accepted truth from science by the purely literary man, after doing its utmost work of destruction in the theological world, has been imported back as if unquestionable into the realms of science.

If I am asked what I mean by this principle of socalled rationalism, I will adopt a definition of one of its advocates. "It is the supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law carries with it as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous." Now, here we have an old objection in a new dress. We have here an assumption that the progress of modern science