The consequent crop of cosmic speculation has been of the most varied and extensive kind, ranging from theories as to the origin of species to theories as to the origin of the universe. Mr. Darwin, admirable in his caution, has held strictly to the scientific proofs of his, as compared with later developments, modest thesis. hardly ever adventuring into the exhausting atmosphere of pure speculation. Mr. Spencer, bolder and more speculative, has essayed the ambitious task of building a science of the universe on a philosophy of the Unknowable. Professor Haeckel, of Jena, has, in a work now translated, remarkable for its lucid eloquence, terse and intelligible exposition, easy and masterful movement of thought, expounded a system of the most thoroughgoing Monism, a "Natural History of Creation," which, as to the Becoming, alike of inorganic and organic nature, is meant to leave no room for a Creator. Professor Tyndall's presidential address is memorable enough, were it only as an instance of sweet simplicity in things historical, and the most highflying metaphysics disguised in scientific terms. Recently there has come from the other side of the Atlantic a "Cosmic Philosophy," which, while built on Mr. Spencer's, still more happily illustrates the aversion of our latest scientific speculation to Positivism. If the Becom

* "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," by John Fiske, M.A., LL.B., -an admirable, though hardly a compendious, exposition of the philosophy of evolution.

E

ing of the universe is to be explained, the search into causes must be held not only possible, but necessary.

In these discussions, which touch its very being, Theism has a right to take part. If it and science stand opposed on many points, they ought to agree in their common love of truth and as common desire to find and confess it. We have come from a fresh point and along new lines face to face with the deepest questions, not simply of our, but of all time, and our common duty is to read as best we can the everlasting riddle. Theism has surely claims enough, even in the changed aspects old questions wear, to entitle it to a fair and patient hearing. But that is a thing hard to get. Our present controversies are cursed by our past. The quest after truth often turns into a hunt after fruitless and provoking error. Eminence ought to be above the meanness of mediocrity, science superior to the tactics of the secularist lecturer or pamphleteer. Distinguished scientists should leave it to obscurer men to make points against theology and the churches. But certain of them, though moving, as they believe, to victory, are ungenerous enough to confuse the battle by raising the ghosts of the dead, to exasperate the sons by fighting them with the bones of their fathers. They seldom forget that Rome burnt Bruno and tortured Galileo, that the Geneva Calvin ruled sent Servetus to the stake, and the synagogue of Amsterdam expelled and cursed Spinoza. They seldom remember that science has known, still knows, how to persecute, that cul

tured and pagan Athens could be as merciless to free inquiry and thought as Christian and Catholic Rome. If they become historians, they are eloquent over the "intellectual immobility" of the middle ages, but silent as to its daring and subtle and even sceptical thought. They praise Copernicus and Gassendi, but fail to indicate what relation religion and the Church had to their studies. They narrate the conquests of science as if they had been victories over theology, and not over ignorance. The antiquated and false views of Nature which old divines maintained, and, because old, could not but maintain, are gravely represented as essential to religion, almost identical with it, and are no less gravely classified and exhibited as exploded religious doctrines, rather than as what they really are, exploded conceptions of nature, necessarily, indeed, interwoven with the religious as with the other thought of the time, but as form, not as matter. These points are well illustrated in a recent book, an unworthy member of a generally worthy series, which professes to represent "the Conflict of Religion and Science,"* but succeeds in representing little else than an unscientific and shallow, perverse and untruthful, conception of their historical relations. Truth can never be served, or science promoted, by factional histories or sectarian polemics. Work done under these con

*

Draper's "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," Henry S. King and Co., 1875, one of the international scientific series, though one can hardly see what right it has to be there.

ditions can never be done well. They tend to create and maintain a state of feud, with the jealousies and retaliations that interfere with honest husbandry, and raise on either side the borderland moss-troopers, not always careful whose cattle they lift or what happens to their owners.

This one-sided and ungenerous method of using the past against the present needs to be explicitly censured. It is, at best, but a caricature of the truth, not too sympathetically done, good, perhaps, as a caricature, but bad as a likeness. Theism has served science, and its services ought to be acknowledged. They might, indeed, be proved to be so many as to be more than the utmost generosity of speech. and action could now repay. The belief that God created the world helped to make science religious, in the noblest sense, in her winsome and wondering childhood, reverent before Nature, as if it were the outer court of the great Temple, through which wandered veiled but beautiful light, the shadow of the God whose seat was the Holy of Holies. Inquiry was worship. To admire the work was to adore the Worker. To extend the knowledge of Nature was to enlarge the knowledge of God. The Moorish philosophers were devout Theists, religiously searched for more adequate modes of expressing the inexpressible greatness, the unresting activity, the unsearchable wisdom of Allah. Copernicus was as famous for his piety as for his genius, consecrated himself and his means to three services that were to him as one-God, man, and science.

The belief that the universe had been built, as it were, to divine music, and manifested divine purpose and action everywhere, in the minutest structures as in the splendid and harmonious whole, made the pious Kepler imagine, with Plato, that the Creator had geometrized, and that he, in discovering the laws of the creation, was but thinking the thoughts of God after Him. Bacon, too, the father of the modern Inductive Philosophy, not only thought Theology the crown and the queenliest of the sciences, but found his highest satisfaction in offering his great work as a sacrifice to the glory of the Immortal God. Galileo, victim of the Inquisition as he was, held that to despise his science was to despise "the Holy Scriptures, which teach us that the glory and greatness of Almighty God are admirably discerned in all His works, and divinely read in the open book of heaven." Newton thought every step in the knowledge of Nature a step nearer to the knowledge of God, and believed that the better we understood the systems, celestial and terrestrial, the more would " we admire Him on account of His perfections, venerate and worship Him on account of His government." To quote indeed every name illustrative of our position were to cite almost all the fathers of modern science. So far were they from thinking, like certain of their sons, that God was the last enemy to be destroyed, and religion a force that must not be "permitted to intrude on the region of knowledge," that they rather