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lives, the perfect holiness, the entire self-renunciation which can spring from no other source than devotion to a God perfect in His own holiness, and yet condescending to identify Himself with His creatures, by the sacrifice of Himself for their sake. The teaching of these great and wise men tends, as we have seen, to establish the fundamental truth that there is a right and wrong in morals, which no perversity of scepticism can annihilate. It bears witness to the yearnings of the soul for something external to itself, and superior to itself, to confirm, purify, and elevate this implicit sense of duty. It pourtrays to itself, dimly indeed, faintly, and imperfectly, such a Being as the incarnate Saviour for the only worthy object of its reverence and love. Like a king on his deathbed, it points with faltering hand to the successor who shall ascend the vacant throne; or rather, in the full glory of its meridian, it resigns its crown and sceptre to the rightful Lord of Humanity, whose kingdom shall have no end.'

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ART. V.-The Reign of Law. By the DUKE of ARGYLL. Second Edition. London: Alexander Strahan. 1867.

WHY should Science and Religion be at war? Why should philosophers and theologians be supposed to dwell in hostile camps Why should it be so often taken for granted that between the natural and the supernatural there must be an irreconcilable antagonism; and so give excuse to reckless reasoners to deduce from this assumption the corollary, that belief in the supernatural is a superstition fast fading away with the night of ignorance, and that knowledge of the natural is the only true light which shall ultimately take possession of the intellectual firmament? These questions, or questions such as these, are asked and answered, and asked again in our day, with, it must be confessed, more frequency than satisfaction. And

yet there is a solution of them which requires no very abstruse investigation to reach. The history of religion and the history of science each contributes its share, and their joint contributions furnish a complete answer. That truth is both everlasting and self-consistent is a statement which insults our understandings by offering them a truism; nevertheless, the occasion of all the conflicts between theology and philosophy is the ignorance, or at least the oblivion, of this truism. The language of the learned and the wise is never more exalted and self-sufficient than when it meets inquirers, and repels objectors, by a lofty reference to abstract principles; but this fondness for abstraction, as for a dignified retreat in which may always be found repose from troublesome questions, has not had that good effect upon those who entertain it which we have a right to look for. The one thing which it would have been of priceless value if the learned and wise had always been careful to remember in the abstract, is truth itself. This they have a most provoking tendency to regard only in the concrete; and the consequence is, that the atmosphere of controversy rings with cries of scientific truths on the one hand, and of religious truths on the other, as though they were marshalled in battle array, and the din of the conflict drives the bystander to ask more in despair than in hope, "What is truth?"

The effect of this exclusive attention to truth in the concrete is to bring about a schism in truth itself, to divide truth against itself, to destroy the unity of truth. Of course, this effect is only wrought in appearance, and with respect to the oppositions

of human views of truth. For truth, in reality, is indivisible; its unity is indestructible, as is the unity of God, of Whose essence it is-as is the unity of creation, the universe,-which is its sphere of existence-as is the unity of the Church, which is its spiritual expression. In short, by constantly viewing truth in its concrete forms, men acquire the same sort of idea of its nature as they would entertain of light, if its rays were only received upon their visual organs through the medium of a prism. In the latter case they would connect in inseparable association the idea of light with the number and variety of the prismatic tints; light would be to them a set of colours, it would not be what it really is, colourless; they would always think of it in its variety, never in its unity. So in like manner truth becomes to men's minds a series of truths more or less extensive according to the power and culture of their intellects, but still a series of separate truths always viewed in separation, never in unity. But the case is worse with truth than we can imagine it to be with light. For the eye is a perfect organ and does see the whole of light, though we may conceive of its being obliged to receive its rays, not directly, but through a prismatic medium: the eye, in a word, would see every colour of which light consists. But the human mind is not a perfect organ. It not only destroys the unity of truth by regarding it only in its concrete forms, but it destroys its fulness by omitting from its observation portions of the truth. Thus we have theologians, on the one side, advancing the truths of religion as the only truths they will recognize, and philosophers, on the other side, preferring the truths of science as the only truths they can acknowledge.

The reason for this antagonism between these two concrete forms of truth,-the theological and the scientific,-is to be sought, it would seem, in the fact that religion preceded science by an immense period of time in the history of human knowledge. The effect of this separation in time was two-fold. The minds most deeply imbued with religious ideas, and most fully devoted to their maintenance and vindication, looked with angry suspicion upon science whenever it touched, even in the slightest way, the domain which they believed to be exclusively their own; and repelled its advances as they would those of a trespasser upon their ancient rights and privileges in the region of thought. The favourers of science, on the other hand, were not free from

1 Of course the writer is not ignorant of the fact that there occurs, in some individuals, a defect of vision called colour-blindness, and that this peculiarity is only known to refer to the red ray in the pencil of light. If the reader be so inclined, he may adopt this physical phenomenon, and use it to point a moral in analogy with the illustration which it has been attempted to draw from the human eye as a perfect organ of sight.

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the faults which commonly attach to the explorers of new paths, the propounders of new ideas, the discoverers of new facts; they were arrogant, self-confident, and wanting in proper respect for men and principles who had possession of the field of knowledge long before them. The bias of the one party was to regard truth as something long since known, that of the other to consider it as something yet to be discovered. In the opinion of the one the charm of truth was its antiquity: in the opinion of the other its peculiar fascination was its novelty. These conflicting tendencies pushed their respective partisans into the opposite extremes of irrational assertion. To the one all that was old was true; to the other whatsoever was true must be new: which two propositions express the greatest amount of absurdity in the most concise terms; for they contradict, though in exactly opposite ways, the verity that truth is from everlasting as well as to everlasting, never old and never new. This view of the attitude which theologians and philosophers have assumed towards each other, is not a mere fanciful picture. The tone of their writings, the allusions which the one party makes to the opinions and teaching of the other, bear witness to its reality. The open defiance of their respective champions does not more surely mark the origin of the hostility than do the well-meant, but little successful attempts at compromise which have been made by the peacemakers who have from time to time gone forth from either side. The theologico-scientific literature which has grown up around geology, bears upon its face the evidence of the fact that theology and physical science are separated by the distance of ages as to the times of their access to the human mind; and, moreover, it points, by the whole tenor of its reasonings, to that fact as the reason for the hostility which it is intended to allay.

A glance at the scheme and conduct of the warfare between theology and science may help us to understand its nature and its probable issues. The theologian claims to possess truths by revelation: the man of science boasts that he has acquired truth by discovery. They are both right in their respective claims; they are both wrong in their respective denials of each other's claims; and the effect is, that on the surface these two claims. have the appearance of being irreconcilable, an appearance which has been given to them by the peculiarly prejudiced state of mind of both parties. We say emphatically that this appearance of irreconcilableness has been given, and we assert that it proceeds from the influence of prejudice, because the day will assuredly arrive, and even now has begun to dawn, when intelligent minds will be struck with amazement that hostility so decided upon grounds so untenable could have been maintained for so long, and with such vigour. The unity and the univer-

sality of truth, which is the deeply cherished conviction of all enlightened minds, will, after it has dwelt long enough in human intelligence to germinate and spring up, and bear its precious and abundant fruit, effect such a change in the mutual bearings of theology and science that men will read with curiosity of their contests, and only marvel that it should have been possible to excite a strife which now it seems almost hopeless to quell. They will ask with astonishment, Surely is not the belief in truth, and the love of it, sufficiently powerful to keep men, who investigate its various forms, patient under the hardships of the pursuit, and forbearing towards their fellow-inquirers? Truth comes to man from God in various blessed forms. It descends upon him as an endowment straight from heaven, and reaches his soul through the "still, small voice" of the Holy Spirit thus he receives it by revelation. It also waits for him by the wayside of the laborious paths of science, and rewards his patient toil with the knowledge and the service of Nature, whom he has learnt to subdue; and thus he receives it through discovery.

But there is another fact, the existence of which is a fruitful source of evil, but will come in time to be looked upon with wonder as a special monstrosity among the many monstrous growths which have sprung from ignorance. That ethics and physical science have real and proper bearings upon each other, no one who knows anything of either will deny; but the perverseness of men who have taken part in the warfare between theology and science has forced them into an unnatural connexion which ought to be a subject of unfeigned astonishment, as well as of regret. Scientific departure from truth is error, moral departure from truth is falsehood; this needs only to be stated to be at once acknowledged; and yet this obvious distinction has been, and even now is, repeatedly lost sight of by angry disputants on either side: one party alleges an error, the other replies as though he were meeting a charge of falsehood. It would be tedious to our readers to conduct them over the field of controversy, and point out the numerous examples of this confusion of ideas. When the history of the war between theology and science comes to be written, the historian will find a large

1 One may, perhaps, be permitted to refer in a note to an instance of this confusion occurring in the writings of so excellent a man as Hugh Miller. He says, that though theologians have at various times striven hard to pledge it [the Bible] to false science, geographical, astronomical, and geological, it has been pledged by its Divine Author to no falsehood whatever.' (Testimony of the 'Rocks,' p. 132.) The impropriety of using the term 'falsehood' in such a connexion must surely be patent to every calm and unbiassed mind. But it is only one of a thousand instances in the works of this and other eminent writers, of the heat of temper generated by the introduction of ethical language into discussions purely scientific.

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