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 RELIGION AND SCIENCE 
 
 ^tuo i^apers 
 
 READ AT THE 
 
 ANNUAL MEETINGS OF THE CHURCH CONGRESS 
 
 IN 1878 AND 1879 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. H. W. WATKINS, M.A. Lond. et Gxon. 
 
 SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD; HONORARY FELLOW AND PROFESSOR OF LOGIC 
 
 AND METAPHYSICS IN KING's COLLEGE, LONDON } EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO 
 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF DURHAM ; 
 
 AND WARDEN OF ST. AUGUSTINE'S COLLEGE, CANTERBURY 
 
 RIVINGTONS 
 WATERLOO PLACE, LONDON 
 0lnatJa(cn Street, (!^)ifoitl ; Cn'uiti) Street, CambiitJgr 
 
 MDCCCLXXIX
 
 PREFATORY NOTICE 
 
 Some who heard these papers wish to have them in a form 
 more permanent than the columns of a newspaper, more con- 
 venient than the pages of an official Report. Others, whose 
 judgment I am bound to respect, have thought that they might 
 be of use to ordinary readers, who have neither time nor power 
 to consult abstruse volumes. I am well aware that papers on 
 these subjects written for a mixed audience, and to be read 
 in twenty minutes, can be of little value ; but the interests here 
 involved are supreme, and no man has a right to withhold that 
 which may be of any value to any mind. 
 
 H. W. W.
 
 s^oDern Doubts anr» Difficulties in IRclation to 
 JRetiealeD IReligion 
 
 Read at the Sheffield Meeting, October i, 1878. 
 
 FROM the day on which I accepted the invitation of the 
 committee to offer to this Congress some remarks on 
 " Modern Doubts and Difficulties in Relation to Revealed 
 Religion," I have taken every opportunity which presented 
 itself of inquiring, from persons most likely to know, what these 
 modern doubts and difficulties are. The result of my inquiries 
 — and I say it with serious earnestness — is that I know of none. 
 That there are doubts in the minds of many thinkers with 
 regard to revealed truth ; that there are difficulties in the path 
 which intelligent faith must tread ; that these doubts are with 
 something of the positiveness, and with something also of the 
 shallowness of cjr own day, asserted as though they were 
 certainties ; that these difficulties are too often with a culpable 
 thoughtlessness placed as stumblingblocks in the way of the soul 
 seeking for its God — all this I know, as every man must know 
 whose experience has brought him into contact with any con- 
 siderable portion of the thought-currents which are flowing 
 around and beneath us. But that these doubts and difficulties 
 are in themselves essentially modern ; that they are anything 
 more than the ghosts of foes slain by our forefathers, taking 
 shape in modern scientific terms ; that they are in reality 
 anything more than the doubts and difficulties which in every 
 age have come to the mind trying to think out the problem 
 of its existence — this I do not know ; and this I know the less 
 the more I inquire into the present and the past. 
 
 I shall not, therefore, seek in your presence to slay the 
 ofttimes slain. Our armoury is abundantly stocked with 
 
 A 2
 
 4 Religion and Science, 
 
 weapons for doing so, and is accessible to us all. Nor shall I 
 seek to deal with the many forms in which old difficulties are 
 now clothing themselves. I cannot, indeed, claim to be a child 
 of the higher criticism, or to have any such wide and accurate 
 knowledge of the latest scientific investigations as to warrant 
 my discussing them. There are those ^ to follow me who have ; 
 and so far as they bear upon the present question I doubt not 
 that they will be fully and justly dealt with. But my own 
 experience leads me to think that the so-called scientific dif- 
 ficulties are not those which now press on men most heavily. 
 The time has passed when it was possible to send a shock 
 through the minds of thousands of pious Christians by calling 
 attention to the fact that the Mosaic cosmogony was not 
 expressed in the technical phraseology of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury ; and men do not now feel startled, nor fear that some 
 Christian doctrine is at stake, when they hear that the Sinaitic 
 MS. has a reading varying from that of the received text. The 
 time has passed, too, if it ever really existed, when men ac- 
 cepted scientific hypotheses as final truths. The temper of 
 present thought, at least, will not bear the ascription of in- 
 fallibility even to the popes of science ; and to claim it is but 
 to bring to the front a host of Protestants, who find in the con- 
 flicting assertions of difTerent writers, or the changing opinion 
 of the same writer, proof that even material phenomena may 
 sometimes be misread, and that generalisations from them 
 may be sometimes too hastily drawn. All true thinkers are, 
 moreover, becoming impatient of the modern restriction of the 
 word " science " to inductions from these material phenomena, 
 and of the term " fact " to those things which the eye can see 
 and the hand can handle. They know that there is a science 
 of mind no less certain than that of matter, and a spiritual 
 experience not less real but more real than that which is 
 natural. They know that there are such things as hopes, and 
 fears, and feelings, and beliefs, and thoughts, and convictions ; 
 and they know that these are facts, and facts having a more 
 important bearing upon their lives than any facts of the outer 
 world. They are becoming content, therefore, to allow the 
 physical investigator to do his work and to say his say. In so 
 
 * Rev. Professor Stanley Leathes, D D. ; Rev. Robinson Thornton, D.D, ; Rev 
 Brownlow Maitland : Rev. J. B. Lowe, D.D. 
 
 ^f UlUC '
 
 Religio7i and Science, 5 
 
 far as this work is done reverently, and the results stated with 
 the humility which characterises the true student, they are 
 ready with open hand to welcome both the worker and his 
 work, and to bid him God-speed as one of the too few who are 
 taking from the ignorance of, and adding to the knowledge of, 
 the human race. But the liberty which they allow they also 
 claim ; and they reject as wholly unscientific the attempt to 
 ignore supersensible facts, and to base all knowledge upon a 
 practical denial of them. Seeking to base their own theory 
 of being upon definitely ascertained mental facts, they find as 
 the most universal fact of human life a belief in the existence of 
 a Divine Being. For our present purpose we are entitled to 
 assume this as acknowledged, but it may be convenient that the 
 assumption should be made in words which by an almost open 
 secret are known to come from two of the most eminent 
 physicists of our day. " Let us begin," say the authors of 
 The Unseen Universe^ "by stating at once that we assume, as 
 absolutely self-evident, the existence of a Deity who is the 
 Creator of all things." Now, with this fact meeting men in 
 the constitution of their own minds, in every record of the 
 human mind in the past, read in every language which has 
 crystallised past thought, found among all peoples of whom 
 present discovery has made them aware, the first question which 
 presses for solution is the relation of the thinking mind to the 
 Divine Being whom it necessarily thinks. For the believer in 
 the Christian revelation this question has been for ever settled. 
 But there are two currents of thought which have become and 
 are now becoming prominent among us, which are constantly 
 leading to a restatement of the question ; and it is in connection 
 with these that the real burden of doubts and difficulties in 
 relation to revealed religion is being felt. There is, on the one 
 side, the tendency to deny the possibility of any revelation 
 from God or any true knowledge of Him ; there is, on the other 
 side, error ranking itself, as always, on the extremes of truth — 
 the tendency to regard Christianity as one among many revela- 
 tions, more perfect indeed than many which have preceded it, 
 less perfect than others which are to follow it. These are the 
 currents which, I am profoundly convinced, are influencing no 
 small part of the best intellectual life and energy of our 
 country ; it is these which our teaching must stem if we are
 
 6 Religion and Science. 
 
 really to preach a revelation from God to man. Bear with me 
 if I further express my conviction that they are to be stemmed 
 not by argument, but by life ; not by theories, but by practice ; 
 not by seeing faults in our foes, but by searching for them in 
 ourselves ; and bear with me if, because I have this conviction, 
 I refer but briefly to the dangers which must be but too well 
 known, and somewhat more at length to the safeguards which 
 are but too often forgotten. 
 
 The first of the tendencies which I referred to has come to 
 us in its modern form from parents who would have been slow 
 to recognise it as their offspring. The greatest of the Scotch 
 philosophers, and the most learned, if not the greatest of the 
 English philosophers of this century, alike held and taught that 
 the Infinite was unknowable by the human intellect. The one 
 is said to have frequently asserted, the other taught in words of 
 definite meaning, that what the mind could not grasp intel- 
 lectually it could lay hold of by the faculty of faith. The 
 absolute cannot be reached by thought : God is known only by 
 revelation. It was but a step from this position — whether 
 legitimate or not it is beyond my present purpose to inquire — 
 to deny both faculties alike. God cannot be reached by 
 thought : God cannot be known by revelation. And this 
 Agnosticism — for the tendency has become a system, with a 
 formal title and many disciples — is presented to us as the 
 highest development of modern thought ; and to be a true 
 Agnostic is the highest aim of not a few of both teachers and 
 taught in colleges and halls devoted by our forefathers to the 
 establishment of learning, virtue, and religion. The secrets of 
 the power by which this system has gained its hold over men 
 are not far to seek. The region of the mysterious has for the 
 young thinker a fascination like that which the peak of the 
 cloud-capped mountain has for the young athlete. The student's 
 devotion to one line of thought and reading for which the mind 
 has had little preparation necessarily unfits it for a true estimate 
 of the whole world of thought beyond. He cannot pass beyond 
 the narrow limits of his own or his tutor's theories, while the 
 masses of mankind are living in life's problems, and living in 
 them are solving them. Most minds in the crisis which they 
 pass through, as boyhood expands to manhood, are brought into 
 contact with some of the doubts and difficulties of which wc have
 
 Religio7i and Science, 7 
 
 been thinking. What if there be this solution to them all ? Hard 
 is it to know God. Easy is it to do as others have done, and seek 
 to rest in the assertion that God cannot be known. Most men, 
 also, as they have passed through this crisis have realised the 
 fearful darkness cast over their whole being by sin. The God 
 of their childhood, of whom they learned, and to whom they 
 lisped in prayer by mother's knee, has seemed to be further and 
 further from them, because they have gone further and further 
 from Him. But there are intervals in their intellectual selfism 
 when the higher nature asserts itself; there are lulls in the 
 storm of passion when the still small voice of God is heard 
 speaking to their souls. But that voice — how awful is it ! Gladly 
 would they " say to the mountains, Fall on us ; and to the 
 hills, Cover us." What if a friendly Agnosticism can cast over 
 them the shield of its darkness, promising the troubled mind 
 rest, even if it be the darkness and the rest of spiritual death ? 
 They say *' Peradventure the darkness shall cover me," but * to 
 Him the darkness and light are both alike.' 
 
 I know not if there exists a true Agnostic — a man without 
 the faculty for knowing God. There are men and women de- 
 prived of one or other of the senses ; there are men and women 
 deprived of reason. They are the objects of compassion of 
 every heart. There may be men and women deprived of — 
 who have deprived themselves of — the higher spiritual faculty. 
 If such there be, let them, too, be the objects of our compassion, 
 but let them not seek to be our guides. A consistent Agnosti- 
 cism should at least be dumb. I know not if to any minds 
 Agnosticism can bring the rest of which it speaks. I do know 
 that some minds, in making the trial, have sunk in blank 
 despair beneath the burden, until the light of reason itself has 
 been quenched before its awful darkness. I do know that 
 others, after making the trial, have been saved as by fire, and 
 will bear, as long as life shall continue, the marks of the fearful 
 ordeal through which they have passed. I do know that the 
 gospel of Agnosticism is a bitter mockery of mankind, and that 
 the hearts of the people, in their need, and sorrow, and sin, 
 longing for a Father's comfort, and support, and forgiveness — 
 in their joy and gratitude hymning a leather's love — can never 
 offer their sacrifice of prayer and praise on an altar raised — 
 " ^K'yvMcrru^ %e(p " — to an Unknown God.
 
 8 Religion and Science. 
 
 The other tendency to which I referred is one which has 
 grown up among us during the last few years, and is destined, 
 probably, to be much more powerful in the next generation 
 than it is now. It arises in part from our insular position in the 
 past, and will come more and more to the front as the dis- 
 coveries of science and the march of civilisation connect us more 
 closely with the brotherhood of mankind. It will be more 
 painfully felt, too, if it is guided by men less learned, less 
 reverential, less Christian than those who are now its leaders. 
 But, in any case, the study of Ethnic Faiths, and the science of 
 Comparative Religion, must be attended with difficulty, and be 
 fraught with danger. The deepest thoughts and feelings of the 
 inmost heart — and these constitute a man's religion — escape 
 observation, and are outside the domain of experiment. You 
 cannot arrange them in a cabinet, and you cannot analyse them 
 in a crucible. The root of a word may represent the fossil of a 
 life which it is interesting for us to examine ; but the life itself 
 has gone, and the life was the religion. There must, moreover, 
 be always a twofold danger even when we have arrived at 
 correct knowledge of the religions of mankind. 
 
 On the one hand, many of us have been trained in schools of 
 thought which, based upon misinterpretation of the words of 
 Christ and His Apostles, have taught us to believe that outside 
 the limits of Christianity there can be absolutely no true religion 
 and no soul-ennobling thoughts. Now, we find in the religions 
 of Egypt and of India and of China thoughts which seem to us 
 the very echoes of the Gospel ; and yet they were fixed in 
 languages which we are but now beginning to read, centuries 
 before the Christian era. We find in the crude worship of 
 Africans, and South Sea Islanders, yearnings after the Eternal, 
 and thoughts about Him which are closely akin to our own. 
 We are brought, moreover, face to face with such facts as that 
 in this nineteenth Christian century the number of nominal 
 Christians in the world does not exceed 360,000,000, while the 
 number of nominal Buddhists alone is some 500,000,000 ; or that 
 Christian England is at this moment by far the greatest Muham- 
 madan Power in the world, and that 41,000,000 of British 
 subjects are followers of Islam. If an average English Christian 
 such as we are thinking of will sit down calmly before a map of 
 the world coloured so as to show the different races and religions.
 
 Religion and Science. 9 
 
 he will realise truths which he will not find it easy to reconcile 
 with his older faith, and with the justice and mercy of God. 
 These facts will come before us more and more. Representa- 
 tives of these nationalities and these religions meet us in our 
 streets, speak to us from our platforms and through the press, 
 and they ask what message Christianity has for them ? That 
 question we cannot, we dare not, avoid. 
 
 On the other hand, there are many among us, though not of 
 us, who would place the teaching of Christ side by side with 
 that of Confucius, or of Buddha, or of Zoroaster ; giving it, 
 indeed, a higher place, but making the difference one of degree 
 and not of kind. We feel to a man that Christianity can never, 
 never take that place. This reverence is the involuntary 
 homage which error pays to truth, but truth dare not accept it. 
 To grant it is to grant too much or too little. Christianity is 
 true or false. If false it has no right to the place they assign to 
 it. If true its very essence is in the claim to be the revelation 
 of God to man in the person of Jesus Christ, and its charter 
 is in the all-embracing words of its Founder — " Go ye into all 
 the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." If 
 Christianity be true it must be, as it ever has been^a missionary 
 religion, aiming to be nothing less than, and destined to be 
 nothing less than, the universal religion of mankind. 
 
 The words which I have already spoken have taken more 
 of your time than I had foreseen. In the minutes that are left 
 to me let me dwell upon some of our own weak points, where 
 doubts and difficulties are chiefly lodged, and which form, there- 
 fore, the real strength of our foes. 
 
 The chief of these is the old truth, which we need to take 
 afresh to heart — that our whole conception of a revelation is too 
 often that of the written Word alone, and that we are content 
 with that written Word without ever grasping the power of its 
 inner meaning. Now revelation is, as the very word implies, 
 a drawing back of a veil. What veil } Not one which covers 
 the Divine Being, but one which rests upon the heart of man. 
 And the man whose inner being has not been brought face to 
 face with the Divine Being has yet to learn what the very 
 essence of Revelation is. Apply this simple test, and ask how 
 far the England of an open Bible and free Christianity has ever 
 received a revelation from God t It is to put the same truth in 
 
 A 3
 
 lo Religion and Science. 
 
 «b 
 
 another form, if I lay stress upon the fact that the great source 
 of our danger is the wholly inadequate teaching of the young in 
 the simplest elements of religious truth. A knowledge of the 
 outer form in which the revelation is contained they have; of 
 the great truth of the revelation itself they are for the most part 
 wholly ignorant. If I were to examine an ordinary middle- 
 class school — and the same remark applies with equal force 
 to schools of lower grade, and with, it may be, greater force 
 to schools of a higher grade — the boys would be able to tell me 
 all the names of the kings of Israel and Judah,. and would 
 perhaps say them backwards as well as forwards, but there 
 would be scarcely an answer if I asked them of the revelation of 
 God to David, by which he passed from sin to holiness. They 
 could all, perhaps, draw for me a map of St. Paul's missionary 
 journeys without a mistake; but there would hardly be a reply 
 if I asked them of the wondrous truths which he preached 
 wherever he went, and which were a revelation to the heathen 
 world. If I were to examine an ordinary class in a theological 
 college I should find that they knew the last views of the last 
 commentator much better than they knew the text of the Bible 
 itself, and that they knew the text much better than the 
 spiritual truth contained in it. If I were to examine the books 
 on an ordinary drawing-room table, I should find the last 
 quarterlies and the last monthlies, with a criticism, perhaps, on 
 the Fourth Gospel, or the method of Butler's Analogy, and I 
 should find young men and young women reading and discuss- 
 ing these, who had never understood either St. John or the 
 Analogy, and could not, therefore, possibly judge whether their 
 critics had. All this is not to be wondered at when the nurse- 
 maid, and the tutor, and the schoolmaster are employed to do 
 what from their very position the natural, or spiritual parents 
 alone can do — to train the child whom God has given them, and 
 whom God will require at their hands. If children grow up 
 with a mere form which is called religion, or with a caricature of 
 religion, worse even than a mere negation, it is no matter for 
 wonder that in the crises of their lives this form or caricature 
 gives way, and they become the bitterest foes of that in which 
 they trusted and found it did not sustain them. The remedy 
 is in the hands of the mothers and fathers of England, in the 
 hands of every woman or man to whom God has given the
 
 Religion and Science. 1 1 
 
 greatest of all privileges and the greatest of all responsibilities — 
 that of moulding the character of a child. They cannot, indeed, 
 feed a child with spiritual meat, but they can watch and pray 
 that the milk be pure and free from the poison of deceit. They 
 can teach in their power and not in form the simple truths of 
 the Gospel which the very relation of child and parent will 
 make clear, and those truths will prove an invulnerable armour 
 for the child they love, in the after battle of life. That youth 
 will need no dark cloud of Agnosticism to deliver him from all 
 thought of God, who has been really taught that in Jesus Christ 
 God is his Father, loving and caring for and forgiving him, and 
 that if he sins Jesus Christ is the propitiation for his sins, and is 
 an advocate with the Father. That man will feel no difficulty 
 in the wider spread of some gleams of light, who has been taught 
 that there is a Light which lighteth every man, and that the 
 Great Shepherd has sheep in other folds whom He is ever 
 leading, that there may be one Shepherd and one flock. He 
 will rather regard every ray of the many-coloured lights which 
 meet him in nature, in history, in the religions of the world, 
 as parts of the great whole, which are to be combined in the 
 pure light of the Eternal Day. He will claim •all light, and 
 all life, and all love as Christian, because Christ is the Light 
 and the Life of the world, and Love is the nature of God. He 
 will believe that men who, in their gloom, have but the light of 
 a star, and follow that light, will be guided until it stand over 
 the place where the Child lies, and they bow in homage before 
 the Incarnate Son of God revealing God to man. 
 
 Another of our weak points is that our teaching is too nega- 
 tive. We allow the enemy to fight upon our ground ; we ought 
 rather to fight upon his. It is a dangerous sign when the 
 apologetic literature of a country is stronger than its dogmatic, 
 and when a large proportion of the sermons we hear have for 
 their chief aim to prove the truth of Christianity, or meet the 
 objection of the last German critic, which the preacher knows 
 perchance only by hearsay. Our commission is to preach the 
 Gospel ; we may safely leave the result in God's hands. The 
 strength of our position is in the power of Christianity over the 
 minds of men, and the reformation of the world by its means. 
 When did Apostle preach or write without setting forth the 
 death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ ^ We may
 
 1 2 Religion and Science. 
 
 count on our fingers the great successful religious teachers of 
 our own day. They are not the men who deal most with modern 
 doubts and difficulties in relation to revealed religion, but they 
 are those who deal most with the grand old certainties and bless- 
 ings which it has brought to man. 
 
 Another and the last of our weak points which I shall dwell 
 upon, and that but for a moment, is the small degree in which 
 we prove to the world by singleness of purpose and devotion of 
 life that we have ourselves received, and therefore can declare to 
 others, a revelation from God. It is now more than twelve years 
 ago since Keshub Chunder Sen, while lecturing in Calcutta, 
 used these words : — " I regard every European settler in India 
 as a missionary of Christ, and I have a right to demand that he 
 should always remember and act up to his high responsibilities. 
 But alas ! owing to the reckless conduct of a number of pseudo- 
 Christians, Christianity has failed to produce any wholesome 
 moral influence on my countrymen." That remark was cheered 
 to the echo ; and the world will always feel that it has a right 
 to make a like demand of us, and a right to exaggerate our 
 failures. If we could, clergy and laity, speaker and hearer alike, 
 go forth from this Church Congress filled with the true spirit of 
 Christianity, living it, and in our lives declaring it, we should 
 carry with us the powerful evidence of a revealed religion — 
 evidence before which all doubts and difficulties have vanished 
 in the past, do vanish in the present, and will vanish to the end 
 of time.
 
 iReligious ^Benefits from Eecent Science anti 
 
 Ee^earcl) 
 
 Read at the Swansea Meeting, October 9, 1879. 
 
 THE words religion, science, research, are all words of which 
 the meaning is vague, and the limits hard to define. 
 The term twenty minutes is on the other hand a term of very 
 definite meaning, and its limits are, in Congress Halls at least, 
 marked in a very practical way. Let me then employ one or 
 two of these minutes in marking out such parts of our almost 
 boundless subject as I may be able to speak of in the minutes 
 that remain. One evident limit is imposed for me. It could be 
 right for few men — it would certainly be wholly wrong for him 
 who is now addressing you — to follow an Oxford Professor^ 
 whose name is as a household word at these assemblies ; to pre- 
 cede a Cambridge Professor,^ who if less known to us by his 
 spoken, is known to all by his written words ; and, coming 
 between these men, to darken subjects which they have illu- 
 mined, and made peculiarly their own. It can hardly be by 
 accident that this middle position has been given me. A whole 
 hour of the pure light of science may be too dazzling for the 
 untrained eye, and an interval of shade has been in kindness 
 provided. Be it mine then to look at these things, as they 
 come within the ordinary powers of vision, and present them- 
 selves as practical questions of life. I may also exclude from 
 " Science " all that outer fringe of unverified hypotheses in the 
 darkness of which sciolists delight to dwell ; and where they find 
 spectral giants that would consume not only our faith but us — 
 did they but themselves exist. To call all this " science," " know- 
 ledge," would be to insult the majesty of truth, and to rob 
 earnest and humble thinkers of the homage which every man 
 
 » Rev. rrofessor Pritcliard, F.R.S. "^ rrofessor G. G. Stokes, F.R.S.
 
 14 Religion and Science. 
 
 accords them, that we may do reverence to men whose only- 
 claim to it is based on the hardihood of ignorance. And on the 
 other hand, " Religion " is limited for the purposes of this meet- 
 ing to its simplest and therefore widest conception. We have 
 to deal, not with science in its relation to Christianity, nor yet 
 with science in its relation to Revealed Religion — this was a 
 question for the last Church Congress — but with the benefits, 
 and I presume that I may add or non-benefits, to Religion as 
 such, from recent science and research. 
 
 Now the currents of higher religious, thought in England, as 
 far as I am able to trace them, are being influenced by two 
 main forces — one the theory of Evolution ; the other Compara- 
 tive Theology, or the so-called Science of Religion itself. It 
 will be found, I believe, that while there are brooks leading 
 in various directions on either side, these are the great rivers in 
 which men's thoughts are flowing, or to which they are tending. 
 Permit me then to address to you some brief remarks on each 
 of these subjects, and to add to them some of a more general 
 kind. 
 
 I. The theory of Evolution comes to us with much of the 
 charm of novelty, and commends itself as emphatically of British 
 growth. And though to some of us much that we now read in 
 English is strangely like what we have before read in the 
 German of Schelling, or Goethe, or Hegel ; and the whole 
 theory little but a development of the teaching of Leibnitz ; 
 and though others among us may think we are hearing again 
 half-forgotten passages from the Greek philosophers, and are 
 quite sure that this and that thought may be found in the Latin 
 Fathers, ay ! and by the deeper reader, in the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures themselves ; yet it remains undoubtedly true that this 
 theory, in its present completion of principle and illustration, is 
 the colossal work of a living Englishman, of whom his age and 
 country may well be proud. I know not whether it is scientifi- 
 cally valid ; it is probable, indeed, that this induction of induc- 
 tions is but a step to higher inductions still, and that we shall live 
 to hear our girls and boys at school laugh at us for stopping on 
 the first summit, and thinking we were on the highest point of 
 the range. But I feel sure that when the history of this century 
 comes to be written from the standpoint of the future, the name 
 of Herbert Spencer will be found in the very first rank among
 
 I 
 
 Religion and Science, 1 5 
 
 those of English workers and thinkers. In ultimate principles 
 I differ from him toto ccbIo, but I am therefore the more anxious 
 . to acknowledge the greatness of his work and the philosophical 
 spirit in which it has been conducted. 
 
 What then is this theory ? " Evolution is a change from 
 indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent hetero- 
 geneity, through successive differentiations and integrations." I 
 have not forgotten that we are in the shade period. This gleam 
 of scientific light is Mr. Spencer's, not mine. But it is a gleam of 
 light. Look at it for a moment and you will see. The writer 
 means not, as is too often said, that everything in its mature form 
 is the development of a germ which was as a miniature edition of 
 the larger work, microscopic indeed, yet perfect in all its parts — 
 nay, he holds it to be absolutely " proved that no germ, animal 
 or vegetable, contains the slightest rudiment, trace, or indication 
 of the future organism," and that "the first process set up in 
 every fertilised germ is a process of repeated spontaneous fis- 
 sures, ending in the production of a mass of cells, not one of 
 which exhibits any special character " — but he means that every- 
 thing commences in a simple rudimentary state, and rises by a 
 countless number of distinct stages to its determinate form ; and 
 that this form commences in its turn the downward course of dis- 
 solution ; and that through these successive differentiations and 
 integrations all things are developed. Physiology, geology, 
 astronomy, zoology, sociology are all subject to this law. The 
 solar system itself will by this law finally pass away into the 
 nebulous matter from which it was evolved. Now all this may, or 
 may not, be true. Let us from our lower standpoint grant that it 
 is true. The grant is a large one, but for the moment let us lend 
 our assent — not give it — and what then } How is our simple 
 idea of religion affected by it } Mr. Spencer shall answer. 
 " The genesis of an atom," he tells us, " is no easier to conceive 
 than that of a planet. Indeed, far from rendering the universe 
 less mysterious than before, it makes a much greater mystery 
 of it. Creation by fabrication is much lower than creation by 
 evolution. A man can bring a machine together, he cannot 
 make a machine that develops itself. That our harmonious 
 universe should formerly have existed potentially in the state of 
 diffused matter without form, and that it should gradually have 
 attained its present organisation, is much more wonderful than
 
 1 6 Religio7i and Science. 
 
 its formation, according to the artificial method supposed by the 
 vulgar would be. Those who consider it legitimate to argue 
 from phenomena to noumena have good right to maintain that 
 the nebular hypothesis implies a primary cause as superior to 
 the mechanical God of Paley as that is to the fetish of the 
 savage." We may object to the wording of this answer ; but its 
 central truth is evident. Science in her advances along the lines 
 of Evolution, as in all the tracks she treads, unveils to us at 
 every step the Infinite and the One ; and in doing so, she leads 
 Religion by the hand and bids her wonder and adore. This law 
 indeed, like every law, answers the question "How?" To the 
 man that follows it to the utmost verge of thought, and, eagerly 
 looking into the darkness still beyond, feels that the mystery of 
 existence remains unsolved, and cries ''Why?" "Whence?" it 
 can furnish no answer. The agonised appeal that must be, will 
 be, answered, strikes against it as against the granite of the 
 mountain side, and the man listening with outstretched head, 
 and ear intent to catch the smallest whisper in reply, finds in 
 despair nothing but the dying echo of his own voice, " Why ? " 
 '' Whence ? " 
 
 2. The systematic study and tabulation of religions, which 
 forms the science of Comparative Theology, is far less English 
 than is the theory of Evolution ; most of the materials come to 
 our hands from foreign sources, and especially from the inde- 
 fatigable and self-denying labour of our neighbours in Holland. 
 But that they do come, and that they are being translated, read, 
 and digested, let our current literature witness. Few of us pro- 
 bably have any conception of the immense amount of scientific 
 research which has been devoted to this particular question by 
 specialists in Holland and Germany during the last few years 
 I refer to this for a moment because I want to show you the 
 importance and value of the statement which I am about to 
 read. It is taken from the Oictliiies of the History of Religion^ 
 by Dr. Tiele, Professor of the History of Religions in the 
 University of Leiden. The competence of Dr. Tiele to speak 
 on such questions is beyond all doubt ; and no one who has read 
 his works will think him unduly inclined to uphold older views. 
 He tells us — I read from the English translation — "The state- 
 ment that there are nations or tribes which profess no religion 
 rests either on inaccurate observation or a confusion of ideas
 
 Religion and Science. 1 7 
 
 No tribe or nation has yet been met destitute of belief in any 
 higher Being ; and travellers who asserted their existence have 
 been afterwards refuted by the facts. It is legitimate, therefore, 
 to call religion in its most general sense a universal phenomenon 
 of humanity." 
 
 We have, then, these results from the particular lines of 
 science of which we are thinking. Let us for a moment place 
 them side by side. Evolution, admitting even that all which is 
 claimed for it is true, and drawing no further inference than 
 that which its ablest advocate has drawn, so far from taking 
 from us the consciousness of adoring wonder in the presence 
 of a power which transcends all efforts of comprehension, in- 
 creases it by the multiple of infinity. A power to be adored ; 
 there is the scientific formula for the one element of religion. 
 Comparative Theology asserts that the belief in higher beings 
 is a universal phenomenon of humanity. Hearts to adore ; 
 there is the other element of religion. I know indeed that 
 Evolution has told us nothing of the infinity to which it neces- 
 sarily leads. " Incomprehensible power," " inscrutable reality," 
 *' potential existence," " nature," *' force," or, as if the plural 
 were stronger than the singular, " forces," or these words deified 
 by being written in capitals by men whose very fingers would 
 assert the living God their intellects cannot grasp ; such are the 
 expressions, not for the Being, but for the power to be adored. 
 But the heart of humanity — and note once again that it is the 
 universal phenomenon, extending through all the centuries of 
 time, and found in all the latitudes of place, crystallised in the 
 language of every nomad race, and the keystone of every 
 institution of civilised mankind, whispered at every birth, 
 uttered at every crisis of life, sobbed over every grave — the 
 heart of humanity bears with a faith in a higher Being. And 
 will Science tell us that the motion of every atom of matter is 
 guided with unerring wisdom, that in all the complexity of this 
 universe — so vast that it is unthinkable — Evolution is silently, 
 and without one false step, doing her eternal work ; that sun 
 and moon, planets and stars, are poised with such accuracy that 
 on this earth (so insignificant in the solar system that seen from 
 the sun it would not be as large as the smallest stop on the 
 paper from which I read) man can predict their exact positions 
 with unfailing certainty ; that all, all is set right, and that the
 
 1 8 Religion and Science, 
 
 heart of man alone goes wrong ? Or will she assert that faculty 
 everywhere implies an object, that eyes are made wherewith to 
 see, and ears wherewith to hear ; that in the struggle for ex- 
 istence the strongest only can survive, and the unneeded ceases 
 to exist ; and will she say in the same breath that this faith- 
 power of mankind implies no being from whom it came, to 
 whom it tends ; that though it has existed through every 
 struggle and survived every attempt to make it cease, it is not 
 needed, and is not strong ? Or will she admit that every 
 faculty of man tends to transcend itself; that Intellect, rising 
 by successive steps, generalises from law to yet higher law, and 
 reaching the highest point declares that there is yet a higher ; 
 that Imagination in her search for the beautiful fixes an ideal 
 she never can attain, and that in every department of art the 
 ideal realised fixes a higher ideal still ; that Conscience in its 
 assertion of right, duty, retribution, feels that these come not 
 from an imperfect human law, and that they are even where no 
 human law exists ; that Affection, putting forth her powers to 
 love, finds that no loved object can satisfy them, and, feeling 
 that the most perfect human love is less than the love she 
 needs, declares there must be a love beyond ; that, in a word. 
 Intellect, Imagination, Conscience, Affection, are with unceasing 
 claim craving to see the invisible, and yet that there is no 
 invisible to see ? Or will she admit that in every department 
 of intellectual work axiom must be assumed and postulate be 
 granted ; that these are the very foundation of all reasoning, 
 and that Reason itself is but the architect, drawing its plans 
 indeed with compass and rule, testing the building with square 
 and plummet, but demanding a foundation in the solid rock on 
 which its own first stone shall be laid ; and will she tell us that 
 Reason, in the sphere of religious thought alone, is competent to 
 build without foundation ; that here no axiom shall be as- 
 sumed, no postulate shall be granted ; that rigid demonstration 
 shall be demanded of that which every man knows without 
 demonstration, and cannot know by it ; that the very existence 
 of the individual man, as well as the existence of God, must be 
 proved by philosophy, or shall not be believed in at all ? Or 
 will she, seated in the seclusion of the watch-tower of her own 
 building, look down upon the seething masses of humanity in 
 their hopes, their fears, their struggles, their affections, their
 
 Religion and Science. 19 
 
 yearnings for the life above, beyond, before ; and assert that 
 all this is the sentiment of the vulgar mob, unknown to the 
 intellectual man ? Will she, that is, bid man crush out of his 
 own nature one part, the highest part, of his very being, and 
 following the guidance of intellect alone, declare that the 
 heart — after he has destroyed it — beats with sentiment no 
 more ? 
 
 But why weary you with these questionings ? Science makes 
 such claims only in her moments of frenzy, and she then is 
 suicidal, and falls slain by her own hand. Judge her not by 
 these moments, but look at her in the calm fairness of her 
 beauty, in the vista of a long past. That past, too, has had its 
 masters of men who know ; masters represented by such names 
 as Augustine and Gregory, Pascal, Descartes, and Leibnitz, 
 Kepler and Newton, Bacon and Locke ; shall I hesitate in a 
 Church Congress to add Richard Hooker and Joseph Butler, or 
 if I passed them over would not this border-town of these 
 dioceses of my fatherland add Edward Copleston and Connop 
 Thirlwall ? Sirs, these men were giants in the vastness of their 
 intellectual strength, though children, because children in the 
 humility of their faith. Who are the children in intellect that 
 will climb upon their shoulders and cry, " We are taller than our 
 fathers ? " Who will dare to bid us think that these men were 
 intellectually imbeciles, or morally knaves ; that the country 
 they saw by faith is a dreamland of non-existence, that the 
 moral power of the lives they lived is the outflow of weakness } 
 Are we, then, to believe that the platform of scientific knowledge 
 is the ultimate limit of human faculty, that upon it we may pace 
 backward and forward, but that it is bounded on every side by a 
 great abyss, into which no ray of light can ever pass, from which 
 no ray of light can ever come ; that every living power of every 
 living man is ever to crave and never to be satisfied, though 
 humanity itself declares it has been satisfied ; that the hungering 
 soul of a famine-struck world is to cry to Heaven for bread, 
 and for bread receive a stone ? Are we commanded to be- 
 lieve all this by the very science which asserts that there is 
 no such thing as faith ? Credat Jtidcetis ! Let the beliefless 
 believe it ! 
 
 Religion, then, rests upon ultimate axioms, which as they 
 are beyond science to establish, so are they beyond science to
 
 20 Religion and Science. 
 
 impugn. Science is the peciilium of the few, and from its very 
 nature ever changing ; religion is the compass of the lives of all, 
 and in essence always the same. Science may not lay her 
 foundations, but it may shape her buildings, may reject this 
 stone or that as unworthy of a place in her walls, may, walking 
 hand and hand with her, guide her in the building of a truly 
 Catholic Church where wisdom, knowledge, faith, and love may 
 together chant the Creator's praise. Claims have indeed been 
 made by extremists, in the name of science, at which religion 
 stands aghast ; and dogmas have been uttered, and deeds have 
 been wrought, in the name of religion that no intelligent man 
 can receive or sanction. But science is not answerable for 
 human ignorance ; nor is religion for human sin. True science 
 must be in a real sense religious ; true religion must be in a real 
 sense scientific. Intellect has always been and always must be, 
 intellectus qiicerens fidem ; faith has always been and always 
 must be fides qucEveiis intellectiim. Intellect and faith, science 
 and religion, are distinct in thought, but inseparable in fact. 
 God has united them in the individual man ; God has united 
 them in the human race. " Those whom God hath joined 
 together let no man put asunder."
 
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