246 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SABBATH.* 



By Professor JOHN TYNDALL, F. E. S. 



I. 



IN the opening words of a lecture delivered in this city four years 

 ao'o, I spoke of the desire and tendency of the present age to con- 

 nect itself organically with preceding ages. The expression of this 

 desire is not limited to the connection of the material organisms of to- 

 day with those of the geologic past. It is equally manifested in the 

 domain of mind. To this source, for example, may be traced the 

 philosophical writings of Mr. Herbert Spencer. To it we are indebted 

 for the series of learned works on " The Sources of Christianity," by 

 M. Renan. To it we owe the researches of Professor Max Miiller in 

 comparative philology and mythology, and the endeavor to found on 

 these researches a " science of religion." In this relation, moreover, 

 the recent work of Principal Caird f is highly characteristic of the 

 tendencies of the age. He has no words of vituperation for the older 

 phases of faith. Throughout the ages he discerns a purpose and a 

 growth, wherein the earlier and more imperfect religions constitute 

 the natural and necessary precursors of the later and more perfect 

 ones. Even in the slough of ancient paganism. Principal Caird de- 

 tects a power ever tending toward amelioration, ever working toward 

 the advent of a better state, and finally emerging in the purer life of 

 Christianity. J 



These changes in religious conceptions and practices correspond to 

 the changes wrought by augmented experience in the texture and con- 

 tents of the human mind. Acquainted as we now are with this im- 

 measurable universe, and with the energies operant therein, the guises 

 under which the sages of old presented the Maker and Builder thereof 

 seem to us to belong to the utter infancy of things. To point to illus- 

 trations drawn from the heathen world would be superfluous. We may 

 mount higher, and still find our assertion true. When, for example, 

 Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel are 

 represented as climbing Mount Sinai, and actually seeing there the 

 God of Israel, we listen to language to which we can attach no signifi- 

 cance. " There is in all this," says Principal Caird, " much which, 

 even when religious feeling is absorbing the latent nutriment con- 

 tained in it, is perceived [by the philosophic Christian of to-day] to 

 belong to the domain of materialistic and figurative conception." The 



* Presidential address to the Glasgow Sunday Society, delivered in St. Andrew's 

 Hall, October 25, 1880. 



f " Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion." 



X In Professor Max Miiller's " Introduction to the Science of Religion " some excel- 

 lent passages occur, embodying the above view of the continuity of religious develop- 

 ment. 



