73 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



condemned by men who have not carefully read the many treatises 

 for and against evolution, and who have not sound conceptions of the 

 true grounds of the learned authors. The writer once heard a divine 

 vigorously controvert the doctrines of Darwin, and exhaust his re- 

 sources of invective upon the unfortunate believers in the evolution 

 theories of the present, much to the edification of the regular church- 

 goers, who, for the most part, had never read the books which were 

 criticised, but had a general idea that Darwinism, socialism, and com- 

 munism, were equally pernicious to the welfare of society. The oc- 

 cupant of the pulpit, upon seeing that he swept his audience with 

 him, elevated himself to his full height and exclaimed, " If they be- 

 lieve that man descended from an ape, let them take a monkey from 

 the Zoological Gardens, and, by a process of natural selection and cul- 

 tivation, make a man of him. Surely this is not mrreasonable to ask ! " 



I often hear sermons from men who admire the progress of science, 

 yet who do incalculable damage by drawing wide and unwarrantable 

 inferences and conclusions from scientific facts. These inferences are 

 often made by men who are well read in the scientific literature of the 

 day, but who do not regard the limits of scientific generalizations, and 

 take steps which the scientific hearer would not dream of taking. The 

 hearer, knowing how defective the preacher's judgment is in his infer- 

 ences from science, naturally doubts the clearness of his pastor's judg- 

 ment on even purely theological points. The attempt to reconcile 

 science and religion is like an endeavor to measure two constantly- 

 e'xpanding scales by comparison with each other. It does not seem 

 to be recognized that a scientific man can have a religion apart from 

 his science : that it is not necessary for him to apply the exact laws 

 of his particular science to his religious convictions, or to test the 

 logic of his belief by the methods which he has found necessary and 

 invaluable in scientific investigations. Many scientific men who are 

 considered atheists are far from being so. It is compatible for a man 

 to be a logical reasoner in an exact science, and yet to refuse to apply 

 the touchstones, which serve him in his science, to his religion. He 

 recognizes that his religious belief is an inherent want of his nature. 

 Strict logicians may laugh at him, and claim that he is inconsistent ; 

 he himself feels that his tests fail ; he cannot reason ; he must receive 

 much on faith. Nothing, therefore, is so disagreeable and demoral- 

 izing to the man who is loyal, both to his religion and his science, as 

 to hear the attempts of preachers to reconcile an incomplete knowl- 

 edge of Nature's laws for, at the best, we are only on the boundaries 

 of the science of Nature with the great mystery of revealed religion. 

 It were better that the subject should be left untouched ; that the 

 minister should be pronounced not in step with progress, than that he 

 should awaken the spirit of opposition and distrust in the minds of the 

 thinkers on scientific problems. 



Such are some of the evils of a superficial exposition of science 



