SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY. 39 



in Nature and in history, to his yearnings for affection, to his sense of 

 sin, to his passion for life and duty, which death cuts short. And that 

 one of the two which is truest to humanity, which lays down the best 

 code of duty, and creates the strongest capacity for accomplishing it, 

 will, in the long-run, prevail; a conclusion which science, so far as it 

 believes in man, and religion, so far as it believes in God, must adopt. 

 Here, once more, it is well nigh impossible to discern the immediate 

 direction of the conflict, whatever may be our views as to its ultimate 

 decision. Science is almost creating a new class of virtues ; it is laying- 

 its finger with unerring accuracy upon the faults of the old morality ; 

 it is calling into existence a passion for intellectual truth. But then 

 Religion has always given the strongest proofs of her vitality by her 

 power of assimilating (however slowly) new truths, and of rejecting 

 (alas ! how tardily) old falsehoods, at the demands of reason and dis- 

 covery. A religious man can always say that Christians, and not Chris- 

 tianity, are responsible for what goes amiss. It is because religious 

 practice never has been, and is at this moment almost less than ever, 

 up to the standard of what religious theory exacts, that we may have 

 confidence in gradual improvement and advance, until that standard, 

 toward the formation of which science will have largely contributed, 

 be attained. 



3. Closely connected w r ith the above, follows the proposition that 

 all attempts on the part of religion to confute the " skeptic " by purely 

 intellectual methods are worse than useless. There is no intellectual 

 short cut to the Christian faith ; it must be built up in the minds of 

 men by setting forth a morality that satisfies their nature, consecrates 

 humanity, and establishes society. It is not because men love the 

 truth, but because they hate their enemies, that in things religious they 

 desire to have what they can call an overwhelming preponderance of 

 argument on their side of the question, the possession of which enables 

 them to treat their opponents as knaves or fools or both. Religion 

 may have been the first to set this pernicious example, but, judging 

 from the tone of much modern writing, Rationalism has somewhat 

 bettered her instructions. No doubt it is a tempting thing to mount 

 a big pulpit, and then and there, with much intellectual pomp, to slay 

 the absent infidel absent no less from the preacher's argument than 

 from his audience. Delightful it may be, but all the more dangerous, 

 because it plunges men at once into that error, so hateful to modern 

 thought, of affirming that intellectual mistakes are moral delinquencies. 

 No one, least of all science, denies that men are responsible for the 

 consequences of their belief, provided these consequences are limited 

 to such as are capable of being recognized and foreseen, and are not 

 extended to comprehend endless perdition in a future state an idea 

 which is supposed, rightly or wrongly, to lurk beneath the preacher's 

 logical utterances, and which religion has done next to nothing to dis- 

 avow. And so we come to this conclusion : to build up by precept 



