456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



edge. And I know no study whatsoever more able to help a man to 

 acquire that inductive habit of mind than natural history. 



True, it may be acquired otherwise. The study of languages, for 

 instance, when properly pursued, helps specially to form it, because 

 words are facts, and the modern science of philology, which deals with 

 them, has become now a thoroughly inductive, and therefore a trust- 

 worthy and a teaching science. But without that scientific temper of 

 mind which judges calmly of facts, no good or lasting work will be 

 done, whether in physical science, in social science, in politics, in philos- 

 ophy, in philology, or in history. 



Now, if this scientific habit of mind can be gained by other studies, 

 why should I, as a clergyman, interest myself specially in the spread 

 of physical science ? Am I not going out of my proper sphere to med- 

 dle with secular matters ? Am I not, indeed, going into a sphere out 

 of which I had better keep myself, and all over whom I may have in- 

 fluence ? For is not science antagonistic to religion ? and, if so, what 

 has a clergyman to do, save to warn the young against it, instead of 

 attracting; them toward it ? 



First, as to meddling with secular matters. I grudge that epithet 

 of secular to any matter whatsoever. But I do more ; I deny it to 

 any thing which God has made, even to the tiniest of insects, the most 

 insignificant atom of dust. To those who believe in God, and try to 

 see all things in God, the most minute natural phenomenon cannot be 

 secular. It must be divine ; I say, deliberately, divine ; and I can use 

 no less lofty word. The grain of dust is a thought of God ; God's 

 power made it ; God's wisdom gave it whatsoever properties or quali- 

 ties it may possess. God's providence has put it in the place where it 

 is now, and has ordained that it should be in that place at that moment, 

 by a train of causes and effects which reaches back to the very creation 

 of the universe. The grain of dust can no more go from God's pres- 

 ence, or flee from God's Spirit, than you or I can do. If it go up to 

 the physical heaven, and float (as it actually often does) far above the 

 clouds, in those higher strata of the atmosphere which the aeronaut has 

 never visited, whither the Alpine snow-peaks do not rise, even there 

 it will be obeying physical laws which we hastily term laws of Na- 

 ture, but which are really the laws of God ; and if it go down into 

 the physical abyss ; if it be buried fathoms, miles, below the surface, 

 and become an atom of some rock still in the process of consolidation, 

 has it escaped from God, even in the bowels of the earth ? Is it not 

 there still obeying physical laws, of pressure, heat, crystallization, and 

 so forth, which are laws of God the will and mind of God concerning 

 particles of matter ? Only look at all created things in this light look 

 at them as what they are, the expressions of God's mind and will con- 

 cerning this universe in which we live " the voice of God," as Bacon 

 says, " revealed in facts " and then you will not fear physical science, 

 for you will be sure that, the more you know of physical science, the 



