NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 735 



From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a 

 whole, has corne the greatest aid to* those who work to advance 

 Religion rather than to promote any particular system of Theology ; 

 for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more and more 

 that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from the period 

 when he had little, if any, ideas of a great power above him, 

 through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry 

 toward better forms of belief, making him more and more ac- 

 cessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences show, 

 too, within the historic period the same tendency, and especially 

 within the events covered by our sacred books, a progress from 

 fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in the early Jew- 

 ish worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through 

 polytheism, when Jehovah was but " a god above all gods," 

 through the period when he was " a jealous God," capricious and 

 cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utterances as those 

 of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, the sublime 

 preaching of Micah, and, above all, through the ideal given to the 

 world by Jesus of Nazareth. 



Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England 

 in our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this evolution 

 " between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to be slaugh- 

 tered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender mercies are over 

 all his works ; between the God of the Patriarchs, who was always 

 repenting, and the God of the Apostles, who is the same yesterday, 

 to-day, and forever, with whom there is no variableness nor shadow 

 of turning ; between the God of the Old Testament, who walked 

 in the garden in the cool of the day, and the God of the New Tes- 

 tament, whom no man hath seen nor can see ; between the God of 

 Leviticus, who was so particular about the sacrificial furniture 

 and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in tem- 

 ples made with hands ; between the God who hardened Pharaoh's 

 heart, and the God who will have all men to be saved ; between 

 the God of Exodus, who is merciful only to those who love him, 

 and the God of Christ — the heavenly Father' — who is kind unto 

 the unthankful and the evil." 



However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthro- 

 pology and its kindred or subsidiary sciences may, in the interest 

 of simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of " the 

 fall " ; however completely they may fossilize various dogmas, 

 catechisms, creeds, confessions, " plans of salvation " and * schemes 

 of redemption," which have been evolved from the great minds of 

 the theological period; science, so far from making inroads on 

 religion, or even upon our Christian development of it, will 

 strengthen all that is essential in it, giving new and nobler paths 

 to man's highest aspirations. For the one great legitimate, scien- 



