7 o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



^cijetxtifit %iizxtituxt. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



We know of no man better fitted to deal with the Scientific Aspects of 

 Christian Evidences* than Professor Wright. He is both a man of science 

 and a theologian ; a trusted professor in an orthodox seminary who is at 

 the same time a fearless investigator of the geological record and of the 

 antiquity of man — and even a sturdy advocate of Glacial man. He is thus 

 bound by the very nature of his attitude to give fair and even attention to 

 both aspects of the question he sets out to discuss. He begins by admitting 

 that Christianity is not capable of demonstrative proof, and is open to ob- 

 jections not easy to answer ; but, he retorts, it is not alone among well- 

 founded beliefs in being thus situated. In a large number of cases it is un- 

 reasonable to demand such proof. Prom a philosophical point of view, even 

 modern science is more superficial than it is popularly represented to be, 

 and has often to assume and even depend upon data that it can not prove 

 or even comprehend. Its great advances have in reality only slightly 

 touched the true basis of religious hope and aspiration. After showing that 

 there are limitations to scientific thought and enumerating some of the par- 

 adoxes which science has to encounter in basing its fundamental principles, 

 Professor Wright defines the view of God's relation to Nature most gener- 

 ally held by Christian philosophers as being that the operations of Nature 

 go on in the main by virtue of forces communicated in the beginning but 

 subject to insulated and systematic interpositions expressing the divine 

 will. This leads to the question of miracles, of which " the economy of the 

 strictly miraculous element in the Bible can never cease to be a surprise to 

 the scientific students of human history." Such events as the Flood, the 

 passage of the Red Sea, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are 

 accounted for as having been brought about by the regular operation of 

 natural laws, while the miraculous element in them lay in the co-ordination 

 by which they were made to concur with other incidents to produce a spe- 

 cial result. Concerning the grand culminating miracle of the wonderful 

 life and the death and resurrection of Christ, it is shown that an unbroken 

 chain of evidence exists from eyewitnesses down; and it has been re-en- 

 forced by very recent discoveries of documents composed by authors re- 

 moved by at most only a single life from the possibility of personal com- 

 munication with eyewitnesses. While these evidences, as well as evidences 

 of the accuracy of Old Testament history, have always been ample, the 

 author now finds them superabundant. " The question, then, which we are 

 brought to face [concerning the story of Christ] is, Were the Christians of 

 the first century under a delusion ? " To this the last pages of the book are 

 devoted. 



The amusement and interest of watching a child's gradual initiation into 

 the mysteries of " things " is best known to the " better half " of the commu- 

 nity. But even our mothers do not properly appreciate that with this enter- 

 tainment may be gathered much information of scientific value — of value 



* Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences. By G. Frederick Wright. New York : D. Appleton 

 and Company. Pp. 362. Price, $1. 



