ADDRESS TO MEDICAL STUDENTS. 65 



can only touch here upon this wide subject. If I were to seek an 

 argument against the modern deniers of a Divine Maker and Provi- 

 dence, I should turn to science itself as furnishing its best ground. 

 The result of our study of Nature, it is justly claimed, is only the 

 knowledge of phenomena ; but in this claim science has rid us forever 

 of the notion of material substance; it has resolved all into one orisi- 

 nal, persistent Force ; it has thus lifted matter into a domain above 

 the physical, and by its own induction brought us back to the neces- 

 sary truth, which we can only interpi'et by our own personal intelli- 

 gence and will. If evolution, whatever its amazing chain of growth, 

 is forced to admit that the principal world-stuff has in it the capacity 

 of all the thinking, conscious, moral being begotten from it, evolution 

 is but a vague name for the living action of a living God. And when 

 I sum, again, our results as to the human organism, all our knowledge 

 of the fitness of the cerebral mass and each fibre of the spinal net-work 

 to the motions of the unseen life, so far from proving thought a func- 

 tion of the brain, or will a shock of the nerve-power, has only refined 

 the body into the perfect vehicle of the indwelling sj)irit. Nothing is 

 more satisfying to a believer in facts above Nature than that chapter 

 on the " Substance of the Mind," where the apostle of English Posi- 

 tivism, Mr. Spencer, gives ixs as the outcome of his analysis, that when 

 we talk of material or spiritual substances, it is indifferent whether 

 "we express those in terms of these, or these of those;" yet, as 

 thought cannot be dissected like the gray matter of the brain, it is 

 sounder science to say that the living force is another than the physi- 

 cal fact. 



But I cannot linger on these questions. Enough if I look forward 

 in this light to the most harmonious results. We need not expect at 

 once a reconciliation of all discords. Much must be done before that 

 is reached. The clergyman has to learn fully that the Word of God 

 is to be studied as the oracle of the great truths of man's spiritual 

 history, not rashly made the rule of exact science. The naturalist 

 must learn that there are facts of conscience and of human life more 

 sacred than the guesses of his theory, which he must touch with rev- 

 erent hands. Indeed, I have sometimes thought if the clergy could 

 ramble with Mr. Huxley over the glaciers, and Mr. Huxley would take 

 an excursion into the fields of Christian history, we should have better 

 clerical sermons, and better " lay sermons." Science will work its 

 own cure at last. It is not probable that there will be less prayer on 

 account of Mr. Tyndall's "prayer-gauge," so long as it is the bidding 

 of the heart of man. It is not probable, if, as a witty doctor has lately 

 hinted, we measure the varied genius of Homer, Spenser, or Beranger, 

 by the slower or quicker respiration, that we shall read the "Iliad" or 

 "Faerie Queene" with less delight. It is not probable that all our 

 discoveries of the ape period will kindle our interest so much as the 

 history we remember far better of the struggles and divine triumphs 



VOL. VII. 5 



