ON THE DREAD AND DISLIKE OF SCIENCE. 415 



ous examples of men eminent in science and sincere in their theological 

 professions, not to admit that the mind can follow two logics, and can 

 accept both the natural and the supernatural explanations. Whether 

 the mind ought to do so, is another question. Let no one, therefore, 

 suspect me of a doubt as to the sincerity of theologians who proclaim 

 that the sphere of science is limited to the processes of the physical 

 world, and may be frankly accepted in all that it teaches respecting 

 such processes, without in the least involving the moral world, or in 

 any way affecting the truths respecting that moral world which theol- 

 ogy derives from a source independent of experience. Science, they 

 say, systematizes whatever experience reveals ; its test is Reason. 

 Theology systematizes what had been revealed from a higher source; 

 its test is Faith. Between reason and faith there is an absolute de- 

 markation ; and between science, which relies on observation and in- 

 duction, and theology, which relies on precept and intuition, there is 

 no conflict. As the artist appeals to the chemist for a theory of salts, 

 and to the mathematician for a theory of singular integrals, but de- 

 clares both chemist and mathematician to have no voice in a theory of 

 art, so the theologian accepts the teaching of mathematician, physicist, 

 chemist, and biologist, in their respective departments, but peremp- 

 torily excludes each and all from the supreme department of moral and 

 religious duties founded on a theory of the relations of the world to its 

 Creator. 



Thus stated, one must admit a sufficient logical consistency in the 

 present condition of compromise, and need suppose no kind of insincer- 

 ity, no conscious equivocation in the acceptance of both the natural and 

 the supernatural modes of explaining phenomena. Nor, indeed, could 

 the fundamental inconsistency of such a compromise have been even 

 recognized, until the quite modern extension of scientific method to 

 moral questions had come to complete the disintegrating effects of his- 

 torical and philosophical criticism applied to the sacred books on which 

 theology relied. In the earlier stages of development, although the 

 natural explanation was adopted in reference to the most familiar ex- 

 periences, and framed the rough theories of common-sense for the 

 habitual guidance of conduct, both in relation to the physical world 

 and to society, the supernatural was adopted in reference to whatever 

 was unusual and unseen ; and the wider range of this speculative 

 method was due to the immensity of ignorance. The slow progress of 

 positive knowledge has more and more enlarged the domain of natural 

 explanation, more and more restricted the domain of the supernatural. 

 Yet, even now, the majority of cultivated men regard the facts of hu- 

 man nature as only partly explicable without aid drawn from the super- 

 natural ; and resist, as impiety, the attempt to assign natural causes in 

 explanation of moral relations. That is to say, there where the opera- 

 tion of natural causes escapes our penetration, supernatural causes are 

 invoked. Just as to men, ignorant of natural conditions, thunder was 



