EDITORIAL AND GENERAL 



119 



the world has been a progress from the 

 worship of Nature for herself alone to 

 the worship of Mini whom she so ad- 

 mirably reveals. 



There are those who tell us that 

 science has dethroned the Almighty, 

 annihilated spirit, abolished Heaven 

 and Nell, given a rude and final awak- 

 ening' from the age-long dream of im- 

 mortality, and sent all gods and angels 

 and devils and departed souls to join 

 the dryads and fauns, the jinns and 

 nagas, the gnomes and brownies, in 

 the No-man's land of a discredited 

 mythology and folkloie. I hit when 

 they attempt, as does llaeckel in his 

 Riddle of the Universe, to show why 

 and how the discoveries of science have 

 had these effects they are unable to 

 point out a single one that has any 

 bearing on their argument. Christian 

 and Mohammedan and Hindu theology 

 and religious learning have been devel- 

 oped with a full concurrent knowledge 

 of what Haeckel calls the Law of Sub- 

 stance — that is to say the persistence 

 of matter and the conservation of 

 energy, the changelessness of the sum- 

 total of matter and of force ; and cen- 

 turies before Christ the law of evolu- 

 tion was taken for granted, as the most 

 certain of all truths, by the Sankhya 

 philosophy of the East and the Ionian 

 philosophy of the "West. 



In spite of the noisy declamations, 

 in a contrary sense, of certain popu- 

 larizers and "readers of scientific liter- 

 ature" who profess to speak in its 

 name, natural science as a whole is 

 now , and always has been, sober, rev- 

 erent and religious. Those wdio repu- 

 diate religion, or' all supercorporeal 

 realities, in the name of science, do so 

 either because the}- have been led 

 astray by a false metaphysics or be- 

 cause the}- have tried to learn and 

 exolain, by the data afforded in the 

 detailed story of Nature, that which 

 belongs to an entirely different field 

 of human thought and endeavor. The 

 real scientific workers, those who are 

 actually making the experiments and 

 syntheses which furnish to the popula, 

 scientific philosophers their materials, 

 are for the most part, taking the world 

 over, earnest and devout men who- 



like Agassiz, Newton, Mivart and 

 Thompson, like Ampere and Pasteur 



— read reverently the Hook of Nature 

 as an Elder Scripture writ by the very 

 finger of (it id and proclaiming Mis 

 goodness and glory in every page and 

 line and character. 



The bitterest of the scientific ene- 

 mies of spiritual religion bias meme 

 Nature as well as God; for the}- follow 

 out the negations of Scicntism to their 

 logical conclusion in the Philosophy of 

 Disillusion, consider Nature itself as 

 (piite as unknowable and illusory as 

 spirit and make scientific experiment 

 as meaningless and worthless as theo- 



'There is i">t an animal, a plant or a stone that does 

 not proclaim in unmistakable the 



glory of the Crei 



