SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



705 



hold that religion is essentially an 

 attitude of mind and heart, a seeing 

 of the invisible, an instinctive recog- 

 nition of a supreme moral authority, 

 a sense that every human being is 

 called to nothing less than holiness 

 of life. They reverence the Scrip- 

 tures because in them, as in no other 

 body of writings in the world, the 

 realities of religion are both ex- 

 pressed and implied. They do not 

 demand of the Bible perfect agree- 

 ment with either scientific or his- 

 toric truth; they are content if they 

 find in it the spiritual basis of hu- 

 man life, a scheme of thought that 

 links the individual human being 

 with an infinite origin and an infi- 

 nite destiny. From their standpoint 

 the value of the Bible for the high- 

 est moral purposes would in no way 

 be increased if every word in it 

 which touches on scientific or his- 

 torical questions had the seal of all 

 the academies in the Old World and 

 the New. 



It is not a difiicult thing, nor does 

 it require much wisdom, to harry 

 a man whose independent thinking 



and moral earnestness have forced 

 him to take a different attitude to- 

 ward some great question from that 

 which is adopted by the multitude. 

 It is easy to present his views in 

 an invidious light, but a more use- 

 ful task would be to show that 

 all that is essential and precious 

 in religious belief can exist as well 

 in a philosophical as in a popular 

 form. With such a thesis it may not 

 be quite so easy to " score," but it is 

 a pity when the standards of the re- 

 porters' room invade the desk of the 

 literary or theological editor. It is 

 upon such men as we have men- 

 tioned, men of competent scolarship 

 and earnest spirit, that the task is 

 laid of purifying and liberating the 

 religious consciousness of the age; 

 and we do not hesitate to say that 

 when, from the vantage height of 

 modern knowledge, they afiirm with 

 deep conviction the indestructible- 

 ness of the religious sentiment and 

 the everlasting reality of its object, 

 they render a service which, from a 

 religious point of Adew, can not be 

 overestimated. 



3titnXitit ^lteratut:je. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



In a stout volume * of nearly a thousand pages Mr. Jachson, the leader 

 of the Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Expedition of 1894r-'97, puts into per- 

 manent form the record of three years' observations made in Franz-Josef 

 Land, a region beyond the eightieth parallel of latitude, which was acci- 

 dentally made known to the world twenty years before by the drift of the 

 Tegethoff, the ill-fated vessel of the Austrian expedition of Payer and 

 Weyprecht. As such it is a substantial contribution to arctic literature, 

 and from it much important detail will be obtained by those seeking fur- 

 ther adventure in the quest for the pole, and a mass of material, geographic 

 and otherwise, pertaining to the region which forms the subject of the 

 work before us. The meteorological data, covering as they do a longer 

 continuous period of observation in the extreme North than has hereto- 

 fore been possible, and fittingly supplementing those recorded by Nansen 

 for an almost equal period, will be specially prized by the scientist, even 

 if the facts of the air are not considered to be the main object of arctic 



* A Thousand Days in the Arctic. By Frederick G. Jackson, Knight, First Class, of the Royal 

 Order of St. Olaf, etc. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1899. 



VOL. LT.— 49 



