SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 147 



more confused mixture of science and theology probably the whole 

 range of printed books does not afford. The positions and conclusions 

 of the latter are constantly uttered as if they were the demonstrations 

 of the former. And this is the obnoxious feature of the book. With 

 Professor Drummond's theology, as such, I have nothing to do, having 

 long ago made my peace with Calvinism. It is only because he utters 

 his theology in the name of science, or as the result of a scientific dem- 

 onstration, that I am occupied with him here. 



When it is declared by a college Professor of Natural Science, as it 

 virtually is in this book, that in the laws and processes of the physical 

 universe that which is science at one end is Scotch Presbyterianism at 

 the other, the proposition arrests attention by its novelty at least. 



" The spiritual world as it stands," he declares, "is full of perplex- 

 ity. One can escape doubt only by escaping thought. . . . The old 

 ground of faith authority is given up ; the new [ground] science has 

 not taken its place." It is his purpose to give to faith this new 

 ground of science. Up to this time, he says, the spiritual world has 

 been looked upon as outside of natural law. Evolution and revelation 

 have been at swords' points ; he has not merely made peace between 

 them, but he clearly believes himself to have enlisted the forces of the 

 former under the banner of the latter. Science, he says, can hear 

 nothing of a " Great Exception." The present decadence of religion is 

 owing to the fact that it has been too long treated as the great excep- 

 tion — cut off by an insurmountable barrier from the natural order of 

 things. It is now found by this Christian philosopher to be as com- 

 pletely under the dominion of natural law as any branch of physical 

 science. What Jussieu and De Candolle did for botany in substituting 

 the natural system for the artificial, what Lyell did for geology in get- 

 ting rid of " catastrophism," what Newton did for astronomy by his 

 law of gravitation, our Glasgow professor flatters himself (rather 

 covertly, to be sure) he has done, or showed the way to do, for theol- 

 ogy. He has introduced law and order where before were chaos and 

 " perplexity." 



All this sounds as promising to the man of science as it must sound 

 bewildering and discouraging to the theologian — because, has not 

 theology always maintained that revealed religion was superior to 

 reason, and that the natural man, with his profane sciences, was at 

 enmity with God ? 



Sir Thomas Browne speaks as a theologian when he says that reason 

 is a rebel unto faith, and that " many things are true in divinity which 

 are neither inducible by reason nor confirmable by sense"; but he 

 spoke as a man of science when he said : " I can cure vices by physic 

 when they remain incurable by divinity ; and they shall obey my pills 

 when they contemn their precepts." Indeed, science and divinity oc- 

 cupy essentially different points of view, in many respects antagonis- 

 tic points of view. 



