SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 149 



Indeed, the question which it is not safe to ask of any religion is just 

 the one we are prone to ask first, namely, Is it true ? A much safer 

 question is, Is it saving ? That is, does it hold men up to a higher 

 standard of life and duty than they were otherwise capable of ? Does 

 it cheer and sustain them in their journey through this world ? Could 

 the religion of Greece have faced the question, Is it true ? And yet 

 the German historian of Greece, Dr. Curtius, says that the religion of 

 Apollo "was nowhere introduced without taking hold of and trans- 

 forming the whole life of the people. It liberated men from dark and 

 groveling worship of Nature ; it converted the worship of a god into 

 the duty of moral elevation ; it founded expiations for those oppressed 

 with guilt, and for those astray, without guidance, sacred oracles." 

 Can historical Christianity any better face the question, Is it true? 

 Did all these events fall out as set down in the New Testament? Are 

 they set in their true light ? And yet who besides Professor Clifford 

 dare say that Christianity has not been a tremendous power in ele- 

 vating and civilizing the European nations ? 



Science affirms that every child born of woman since the world 

 began belonged to the human species, and had an earthly father ; the- 

 ology affirms that this is true of every child but one : one child, born 

 in Judea over eighteen hundred years ago, was an exception, was indeed 

 very God himself. Theology makes a similar claim with regard to 

 the Bible. It affirms that every book in the world was written by a 

 human being, and is therefore more or less fallible and imperfect, with 

 the exception of one — that one is the Bible. This is the great excep- 

 tion : the Bible is not the work of man, but is the word of God him- 

 self uttered through man, and is therefore infallible. Science simply 

 sees in the Bible one of the sacred books of the nations — undoubtedly 

 the greatest of them all — but still a book or a collection of books 

 embodying the history, the ideas, the religious wants and yearnings 

 of a very peculiar people — a people without a vestige of science, but 

 with the tie of race and the aspiration after God stronger than in any 

 other people — a people still wandering in the wilderness, and rejected 

 by the nations to whom they gave Christianity. Science knows God, 

 too, as law, or as the force and vitality which pervade and uphold all 

 things ; it knows Christ as a great teacher and prophet, and as the 

 savior of men. How? By virtue of the contract made in the Council 

 of the Trinity as set forth in the creed of Calvinism ? No ; but by 

 his unique and tremendous announcement of the law of love, and the 

 daily illustration of it in his life. Salvation by Christ is salvation by 

 self-renunciation, and by gentleness, mercy, charity, purity, and by all 

 the divine qualities he illustrated. He saves us when we are like him, 

 as tender, as charitable, as unworldly, as devoted to principle, as self- 

 sacrificing. His life and death do inspire in mankind these things ; 

 fill them with this noble ideal. He was a soul impressed, as perhaps 

 no other soul ever had been, with the oneness of man with God, and 



