SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. 157 



when it is uttered as science, as it is here, it is quite another matter. 

 When it is declared that a man, say like Emerson, when compared 

 with the general of the Salvation Army, is a crystal compared to a 

 flower, and the declaration is made in the name and with the authority 

 of science, it is time to protest. In fact, to aver that the finest speci- 

 mens of the race who lived before the advent of Christianity, or who 

 have lived since, and honestly withheld their assent from the Calvin- 

 istic interpretation of it, came short of the higher life and the true des- 

 tiny of man, as much as the stone comes short of the plant, may do as 

 the personal opinion of a Scotch professor, hut to announce such an 

 opinion as the result of a scientific demonstration is an insult to sci- 

 ence and an outrage upon human nature. 



It is told of Dr. Johnson that he once silenced an old Billingsgate 

 fish-wife by calling her a parallelogram. Professor Drummond calls 

 the merely moral man a hexagon (see chapter on classification), and 

 there is just as much science in the one case as in the other. It is a 

 mere calling of names, and the retort in both cases is liable to be, 

 " You're another ! " That there is a fundamental difference between the 

 crystal and the cell we all know, but to call Plato or Marcus Aurelius 

 a crystal, and Luther or Calvin living organism, is purely gratuitous. 

 To science Paul is no more alive than Plato. Both were master-spirits, 

 both made a deep and lasting impression upon the world, both are still 

 living forces in the world of mind to-day. Theology may see a fun- 

 damental difference between the two, but science does not. Theology 

 may attach its own meanings to the terms life and death, but science 

 can attach but one meaning to them, the meaning they have in the 

 universal speech of mankind. Theology may say that " he that hath 

 the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son hath not life " ; but 

 is the statement any more scientific than it would be to say, " He 

 that hath Confucius hath life, and he that hath not Confucius hath 

 not life " ? If Christ was the life in a biological and verifiable sense, 

 then the proposition would carry its own proof. But the kind of life 

 here referred to is a kind entirely unknown to science. The language, 

 like the language of so much else in the New Testament, is the lan- 

 guage of mysticism, and is not capable of verification by any process 

 known to science. The facts that confirm it, if facts there are, lie en- 

 tirely outside of the domain of scientific inquiry, direct or indirect. 



As a matter of fact, and within the range of scientific demonstra- 

 tion, the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian, be- 

 tween the moral and the orthodox citizen, in our day, is as little as the 

 difference between Whig and Tory, or Republican and Democrat — a 

 difference of belief and of outward observance, and in no sense a fun- 

 damental difference of life and character. Is it probable that a scien- 

 tific commission could establish any essential differences, say between 

 Professor Tyndall and Professor Drummond, any differences which 

 the latter owed to his orthodoxy that enhanced his worth as a man, as 



