THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND NATURE. 459 



The form into which Mr. Gladstone has thought fit to throw this 

 opinion leaves me in doubt as to its substance. I do not understand 

 how a hostile criticism can, under any circumstances, tend to confirm 

 that Avhich it attacks. If, however, Mr. Gladstone merely means to 

 express his personal impression, " as one wholly destitute of that kind 

 of knowledge which carries authority," that he has destroyed the value 

 of these criticisms, I have neither the Avish nor the right to attempt to 

 disturb his faith. On the other hand, I may be permitted to state my 

 own conviction that, so far as natural science is involved, M. Reville's 

 observations retain the exact value they possessed before Mr. Gladstone 

 attacked them. 



Trusting that I have now said enough to secure the author of a 

 wise and moderate disquisition upon a topic which seems fated to stir 

 unwisdom and fanaticism to their depths, a fuller measure of justice 

 than has hitherto been accorded to him, I retire from my self-appointed 

 championship, with the hope that I shall not hereafter be called upon 

 by M. Reville to apologize for damage done to his strong case by im- 

 perfect or imjjulsive advocacy. But perhaps I may be permitted to 

 add a word or two, on my own account, in reference to the great ques- 

 tion of the relations between science and religion, since it is one about 

 which I have thought a good deal ever since I have been able to think 

 at all, and about which I have ventured to express my views publicly, 

 more than once, in the course of the last thirty years. 



The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear 

 so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one 

 hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch 

 of science, theology, with religion ; and, on the other, by equally short- 

 sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province 

 only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension, and 

 that outside the boundaries of that province they must be content with 

 imagination, with hope, and with ignorance. 



It seems to me that the moral and intellectual life of the civilized 

 nations of Europe is the product of that interaction, sometimes in the 

 way of antagonism, sometimes in that of profitable interchange, of the 

 Semitic and the Aryan races, which commenced with the dawn of his- 

 tory, when Greek and Phoenician came in contact, and has been con- 

 tinued by Carthaginian and Roman, by Jew and Gentile, down to the 

 present day. Our art (except, perhaps, music) and our science are the 

 contributions of the Aryan ; but the essence of our religion is derived 

 from the Semite. In the eighth century b. c, in the heart of a world 

 of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception 

 of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of 

 genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 



"And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to 

 love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " 



