402 SCIENTIB'IC THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 



immortality. And again it was said, If species originate by evolution, 

 and not by special creation, there is no God. So it had been said cen- 

 turies before, If the earth revolves around the sun. Christian faith 

 must be abandoned as a superstition. But in the nineteenth century, 

 as in the sixteenth, the scientific conclusions won their way to universal 

 acceptance, and Christian faith survived. It showed a plasticity which 

 enabled it to adapt itself to the changing- environment. The magically 

 inerrant Bil)le may be abandoned, and leave intact the faith of the 

 church in a divine revelation. The correlation of forces acting in the 

 human cerebrum with those of inorganic nature may be freely admitted; 

 and yet we may hold that there are other forms of causation in the 

 universe than physical energy, and that the inexpugnable belief of 

 moral responsibility is more valid than the strongest induction. The 

 "carpenter God" of the older natural theology may vanish from a 

 universe, which we have come to regard as a growth and not a liuild- 

 ing; but there remains the immanent Intelligence 



"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

 And the round ocean, and the living air, 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;" 



the God in whom "we live and move and have our being," 



The church has learned wisdom. The persecution of Galileo is not 

 likely to be repeated, nor even the milder forms of persecution which 

 assailed the geologists at the beginning, and the evolutionists in the 

 middle, of our century. And science, too, has learned something. In 

 all its wealth of discovery it recognizes more clearly than ever before 

 the fathomless abysses of the unknown and unknowable. It stands 

 with unsandaled feet in the presence of mvsteries that transcend human 

 thought. Religion never so tolerant. Science never so reverent. 

 Nearer than ever before seems the time when all souls that are loyal 

 to truth and goodness shall find fellowship in treedom of faith and in 

 service of love. 



