ON THE FIELDS OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 447 



of a guide or interpreter, and to meet the enemy to be 

 encountered on the ground he may himself have chosen. 

 But these are the very departments of knowledge from 

 the study of which, in our universities, the future teachers 

 and defenders of Christianity from the pulpit are syste 

 matically excluded. How many of our clergy, of any 

 denomination, were able to expose the errors of the 

 Vestiges ? How many are now able successfully to 

 encounter the new infidelities of Agassiz ? * 



first parents partook of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That 

 brutes die because man has sinned, has been asserted innumerable 

 times by divines of eminence ; but I consider it unnecessary to enter 

 into any critical examination of the few texts which have been supposed 

 to favour this idea, as they have scarcely even a semblance of giving it 

 any countenance. We are told, indeed, that sin entered into the world, 

 and death by sin ; but it is evident that the Apostle, in so expressing him 

 self, used the language in relation to man, for he adds, and so death 

 passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. {Romans, v. 12.) The 

 death of animals is a fact in the course of nature, the truth of which all 

 parties must admit. It creates, however, no special difficulty to the 

 reception of our holy faith, for it contradicts in no way whatever 

 either the Scriptural narrative or Christian doctrine. This objection, 

 when justly viewed, only shows, then, how much safer we are with the 

 Scriptures themselves, as our rule of faith and manners, than with the 

 most ably executed and generally received systems of theology.&quot; 

 Geology and Religion, by the Rev. DR KING. 



* A work against the views of Agassiz has already been published 

 by the Rev. Dr Smyth of Charlestown, on the Unity of the Human 

 Race in which Agassiz s positions and theory are reviewed. 



