or THF 

 UNIVERSITY 



PREFf\GE. 



As the writer states in the leading paragraph of the 

 first of the four lectures here offered, they were delivered 

 in response to an invitation'of the Right Reverend Rector 

 Bishop Keane, of the Catholic University of America, 

 and addressed to the faculty and students of that insti- 

 tution and an audience of ladies and gentlemen coming 

 principally from the city of Washington, D. C., and gath- 

 ered in the public lecture hall of the University, that seat 

 of learning being situated but a few miles from the afore- 

 said city. 



The lectures were delivered in the order they are here 

 printed, and upon the four Thursday afternoons in the 

 month of January, 1892, between the hours of four and 

 five o'clock. 



The author of them not being a Roman Catholic in any 

 sense of the word, nor even an acceptor of the fundamen- 

 tal requirements of the Christain faith, it was a matter 

 of no little surprise, and, it may be added, of gratifica- 

 tion, that he was the recipient of a call to undertake such 

 a task, coming, as it did, from such a 

 quarter. Surprise, from the fact that all history goes 

 to show that Catholicism has been ever since the dawn 

 of learning the open and avowed enemy of all science 

 and scientific progress: and gratification, principally due 

 to the evidence that, perhaps, the day was drawing nigh 

 when even Catholics were, at last, prepared not only to 

 listen to the teachings of science but to feel the truth of 

 them. My sense of gratification was the further intensi- 



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