332 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



are past finding out. Familiar as Miller was with 

 the tremendous reasonings of Hume's Dialogues on 

 Natural Religion, he was not one to take refuge in 

 the amiable platitudes of the Rosa Matilda school, or 

 to wrap himself from the lightnings in garlands of 

 flowers. He would not have shrunk from admitting, in 

 all that width of extension and precision of application 

 which Mr Darwin and his school have shown to belong 

 to it, the law of pain throughout the world of life. 

 Survival of the stronger, with extermination of the 

 weaker by famine and anguish, he would, I think, have 

 allowed to be the law of physical nature. He would, 

 at the same time, have maintained that ' a gradual pro- 

 gress towards perfection,' though, as Mr Huxley points 

 out, it forms no necessary part of the Darwinian creed, 

 is revealed in nature. He would have dwelt with Goethe 

 on the fact that death itself is but a subtle contrivance 

 by which more life is obtained. Above all, he would 

 have insisted, as neither Hume, Goethe, nor Darwin 

 have insisted, upon sin as an explanation of misery, 

 and upon the promise of redemption and immortality 

 through Christ, as sending a stream of celestial radiance 

 far up into the hollow of the terrestrial night. 



It was a heart-rending experience for Miller that the 

 erect, fearless, friendly attitude which he felt ought to 

 be that of religion towards scientific truth gave offence 

 to religious people. He would have been so glad, in 

 his visit to England, if he could have convicted the 

 Anglo-Catholics, and them alone, of distrust and alarm 

 with regard to science, and could have left them to 

 nurse their childish Mediasvalism in all departments, 

 while the sturdier sons of the Reformers welcomed 

 every revelation of science as Divine. His Evangelical 

 Religion was of that early and vigorous type which, 



