The Religious Work of Science. 495 



have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Ex- 

 tinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science 

 as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules, and history 

 records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been 

 fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the 

 lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated." But be this 

 as it may, science has achieved its noble work, as all the 

 world now testifies. It has gained supremacy ov^r the 

 forces of Nature, it has established principles for the guid- 

 ance of human action, it has liberated the human mind 

 from the paralyzing fear and thralldom of superstition, and 

 opened a new and more hopeful dispensation for humanity. 

 But its grandest achievement is that it has recreated the 

 universe in thought, and, by elevating and expanding man's 

 conceptions of the sphere of harmony and law, has exalted 

 our reverential feelings toward the Infinite Power by which 

 it is ordered and sustained. So profound a revolution as 

 science has accomplished must be felt in every department 

 of thought, theological as well as others, and its influence 

 here is something more than a perturbation ; it is seen in a 

 radical modification of views. Less and less do we hear 

 from theologians of what is to be learned from the lapses 

 and suspensions of physical law, and more and more of the 

 teachings of its unbroken order. Theology begins to ac- 

 cord to science the leadership of thought, and avows her 

 readiness to accept whatever science can establish as truth. 

 Take a recent case. 



Within the present generation scientific men have pro- 

 mulgated the doctrine that the universe did not come into 

 existence in the way generally believed, but that it has 

 been gradually unfolded, and that the world and all that it 

 contains are but the final terms in an immense series of 

 changes which have been brought about by natural causes 

 in the course of immeasurable time. No theory ever before 

 propounded by science was so all-disturbing as this. It re- 



