VII 



THE LOGIC OF FACTS 97 



or other, and to a greater or less degree, influence many others, 

 even those not directly connected with it, and therefore the rapid 

 simultaneous strides of so many branches of knowledge as may 

 be embraced under the term of "recent advances in natural 

 science" will be very likely to have some bearing upon 

 theological beliefs. Whether in the direction of expanding, 

 improving, purifying, elevating, or in the direction of contracting, 

 hardening, and destroying, depends not upon those engaged in 

 contributing to the advance of science, but upon those whose 

 special duty it is to show the bearing of those advances upon 

 hitherto received theological dogmas. The scientific questions 

 themselves may well be left to experts. If the new doctrines are 

 not true, there are plenty of keen critics among men of science 

 ready to sift the sound from the unsound. Error in scientific 

 subjects has its day, but it is certain not long to survive the 

 ordeal, yearly increasing in severity, to which it is subjected by 

 those devoted to its cultivation. On the other hand the advances 

 of truth, though they may be retarded, will never be stopped by 

 the opposition of those who are incompetent by the nature of 

 their education to deal with the evidence on which it rests. 



There is no position so fraught with danger to religion as that 

 which binds it up essentially with this or that scientific doctrine, 

 with which it must either stand or fall. The history of the 

 reception of the greatest discoveries in astronomy and geology, 

 the passionate cHnging to the exploded pseudo-scientific views on 

 those subjects supposed to be bound up with religious faith, the 

 fierce denunciation of the advocates of the then new, but now 

 universally accepted, ideas, are well worn subjects, and would not 

 be alluded to but for the repetition — almost literal repetition in 

 some cases — of that reception which has been accorded to the 

 new views of biology. Ought not the history of those discoveries, 

 and the controversies to which they gave rise, to be both a 

 warning and an encouragement ? Those who hoped and those 

 who feared that faith would be destroyed by them have been 

 equally mistaken ; and is it not probable that the same result 

 will follow the great biological discoveries and controversies of 

 the present day ? In stating thus briefly what is the issue of 

 these discoveries, as generally understood and accepted by men 



H 



