268 REV. H. J. CLARKE. 
Mr. R. Niven.—May I ask for information (I am not wishing to 
take a hostile view) on what grounds you would justify the reassur- 
ing statement which occurs in the last sentence of the lecture, “ the 
true secret of that authority to which unconscious nature yields a 
never-wayering obedience, and which, as time goes on, is over- 
throwing and demolishing those baseless speculations wherein 
Creator and creation are confounded, and is absorbing, slowly in- 
deed, but surely, every realm of thought into the kingdom which 
shall have no end”? Does not that, in view of the state of modern 
thought, whatever it is called, or modern science, seem rather at 
variance with the actual fact? 
The AutHor.—I admit, of course, that in the progress of that 
absorption there are fluctuations,—the progress is not steady; yet 
still I cannot myself but believe that the process of absorption is 
going on,—that fundamental Christian principles are gradually 
transforming scientific conception. 
Mr. Nivey.—Does not it rather seem as if Christian apologists, 
as I suppose they would still be called, have been obliged, in view of 
recent supposed discoveries, to form new theories, and theories that 
would not have been held by old Christian authorities, to govern 
supposed new facts, and that you can hardly say, that being 
the state of things, that the Christian position is actually at this 
moment (whatever it may do ultimately) absorbing these new 
schools ? 
The AvurHor.—By the Christian conception I mean the funda- 
mental Christian conception ; but it seems to me to be embodied in 
the word “Logos.” Of course, so long as philosophy is infected by 
materialism, there remains something which still has to be trans- 
formed into the Christian conception; but I believe myself that the 
Logos (that is to say, the true conception of the first principle of all 
things) is so transforming scientific conception that in the end 
materialism will be abandoned,—it will be a thing of the past. I 
think that change has gone on to some extent already in this 
country and in Germany, where, I think, the spiritual view of 
origination is powerful. 
Mr. Nivey.—I suppose you admit that the great representatives 
of scientific thought, or at least three of the greatest representa- 
tives, have been Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley. Would you kindly 
show me in what degree this conception has transformed or even 
affected their conception ? 
