xxiv REPORT—1868. 
due to it. But Dr. Hanna omits to observe that the majority of these 
honoured contributors were not religious teachers in the ordinary sense of 
the term; nor does he tell us in what light many of their scientific writings 
were regarded by a large body of their brother clergymen, those resident in 
the country especially, from whom alone an overwhelming proportion of the 
population ever hear the name of science. 
To return, let each pursue the search for truth, the archeologist into the 
physical, the religious teacher into the spiritual history and condition of 
mankind. It will be in vain that each regards the other’s pursuit from afar, 
and turning the object-glass of his mind’s telescope to his eye, is content 
when he sees how small the other looks. 
To search out the whence and whither of his existence, is an unquench- 
able instinct of the human mind; to satisfy it, man in every age, and in 
every country, has adopted creeds that embrace his past history and his 
future being, and has eagerly accepted scientific truths that support the 
creeds ; and but for this unquenchable instinct, I for one believe that neither 
religion nor science would have advanced so far as they have into the hearts of 
any people. Science has never in this search hindered the religious aspira- 
tions of good and earnest men; nor have pulpit cautions, which are too often 
ill-disguised deterrents, ever turned inquiring minds from the revelations of 
science. 
A sea of time spreads its waters between that period to which the earliest 
traditions of our ancestors point, and that far earlier period, when man first 
appeared upon the globe. For his track upon that sea man vainly questions 
his spiritual teachers. Along its hither shore, if not across it, science now 
offers to pilot him. ach fresh discovery concerning pre-historic man is as 
a pier built on some rock its tide has exposed, and from these piers arches will 
one day spring that will carry him further and further across its depths. 
Science, it is true, may never sound the depths of that sea, may never buoy 
its shallows, or span its narrowest creeks ; but she will still build on every 
tide-washed rock, nor will she deem her mission fulfilled till she has sounded 
its profoundest depths and reached its further shore, or proved the one to be 
unfathomable and the other unattainable, upon evidence not yet revealed to 
mankind. And if in her track she bears in mind that it is a common object 
of religion and of science to seek to understand the infancy of human ex- 
istence, that the laws of mind are not yet relegated to the domain of 
the teachers of physical science, and that the laws of matter are not within 
the religious teacher’s province, these may then work together in harmony 
and with good will. 
But if they would thus work in harmony, both parties must beware how 
they fence with that most dangerous of all two-edged weapons, Natural 
Theology ; a science, falsely so called, when, not content with trustfully 
accepting truths hostile to any presumptuous standard it may set up, it seeks 
to weigh the infinite in the balance of the finite, and shifts its ground to 
meet the requirements of every new fact that science establishes, and every 
old error that science exposes. Thus pursued, Natural Theology is to the 
scientific man a delusion, and to the religious man a snare, leading too often 
to disordered intellects and to atheism. 
One of our deepest thinkers *, Mr. Herbert Spencer, has said :—* If reli- 
gion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of the reconciliation must be 
this deepest, widest, and most certain of facts, that the power which the 
universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.” The bonds that unite the 
* First Principles, by Herbert Spencer, ed. ii, p. 16. 
