200 MEMORIAL OF JOSEPH HENRY. 



sophism, and declined to yield his mind an easy prey to its bland- 

 ishments. To his eyes much of the free and easy teleology, with 

 which an under-wise and not over-reverent sciolism is wont to 

 interpret the Divine counsels and judgments, seemed little better 

 than a Brocken phantom — the grotesque and distorted image of 

 its own authors projected on mist and cloud, and hence very far 

 from being the inscrutable teleology of Him whose glory it is to 

 conceal a thing, and whose ways are often past finding out, because 

 His understanding is infinite. 



As Professor Henry was a believer in theism, so also was ho a 

 believer in revealed religion — in Christianity. He had not made 

 a study of systematic, or of dogmatic, theology as they are taught 

 in the schools, and still less was the interest he took in polemical 

 divinity, but he did have a theology which, for practical life, is 

 worth them all — the theology of a profound religious experience. 

 He was a fresh illustration of Neander's favorite saying: Pectus 

 facit theologum. The adaptation of the Christian scheme to the 

 moral wants of the human soul was the palmary proof on which 

 he rested his faith in the superhuman origin of that scheme. The 

 plan had to him the force of a theory which is scientific in its exact 

 conformity to the moral facts it explains, when these facts are pro- 

 perly known and fully understood. 



Hence he was little troubled with the modern conflict between 

 science and religion. History, as well as rejison and faith, was here 

 his teacher. He saw that the Christian church had already passed 

 through many epochs of transition, and that the friction incident to 

 such transition periods had only brushed away the incrustations of 

 theological error and heightened the brightness of theological truth. 

 In a world where the different branches and departments of human 

 knowledge are not pushed forward pari passu — where "knowledge 

 comes but wisdom lingers" — he held it nothing strange that the 

 scientific man should sometimes be unintelligible to the theologian, 

 and the theologian unintelligible to the scientific man. He believed, 

 with the old Puritan, that "the Lord has more truth yet to break 

 out of His holy word" than the systematic theologian is always 

 ready to admit j and as the humble minister and interpreter of 

 nature he was certain that the scientific man has much truth to 



