be uaed for evil purposes, as In the ca&es of murderous 

 throwers of explosive missiles. A clever writer in a recent 

 number of the University Magazine, laments, in a serio- 

 comic way, that "the Devil is paissing out of fashion," that 

 "after a long and honorable career he has fallen into an un- 

 grateful oblivion," and that "ho now stands leaning en his 

 three-pronged fork looking into the ashes of his smothering 

 fire." His material Hell has been replaced by moral tor- 

 ture. And the writer goes on to ask how the laggards on 

 the highway of virtue arc to be kept advancing without the 

 three-pronged fork. The writer's lurid parable suggests to 

 me that science, with its usual enterprise, has sent abroad 

 over the eaxth a new order of evil spirits who, if they are 

 less weird, are even more effective in their devilti-y. Some- 

 times one of these modem agents of evil appears in the 

 form of a bank robber stalking about in shadowy corners of 

 the street, with false keys in one pocket and his dynamite 

 and fuse in another. Or he takes the sha.po oi the Devil's 

 attorney with his red bag under his aim and his head stuffed 

 with scientific methods- in law whereby he can make the 

 worse appear the better reason. Or again, he may take 

 the form of that famous pessimistic character of whom Job 

 writes, who did not believe that there was a good man in 

 the world, and who walked to and fro in the earth to find 

 scientific evidence which would establish his ^^•ant of faith 

 in human nature. 



To leave figure, science puts power into men's hands, 

 and if they are evil men they will use it for evil purposes. 

 But this is true not only of scientific po^ver, but of power 

 of any kind. A healthy hand may strike a cruel blow, and 

 a healthy tongue may speak a venomous word. But m 

 neither case do we blame the power, but the man who uses 

 it. Neither must science be blamed for the horrors of well- 

 thrown or well-laid bombs. 



In like manner science must not be made responsible 

 for a one-sided pursuit of it. INIere abstract ideas of life 

 may so fill a student's mind us to exclude the rich contents 



104 



