14 YORKSHIRE NATURALISTS' UNION — ANNUAL MEETING. 230 



highest interest laid upon him, he could not be content to deal 

 only with the purely scientific aspect of this question. He knew 

 that some said that science and faith occupied two distinct spheres 

 which never touched. He never could hold that. They did touch. 

 They overlapped, and they intersected. Of course, each had a 

 region of its own untouched by the other. But it was foolish to 

 say there was no point of contact. Take such things as the 

 antiquity of man, the history of the Creation, the universality of 

 the Deluge, the history of the sun and moon standing still — these 

 were instances of how the two areas intersected. Well, he had no 

 fears whatever from a patient, honest, candid, reverent study of 

 Nature. God's library did not consist of one volume alone. There 

 was the book of nature and the book of conscience, no less than 

 the book of the Revealed Word ; and if God was the author of 

 these books, he did not think they could really contradict one 

 another. If they did seem to do, we might be reading wrongly 

 the one volume or the other. It had been so before, it might be so 

 now. And if there was anything in the past history of the Church 

 more humiliating than another — he supposed moral corruption was, 

 but next to that — it was the fulminations of the Church against 

 physical science. What a sad picture is that of Galileo, with his. 

 lucid insight and his firm grasp of the Copernican system ! Who 

 could help almost weeping as one reads of the aged philosopher 

 made by the Inquisition to go down on his knees, and, with his 

 hand on the Bible, to swear that all he taught was a tissue of lies ? 

 Which really was the more likely to lead to infidelity — the light of 

 the sage or the darkness of the Church? Well, they had seen 

 something like it in later times ; in reference to Geology, for 

 instance, and the story of the days of Creation in Genesis. Again, 

 they had Evolution, and the same scare had to some extent been 

 created in these later days. Yet he thought that the higher 

 Christian philosophy, now more and more recognising the doctrine 

 of the immanence of the Creator in all creation, could accept the 

 doctrine of Evolution without fear. He did not want to assume 

 that everything had been definitely and conclusively proved, but he 

 thought they need not be in the least afraid if it should be con- 

 clusively proved ; and he supposed they were advancing every day 

 towards the acceptance of that truth as a great fact in scientific 

 discovery. But, if proved, what then ? Why, then what he would 

 say was that they had been taught what was God's method of 

 creating. Surely the creating by successive stages of advance was 

 not less wonderful, and gave one no less idea of the power and 

 wisdom of the Creator than the creating by an enormous number 



Naturalist. 



