60 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



correctness to but a few, their rigid rejection of all 

 outside their small flocks. It is almost two hundred 

 years ago that Jonathan Edwards, at Northampton, 

 Massachusetts, preached his famous sermon, — "Sin- 

 ners in the Hands of an Angry God," painting hell- 

 lire with such eloquence and power that his hearers 

 gripped the pew backs in agonies of religious ecstasy, 

 as they consigned nearly all people on earth to perdi- 

 tion. He gave this sermon nearly one hundred times, 

 it is said, and always read it from manuscript, perhaps 

 to be sure that he would not improvise on so vital a 

 theme. It was Edwards, too, later president of 

 Princeton, who gave from his pulpit the kindly pro- 

 nouncement : 



As innocent as young children seem to be to us, yet if they 

 are out of Christ they are in God's sight young vipers, and in- 

 finitely more hateful than vipers. 



And, one hundred fifty years later than Edwards, the 

 laws of the science of that date seemed so sure, so 

 divinely ordained, so to speak, that all authority rested 

 in them, and it was felt that we were here and there 

 coming quite close to the real boundaries in all aspects 

 of nature. It was a scientist who proved the impos- 

 sibility of a steamship crossing the Atlantic under its 

 own power; scientists assigned a few paltry million 

 years for the past and future duration of the sun; 

 scientists gave us what Chesterton feelingly refers to 

 as "the dear old atom," and the immutability of 

 matter. It is not so much the subject matter of the 

 scientific gifts of that now almost prehistoric age 

 which causes a slight scientific blush for the tribe in 

 general, as was the mental attitude accompanying the 



