230 YORKSHIRE NATURALISTS’ UNION—ANNUAL MEETING. 
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 
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 umber 
Naturalist, 
