SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY 33 



It is told that a celebrated wit once silenced an 

 old Billingsgate fishwife by calling her a parallelo- 

 gram. Professor Drummond calls the merely moral 

 man a hexagon (see chapter on Classification), and 

 there is just as much science in the one case as in 

 the other. It is a mere calling of names, and the re- 

 tort in both cases is liable to be, " You 're another ! " 

 That there is a fundamental difference between the 

 crystal and the cell we all know, but to call Plato 

 or Marcus Aurelius a crystal, and Luther or Calvin 

 a living organism, is purely gratuitous. To science 

 Paul is no more alive than Plato. Both were mas- 

 ter spirits, both made a deep and lasting impression 

 upon the world, both are still living forces in the 

 world of mind to-day. Theology may see a funda- 

 mental difference between the two, but science does 

 not. Theology may attach its own meanings to the 

 terms life and death, but science can attach but one 

 meaning to them, — the meaning they have in the 

 ■universal speech of mankind. Theology may say that 

 " he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath 

 not the Son hath not life ; " but is the statement any 

 more scientific than it would be to say, " He that 

 hath Confucius hath life, and he that hath not Con- 

 fucius hath not life " ? If Christ was the life in a 

 biological and verifiable sense, then the proposition 

 would carry its own proof. But the kind of life 

 here referred to is a kind entirely unknown to sci- 

 ence. The language, like the language of so much 

 else in the New Testament, is the language of mys- 

 ticism, and is not capable of verification by any pro- 



