I'HK RELATIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION, KTC. 279 



powers, the results of purely material laws. The process of 

 " reconciliation " seems to me to have gone very far in the nearly 

 sixty years through which my ministerial life has passed, and 

 we may entertain a confident belief in its fuller realization. 

 There is no occasion for theologians to throw aside parts of their 

 creed as irreconcilable with modern science, for there is every 

 sign that science is steadily approximating to the principles 

 which are at the foundation of the Christian Creed. Its 

 revelations are more and more in accordance with the grand 

 convictions respecting the Divine Nature which Kewton 

 expresses in tlie following passage from the concluding Scholium 

 of the FriTwipia, to which I have already referred : — 



" The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely 

 perfect ; but a Being, however perfect, without dominion is 

 not the Lord God. It is the dominion of a spiritual Being 

 which constitutes a God : true dominion a true God ; the 

 highest dominion the highest God ; a feigned dominion a 

 feigned God ; and from a true dominion it follows that the true 

 God is living, intelligent, and mighty ; and from His other 



perfections that He is Supreme, or Supremely Perfect 



God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is 



<jmnipresent, not merely virtually but substantially In 



Him all things are contained and moved, but God is not affected 

 by the motions of bodies, and they experience no resistance from 

 the omnipresence of God. It is manifest that a Supreme God 

 must necessarily exist ; and by the same necessity He exists 

 always and everywhere. Whence also He is wholly similar to 

 Himself, wholly an eye, wholly an ear, wholly a brain, wholly 

 an arm ; one total force of feeling, of understanding, and of 

 acting, but in a manner in no way human, in no way corporeal — 

 a manner absolutely unknown to us. As a blind man has no 

 idea of colours, so we have no idea of the modes in which a God 

 of all wisdom perceives and understands all things. He is 

 destitute of all body and corporeal figure, and therefore can 

 neither be seen, nor heard, nor touched, and ought not to be 

 worshipped in the form of any corporeal thing. We have ideas 

 of His attributes ; but what is the substance of anything what- 

 ever we in no way apprehend. We see only the figures and 

 colours of bodies, we hear only sounds, we touch only external 

 .surfaces, we smell only odours, and we taste only savours ; but 

 the intimate substances we cannot recognize by any sense or 

 any reflex action, and much less have we any idea of the 

 substance of God. Him we only know by His properties and 

 attributes, and by the supremely wise and good structures of 



