COMMEMORATION MEETING. L69 



was only regarded as a tribal God, but tbat gradually tbe Jews 

 were led on to the nobler and truer belief in monotlieism. 



It seems to me, then, that everything which we have learned 

 from science during the last fifty years has tended not to 

 destroy faith, but to purify it. It has tended to banish 

 fetishes, to clarify thought ; to bring our faith into harmony 

 with conscience, common sense, history, and reason. It has not 

 destroyed anything valuable, but bestowed on us the boon of 

 scattering the chaff to the four winds of heaven. Long may it 

 stay there. It has brought out more clearly than was realized 

 before that a moral and spiritual life based on the teaching and 

 example of our Lord, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the 

 one thing that " the Lord requires of us." 



In conclusion, let me add that there may be some bere who 

 do not accept evolution, higher criticism, or the results in 

 archaeology which I have indicated. My object is not to raise 

 any controversy on such matters, but to show that from the 

 point of view of those who, like myself, recognize the above- 

 mentioned results, true religion is advantaged and not injured 

 by scientific progress. 



The Chairman then invited -Mr. Walter Maunder, F.E.A.S., 

 to make some remarks upon — 



FIFTY YEARS' PROGRESS IN ASTRONOMY. 



The Victoria Institute was founded fifty years ago, chiefly 

 because some distinguished men had made the assertion that 

 science and religion were at issue. This assertion itself 

 demanded investigation, and the Victoria Institute was founded 

 largely to secure that that investigation was unprejudiced. 



The particular science in which I am myself interested was 

 not specially concerned at the time to which we are now 

 looking back. For it, tbe question had been thrashed out three 

 hundred years earlier. Then Galileo, the founder of the new 

 astronomy, had ventured to declare that the earth moved round 

 the sun and that the sun was at rest. The old astronomy had 

 asserted the contrary and, as was but natural, its adherents had 

 believed that many texts of Holy Scripture supported their 

 cosmological ideas. The world to-day accepts one of Galileo's 

 doctrines, that the earth moves, and rejects the other, that the 

 sun is at rest, and it does this quite irrespective of any belief or 

 want of belief in the inspiration of Holy Scripture. Most 



