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more particularly do I congratulate this Society on the success it has 
had in realizing the object for which it was founded; that was, as 
you all know, to reconcile apparent discrepancies between science and 
revelation, and to explain away difficulties which had then perplexed, 
and now still perplex to a great degree, the mind of the honest 
inquirer after truth. We live in an intellectual age ; there never was 
a time, perhaps, when the human mind pried more into the secrets 
of nature than it has done in the last fifty years. The progress of 
science has been remarkable; its triumphs have been brilliant; and in 
no period of the world’s history have the advances made by science 
been more remarkable than those of the last fifty or eighty years. 
Well, no doubt, this has been a great gain to humanity ; the human 
intellect has been extended, the mental horizon has been enlarged, and 
there has been a great addition to the comforts and conveniences of 
material life ; hut, unfortunately, accompanied with all this, there has been 
a tone adopted on the part of some — happily only some — men of science, 
I will not say only unfavourable, but positively hostile to religion. And 
by religion I mean not only revealed religion, namely Christianity, but the 
great truths of Natural Religion itself; many of the doctrines tending to rank 
materialism, to the denial of a personal Creator, and the extinction of all our 
hopes of a happy immortality hereafter. Well, no doubt there were great 
perplexity and confusion felt in the minds of many, because they thought that 
as science must be true, and science and religion seemed to be opposed, 
religion must be false. It was a happy thought, therefore, I think, on the part 
of the founders of this Institute, to endeavour to array on the side of religion 
men who should not merely be religious men, deeply convinced of the truths 
of religion, but men perfectly competent to grapple with science on its own 
ground, to fight the enemies of the faith with their own weapons, and engage 
in controversy with them upon equal terms. Now', it seems to me that two 
great causes of the difficulties which weighed upon men’s minds were these : 
— the one was that they were unable to distinguish between the real disco- 
veries of science on admittedly-proved facts, and the theories and conjectures of 
science which were dogmatically put forward by men of science as if they had 
been really proved ; and secondly, I think, men were apt to take too narrow 
a view of revelation itself, and to expect to find in it what revelation 
does not contain. I think the more rational view to take of it is that we 
should not expect to find in revelation enunciations and explanations 
of physical phenomena, or that the progress of the human mind should 
be anticipated, and scientific facts revealed to men which had nothing whatever 
to do with the spiritual nature or the moral government of the Great Ruler 
of the universe. With respect to the object of the founders of this Society, I 
must say that they have carried it out with wonderful efficiency and success. It 
is impossible to look at the papers that have been selected for the purpose of 
discussion in the Victoria Institute, and not see that they are the pro- 
ductions of men of enlarged intellect, of singular powers of scientific observa- 
tion, and who are as perfectly competent to deal with scientific subjects as 
