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prophecies of the good things to come. The heavens and 
earth can never be measured and weighed aright, without 
leading to the knowledge of Him who “ telleth the number of 
the stars, and calleth them all by their names ” ; who metes the 
ocean as in the palm of his hand, and weighs the mountains 
in scales, and the hills in a balance. Life can never be studied 
aright, or its true nature and laws discerned, apart from Him 
who is the Lord and the Giver of Life, who breathed it into 
man’s nostrils in the hour of his birth, and whom truly to 
know is life eternal. As a general rule, the chief discoverers 
in Natural Science have been Christians of a modest, reverent, 
and religious tone of mind. Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, 
Boyle, Pascal, Newton ; and in the past and present centur} 7 , 
Euler, Cavendish, Cuvier, Brewster, Sedgwick, Whewell, 
Faraday, have all combined ardour in physical research with 
a spirit of reverence for Christian truth. They have entered 
into Bacon’s prayer, that no unlocking of the secrets of 
nature may cause blindness to the higher mysteries and 
messages of the word of God; and the axiom of Newton, 
that the object of physics is to trace phenomena up to their 
causes, climbing to those more and more simple and general, 
“ till we come to the First Cause, which is certainly not me- 
chanical.” 
For myself, I can see no cause whatever for alarm to tho 
Christian in the growth of what calls itself scientific disbelief. 
The divorce of physics from Christian faith and piety may be 
permitted for a moment, but it can never last. There is no 
science, but the extreme of folly, in the Atheist creed, that 
trillions of atoms were their own creators, that each chose for 
itself, in the moment of its birth, where it should pitch its 
ever-moving tent, and whether it should be an atom of matter 
or one of ether, and endued itself further with the promise 
and potency of every form of life that exists in the depths of 
ocean, on earth, or in heaven. I have no faith even in the 
desponding Theism which holds that the sun is a spendthrift 
and a prodigal, wasting nearly all its light and heat in 
riotous living, losing it in empty space, and is thus doomed 
justly, after a few millions of years, to utter bankruptcy, and 
eternal, midnight darkness. But of one thing we may be 
sure without the shadow of a doubt. The Sun of Righteous- 
ness, in His deep compassion and love, once suffered eclipse for 
a moment. But that hour of brief darkness is past, and can 
never return. He must reign, till all be subdued unto Him 
in heaven and in the earth. He must and will shine, and 
shine on for ever. The chiefs and leaders of science then only 
