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been stated in the paper before us with sufficient accuracy for the purposes 
of scientific discussion. Belief and faith : there is a reference somewhere 
in the paper which evidently confounds them as though they were one and 
the same thing ; the belief in a fact, and trust and submission to an 
authority. Ultimately, it may be, that these two things repose upon 
the self-same principle of testimony, but nevertheless, there is a very 
great difference in nature between the belief in a fact upon testimony 
and trust in authority. In regard to moral conduct these two things 
are essentially distinct, and it is very necessary indeed, when we are 
dealing with this wide topic, that we should not confuse things so different 
as a belief in a fact, and that variety of faith which leads us to trust 
and to submit ourselves to authority, as if they were the self-same 
thing. Altogether, I do think it is of the utmost importance that we 
should not allow men of science to teach us that there are two 
entirely distinct provinces the one, the province of knowledge, and 
the other, the province of faith. I do not know where science 
would be if it were not for some faiths on which science itself reposes. 
I think it will be found that scientific men themselves, in their discussions, 
are perpetually taking for granted principles not to be distinguished 
in their nature from what they are pleased to call beliefs : ° taking 
for granted, in fact, things which caunot be demonstrated ; things 
of which we may feel absolutely certain, but which rest on no other 
basis than an intuitive conviction. The very existence of one’s own 
personality will be found, when we come to analyze it, to be a necessary 
assumption in a great deal of scientific investigation and discussion, but 
it is a thing which can never be proved by science in that sense in 
which scientific men speak of proof to-day. Even in regard to the laws 
of the universe, there are a great many things which are assumed, as 
has been shown by Professor Martineau in his discussions on the sub- 
ject, and we shall find, I think, that it is necessary for us to hold 
fast by the truth ; that there is no such wide and essential distinction 
capable of being established, as it is the custom to assume, between the 
province of demonstration in regard to matters of so-called science on the 
one hand, and the province of conviction in regard to matters of belief. 
Doubtless, all our faith as Christians rests ultimately upon historical inves- 
tigation and demonstration — it rests ultimately, doubtless, upon testimony. 
Out of the facts of history, established as historical facts, the mysteries 
themselves come forth to our view, and it is precisely the same with science. 
There is hardly a fact of science which would not have been rejected before- 
hand as incredible. There is hardly a fact of modern science which, if it had 
been stated for the first time, without any sort of preliminary preparation 
leading up to it, would not have been rejected as a thing altogether 
inconceivable and altogether incredible. Science has, one after another, 
and by slow and painful effort, established things which all the world 
in the first instance, would have declared were things that never could 
