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can never serve the interests of truth. In any such hasty generalization as 
this you may be sure there lies some mistaken judgment, some sort of hidden 
misrepresentation. It is so here. Of course I do not for a moment accuse 
my brother of intentionally misrepresenting me, yet he certainly has done 
so. Hurried along by that rapidity of thought which so often belongs to 
acute but impulsive minds, he has come to the conclusion that because I am 
contending for theology and philosophy as occupying two distinct spheres of 
thought, and as having two separate missions in the world, I there- 
fore exclude from Divine teaching all facts in Scripture which bear 
upon the natural sciences. If you look to the conclusion of his 5th 
paragraph, you will see the following words : — “ The partition in 
Canon Titcomb's paper is different. All moral and spiritual truth is 
placed on one side ; all outivard facts, and physical, zoological, and human 
changes on the other.” Now, sir, I protest, in the first place, against this 
artificial summary of my views, because the words are not my own. I 
never once used the terms, “ outward facts,” “ physical, zoological, and human 
changes ” ; nor, indeed, anything like them. In appropriating them, there- 
fore, to myself and saying that I have separated them from the teaching of 
Divine Truth, my friend has simply set up a hobgoblin and hunted it 
down for his own intellectual gratification. I no less object, however, to the 
ambiguity of this language. “All moral and spiritual truth is placed on 
one side.” “On one side” — of what? Again, “a?? outward facts, &c., on 
the other side.” On the other side — of what ? The whole statement is 
loose and undefined. It is true that the sentence begins with an acknow- 
ledgment of my views being different from those of the two other writers 
before named ; nevertheless, the difference is expressed so vaguely that no 
one can tell what it means. The plain sense of the words, when taken 
in connection with the general scope of the paragraph, undoubtedly implies 
that I place “ moral and spiritual truth ” within the scope of Divine Kevela- 
tion ; but “ all outward facts and physical changes ” on the outside of it. 
I cannot but believe that I am right in this assertion ; for the paper just 
read states that my attempt is to maintain the doctrinal authority of Scrip- 
ture, and yet to impute to it a merely human authority (§ 6). Now, sir, if that 
be the intended sense of the passage, I not only repudiate it as false ; but I 
defy any careful reader of my paper to find in it one single word for its 
justification. Take, for example, the interpretation which I gave of the first 
chapter of Genesis. Is not that chapter full of “outward facts and 
physical changes”? Yet, the very basis of the whole reasoning upon it 
was, that Moses received it from God under the form of a Divine vision. 
Canon Birks may object very fairly to my belief in this series of facts and 
changes as having been communicated to Moses under a vision. That I 
allow. Although why he should object, I know not ; seeing that Balaam’s 
and Micaiah’s revelations were given by vision, and that when Isaiah 
described the mountain of the Lord’s House, established in the tops of the 
mountains, and all nations flowing into it,” he distinctly declared it to 
