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. , Bat Eot to multiply instances of this kind in further detail ; 
it is surely a fair argument, for those who are anxious not to see 
science put unfairly or unwarrantably forward as at issue with 
Holy .Scripture, to say that, after all this recent experience of 
theories rashly adopted and authoritatively upheld, while facts 
and arguments, adduced by numerous assailants, have been 
disiegarded, refused a hearing, and despised, — they are anxious 
to see a freer discussion of scientific dogmas in a new arena, 
and especially anxious to invite an immediate and rigid inves- 
tigation and discussion of such scientific facts and theories 
that are yet said to be adverse to scriptural statements, which 
they regard to be the revealed truth of God. 
What they may well say is this : that just as Dean 
ockburn and others opposed the nebular theory twenty 
years ago, but were .not heard; so that now other com- 
petent persons dispute other quasi “ facts " in geology and 
other theories in science which now pass for true; and they 
are anxious to give these investigators a hearing, which they 
cannot expect to secure in existing scientific societies. They 
say that this must be for the real interest, and that it will tend 
to the real advancement, of true science ; and -that it has 
become a necessity in the interest of revealed truth, which it is 
so important should not be allowed to remain liable to be ever 
lashly impugned by crude theories in the name of science, with- 
out any independent organization of a scientific kind composed 
of men able and willing to watch, as it were, over the outworks 
of religion in this respect. 
Let us revert, moreover, to the remark of Professor Sedgwick, 
that the nebular theory was adopted by the geologists from 
the astronomers, while indifferent whether it was true or false ! 
And only consider what must be the effect of thus carelessly 
adopting a hypothesis in science, without raising the question 
whether it is probably true or utterly absurd, and then going 
on for years, collecting and arranging in the mind all newly 
discovered facts, with sole reference to such a groundlessly 
assumed hypothesis. In what other way could a mere unrea- 
soning prejudice be better instilled and made to grow inveterate 
m the human mind ? . Adopted thus at first, as we are told, 
with indifference, in time the nebular theory became, what 
Mr. Goodwin called “the first dear conception” of the origin 
of the world; and even now, when the intensely scarlet tint 
of the earth's imagined central fire and of the wellino- ir p 
molten granite must be obliterated in all the future graphic 
representations of the earth's sections, the cosmographists, so 
long accustomed to this false basis, will indeed be puzzled what 
