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it is, in itself, uncommanded and unassailable from every 
point. The historical evidence of Christ’s life, death, and 
resurrection is the citadel of our fortress. 
It is remarkable, after all, how little, notwithstanding all 
our modern controversies, the ground of the evidential argu- 
ment, the basis of our Christian defence, has been shifted. 
Essentially in his “Bampton Lectures” Mr. Row stands on 
the selfsame ground as Paley in his “Evidences of Chris- 
tianity.” Both defenders disencumber themselves of whatever 
is non-essential, of whatever to the eye of mere intellect is 
incapable of evidential proof, and then address themselves 
to their argument ; and both argue on virtually the same 
principles. So also Paley’s argument from design, instead of 
being torn up, as we were told it was to be, and cast away 
as worthless, has been effectually rehabilitated. Having 
been modified in accordance with the language of modern 
„ thought — by such writers, for example, as the Rev. Brownlow 
Maitland, in his excellent manual entitled “ Theism or Agnos- 
ticism,” and by the Rev. Eustace R. Conder in his Congrega- 
tional Lectures entitled, “ The Basis of Faith ” — that grand 
common-sense argument holds good its ground, unanswer- 
able as before. And as respects science and philosophy — 
to recur now to these points for a few moments — there 
is, I venture to believe, no reason for panic, no reason for 
despondency. 
How far it is from being true that the highest teachers of 
science have given, or do give, any countenance to the Agnostic 
unbelief of to-day, you have, as I have already intimated, 
heard before, on occasions similar to the present, from men 
eminently competent to speak on the subject. I may, however, 
be forgiven for referring again for a moment to a point so im- 
portant. We all know that among the list of devout believers 
in these modern times have been included such men as Fara- 
day, Sir John Herschel, Professor Phillips, Professor Sedgwick; 
we know to-day that such men as Professor Stokes, Professor 
Pritchard, Professor Clerk-Maxwell are among the number. 
But I wish to ask your attention to the judgment and testimony 
of the well-known Professor Tait, of Edinburgh. This dis- 
tinguished man adopts and makes his own a passage from the 
Church of England Quarterly Review, in which, after referring 
to that branch of science of which Professor Huxley and Pro- 
fessor Tyndall are such distinguished professors, the branch 
as the writers call it, of scientific phenomenology, as “a most 
valuable but lower department of” natural science, the 
reviewer thus proceeds : — 
“ But the inferior and auxiliary science has of late assumed 
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