68 
a position to which it is by no means entitled. It gives itself 
airs, as if it were the mistress instead of the handmaid, and 
often conceals its own incapacity and want of scientific purity 
by high-sounding phrases as to the mysteries of nature. It 
may even complain of true science, the knowledge of causes, 
as merely mechanical. It will endue matter with mysterious 
qualities and occult powers, and imagines that it discerns in 
the physical atom the promise and the potency of all terrestrial 
life” 
Professor Tait, in the same work, declares that “ science 
enables us distinctly to say that the present order of things 
has not been evolved through infinite time past by the agency 
of laws now at woi'k, but must have had a distinctive begin- 
ning, a state beyond which we are totally unable to penetrate j 
a state, in fact, which must have been produced by other than 
the now [visibly] acting causes/’ He speaks furthermore of 
“ the absolute necessity of an intervention of creative power to 
form or to destroy one atom even of dead matter,” whilst he 
declares that “ it is simply preposterous to suppose that we 
shall ever be able to understand scientifically the source of con- 
sciousness and volition, not to speak of higher things.” 
(“ Some Recent Advances in Physical Science,” pp. 349, and 
22-24.) 
Christians need not, therefore, be disturbed bj 7 such un- 
philosopliic assumptions and audacities, such unscientific 
charlatanry as that of Professor Tyndall in some of his 
popular addresses. Rashness and recklessness such as his, 
with whatever gifts of exposition and of address they may be 
accompanied, merely go to show the defect of thorough 
training and education in the brilliant Irishman, who, having 
learnt so much while acting as assistant to the great Faraday, 
unfortunately never learnt from the example of that profound 
and sagacious master of experimental philosophy that the 
“ fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and that a 
childlike faith in God and Christ is compatible with the 
character of the greatest of philosophers. 
Nor, if the fear be laid aside of any lasting danger to 
Christianity arising from “ the opposition of science falsely so 
called,” is there any more reason why Christian believers 
should stand in fear of a lasting feud between Christian faith 
and the accepted philosophy of the schools. It is true that 
during the last five-and-twent} r years the nihilistic idealism — 
or nihilistic materialism, for either description would be 
equally appropriate — of Mr. Mill has infected very largely and 
deeply the thinking of Oxford and the higher English culture 
generally. But one chief reason of this was that Oxford, that 
