49 
respect to which science is mute. It is the fashion with some 
scientists of onr day to entirely ignore Scripture — to treat it 
as if it were so completely beaten out of the field as not to be’ 
worth even a thought. I fearlessly say that the Scriptures 
come to us with a strength of evidence and an authority so 
great, that no man has any right to ignore them, or to view 
them otherwise than as an important factor in forming his 
opinion on these subjects. The facts cannot be got rid of, 
that their teaching has civilized and elevated a great portion 
of mankind ; that, taking in the whole time since Christianity 
was first introduced, the great majority in the most civilized 
countries of the world have received it as of divine origin ; 
and that in that majority are to be found a Newton, a Leibnitz, 
a Euler, and a Descartes. With respect to Newton, Dr. Tyndall, 
in his Belfast Address, says, “ that the very devotion of his 
powers, through all the best years of his life, to a totally dif- 
ferent class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualification, 
tended to render him less instead of more competent to deal 
with theological and historic questions,” I think we may 
fairly ask, if this remark be justly applicable to Newton, what 
guarantee can Dr. Tyndall give that it is not also applicable to 
himself? It is a remark which is capable of being retorted. 
And I believe it will generally be thought that Newton was at 
least as good a theologian as Dr. Tyndall. 
8. While on this subject, I would take the liberty of making 
a short quotation from Dean ManseTs Limits of Religious 
Thought, in which are enumerated the topics which require to 
be well considered and weighed before any man can have a 
right to ignore the Scriptures. These are : — “ The genuine ■ 
ness and authenticity of the documents ; the judgment and 
good faith of the writers ; the testimony to the actual occur- 
rence of the prophecies and miracles, and their relation to the 
religious teaching with which they are connected ; the cha- 
racter of the Teacher Himself, that one portrait which, in its 
perfect purity and holiness and beauty, stands alone and un- 
approached in human history or human fiction ; those rites 
and ceremonies of the Elder Law, so significant as typical of 
Christ, so strange and meaningless without Him ; those pre- 
dictions of the promised Messiah, whose obvious meaning is 
rendered still more manifest by the futile ingenuity which 
strives to pervert them ; the history of the rise and progress 
of Christianity, and its comparison with that of other religions ; 
the ability or inability of human means to bring about the 
results which it actually accomplished ; its antagonism to the 
current ideas of the age and country of its origin ; its effects 
as a system on the moral and social condition of subsequent 
VOL. xv. E 
