158 
Surely if there be one characteristic of our age more pro- 
minent than another , it is that of comprehensiveness rather 
than of exclusion — of so-called large-heartedness rather than 
narrowness of mind. We have had scientific theories ad 
nauseam — theories almost to the obscuration of science : our 
nebular theory, our vulcanic theory, our plutonic theory 
respecting the earth — and each has had its day and passed 
current as science. We have had theories of man's origin and 
status ; theories of development, of selection, of spontaneous 
generation ; theories of optimism, of perfectibility, of utilita- 
rianism : and each has been accounted a science, and each has 
numbered its disciples. From the optimism of Leibnitz, and 
the perfectibility of Turgot and Condorcet, down to the posi- 
tivism of Comte, whether the utterances of a religious serious- 
ness vindicating God, or of a philosophical infidelity deifying 
man, culminating in a sheer empiricism, semi -scientific with 
its “ hierarchical order," and steeped in superstition with its 
“ worship of humanity," — “the systematic idealizatio?i of final 
sociability ," whatever that may mean — none has been excluded, 
each one has been accounted science. Theology alone, in the 
judgment and suffrage of some, is under the ban. If all the 
foregoing are rightly included, we ought perhaps not to com- 
plain that Theology is excluded. 
1 say all this in unfeigned love of legitimate science, and a 
corresponding admiration of really scientific men ; and I am 
persuaded that from neither the one nor the other of these 
has either Theology or the Theologian anything to fear. Those 
with whom we have to do battle are men — really scientific 
men, it may be, in their own particular branches — who quietly 
ignore our system, which, we fear, they have never examined, 
and with whom its rejection is therefore a foregone conclusion. 
How far this is philosophical I leave to them to determine. 
We allege no oppugnancy between other sciences and Theology. 
Our deep conviction is, that all branches of true science are 
really and fully at one, and that it needs only that the good 
and the true should be separated from the refuse and the vile, 
and each branch of science pushed faithfully, and honestly, and 
logically, to its legitimate issues, to make this oneness abun- 
dantly apparent. If, however, men of any particular school 
of thought whatever, will represent and labour to exhibit an 
antagonism between the partial truths and facts of science, 
and the perfect truth and operations of God, the only safe 
standpoint in the controversy for every Christian man is that 
of St. Paul in a somewhat analogous position, “Let God be 
true , and every man a liar” 
