on our side might not necessarily preserve us from being in 
the wrong. And yet tolerance has its limits ; there is a point 
where true liberality stops. There is no real tolerance in 
acquiescing, for the sake of peace, in what we know to be 
untrue. Genius has by some been defined to be the power of 
seeing remote similarities. This genius is to my mind a kind 
of Codes, mighty, but one-eyed. It would be imperfect with- 
out the power of seeing points of difference also ; and these 
two powers themselves require to be completed by the presence 
of a judicial faculty, a power of estimating the value of points 
of agreement and difference, and deciding whether they are 
essential or merely accidental. Such a genius we must call to 
preside over our contests for the Faith ; so that, while we 
tolerate all that is tolerable, we may make a firm stand against 
all that is really incompatible with the essence of our Christian 
belief. 
Though we must, as I have already hinted, be extremely 
cautious not needlessly to mix up Science and Religion, and 
we of this Institute must above all remember that we are 
associated not as scientific Christians, but as Christian men of 
science, to examine, on scientific principles, the statements of 
non- Christian men of science, — there is one religious truth 
which we must earnestly contend for ; and that is, the 
Personality of God. We must contend for it, as well as the 
conclusions which directly flow from it, because it is a scientific 
as well as a religious truth; the grand axiom of Natural 
Theology. Theology is a science, and a possible one. I 
once heard a speaker — a scientific man — use this unfortunate 
expression in defending some rather daring statements from 
the opposition made to them on religious grounds : “ I do 
believe in Religion, but I do not believe in Theology ” : and 
this claptrap was actually applauded by those wbo ought to 
have known better. What he meant was, I suppose, that he 
declined to assent to all the propositions about things Divine 
which men had imported into Religion, Natural or Revealed. 
But what he said in effect was, either that he believed in 
Religion, but not in a God, a most extraordinary statement ; 
or else that there was a something, namely God, cognizable 
by man, of which he refused to admit a science ; an assertion 
painfully unscientific, for of everything that man can know 
there is a science, and Theology is the science of God, so far 
as He permits Himself to be known by man. And so (to 
return to our point) we must, as men of science, maintain 
devoutly and inexorably, as one of those axioms which are 
common to all science, the Personal Being of the One First 
Cause. 
VOL. IX. 
n 
