1 878.] 
Notices of Books. 
135 
is a mere chimera; the notion never had any rational foundation, 
and if any belief in it ever existed it must have been dispelled by 
Strauss’s last book. It is only, therefore, as a supernatural 
element of actual knowledge that . Christian dogmatics can take a 
place in our knowledge, and prevail over, or rather, supplement 
the conclusions of scientific materialism. Without the super- 
natural element there is, as far as I can see, no choice except 
between Pantheism and negative Atheism ; for the flimsy barrier 
of Deism is swept away at once whenever the hold on the super- 
natural is abandoned.” 
Now, we are certainly not prepared to say that Dr. Drysdale’s 
views in this respedt are not here and there open to criticism, 
but they involve, at least, no fundamental absurdity, and it will be 
worth carefully considering whether they do not open out the 
only possible way of escape from the difficulties which we en- 
counter whenever — as none of us can help at times attempting 
— we would rise from the details of research to first principles. 
It must be confessed that the Universe, as we now behold it with 
the eye of unaided reason, is a ghastly spedtacle. Time was 
when we fancied we saw in the woods and the fields realms of 
peace and joy. We knew, of course, that the hawk and the 
weasel were preying upon the small birds, that the spider was 
sucking the life-juices of the fly, and that the ichneumon larva 
was feasting among the vitals of the caterpillar. But all this 
seemed merely an exceptional disturbance of the general bliss. 
Now all this is changed ; whether Natural Selection be a true 
cause of the formation of species or not ; nay, whether species 
have been evolved at all, or primordially created, we cannot get 
rid of the Struggle for Existence, which, like Lytton-Bulwer’s 
“ Dweller on the Threshold,” haunts every man whose eyes have 
been opened. Well might Winwood Reade, quailing before this 
phantom, and finding no solution to the mysteries of the Uni- 
verse, exclaim “ Creation is murder.” 
We need scarcely say that Dr. Drysdale, in accepting the 
Christian revelation as fully compatible with the results of the 
latest advances in science, makes the necessary reservation, old 
as the days of Galileo, that the Scriptures are not a code of 
geology, physics, biology, or psychology. This simple principle 
that where matters of observation and experience are touched 
upon Revelation speaks a merely popular language — with the 
same right as the most precise of us all still speaks of the sun’s 
rising and setting — does away with the necessity of all attempts 
to reconcile “ geology and Genesis,” and at the same time cuts 
away the ground from beneath those who contend for the rejec- 
tion of revelation on the ground of its technical inaccuracies. 
We have no doubt Dr. Drysdale will encounter some rough 
usage. Those who presume to say that the object of Evolu- 
tionism is to undermine religion will doubtless brand him as an 
infidel. On the other hand, he will be denounced as an abject 
