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NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
Religion and Science ; their Relations to Each Other at the 
Present Day. By Stanley T. Gibson, B.D. London : 
Longmans, Green, and Co. 
In this work an interesting and delicate subject is handled with 
a rare amount of breadth, liberality, and candour. The reconci- 
liation of religion and science is attracting much attention, and 
is being discussed from very various points of view. But may 
we not put a preliminary question as to the nature of the feud 
for which a remedy is sought ? Are religion and science essen- 
tially and permanently hostile ? We think not : the differences 
between them seem to us to spring from merely incidental causes, 
and to have been intensified by the conducft of injudicious par- 
tisans. There are, on the one hand, men of an anti theological 
turn of mind, who eagerly watch the results of research in the 
hope of finding some facft or some conclusion which may serve 
them as a weapon against religion, and who claim — sometimes 
with very questionable authority — to speak in the name of science. 
There are men, on the other hand, of decidedly theological 
leanings, who scrutinise the career of discovery with equal atten- 
tion, but with an opposite feeling, jealous lest either facft or theory 
should operate to the prejudice of religion. To take a recent 
instance, the Darwinian controversy has been needlessly obscured 
by outsiders of these two classes, the one hoping and the other 
fearing that the docftrine of Evolution — or at any rate that of 
Natural Selection — might shake some of the fundamentals of 
Christianity. More judicious minds, however, could not fail to 
perceive that Evolution, even when extended to the human race, 
is no less compatible with theism than was the old notion of 
special creation. We say that every individual plant and animal 
is created by God, even though we know it has been procreated 
by antecedent beings of its own species. In a manner closely 
analogous, we may still maintain that every animal and vegetable 
species has been created by God, even though we discover that 
it has been evolved from some earlier form of organic life. 
Evolution may be regarded as a mode of creation, not a distinct 
and irreconcilable process. 
Another cause of discord between science and religion maybe 
sought in the circumstance that the sacred writings of most 
religions open with a cosmogony, and contain passages which 
may be taken as deliverances on various physical and biological 
questions. Upon these cosmogonies and these passages theolo- 
gians still, in some quarters, consider themselves entitled to 
build up philosophies which are in glaring contradiction to fadts. 
