The Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 | Page 4

American Professor. Consistently with this view, they maintain that the Scriptures are to be held as an authority in scientific matters; that science must order its conclusions in accordance with them; and that any facts are to be distrusted which conflict with the declarations of the Bible. They would thus place the Scriptures and nature in a posture of antagonism; and require Christian faith to trample upon and triumph over the evidence of the senses, as it is required to triumph over the world, the flesh, and the devil. What must be thought of an otherwise educated body of men who would willingly reduce the faith of the Christian world to such a posture as that?
Furthermore, in the general spirit and temper of the religious press with reference to science and scientific men, there is much to criticize and condemn. It is often snappish, petulant, ill-humored, unfair, and sometimes malicious in the extreme. Such opprobrious terms as infidelity, irreligion, rationalizing tendencies, naturalism, contempt for the Scriptures, etc., are freely used. Scientific men are called infidel pretenders, and are charged with a secret conspiracy to overthrow the faith of the Christian world. A respectable religious weekly paper in this country, in noticing Sir Charles Lyell's work, while carefully withholding from its readers the slightest notion of the array of evidence adduced in the book, is prompt to inform them that the learned author shows his want of respect for the Word of God. Another, in noticing the account of the last hours of Mr. Buckle, is almost ready to exult in the fact that in the wreck and prostration of his great powers he whined out piteously: 'I am going mad!' and intimates that his mental sufferings are to be attributed to the judicial visitation of God, inflicted as a punishment for the employment of those powers in the service of infidelity. An able, though generally absurd quarterly journal, in reviewing Hugh Miller's 'Testimony of the Rocks,' finds in some of his gorgeous speculations premonitions of that mental aberration which ended his life, and does not hesitate to attribute the final catastrophe to the overworking of his powers in the service of pretentious and unsanctified science. Noble and true-hearted son of the Church though he was, and though laboring with herculean strength to set the Bible and science in harmony, he has not escaped the envenomed shafts of a portion of the religious press. By some he has been openly branded as a traitor in the camp.
Now this unseemly heat and this unbecoming spirit and temper may be cloaked under a zeal for religion. It may be said that we are to 'contend earnestly for the faith.' We answer, verily, but never with the weapons of malice and wickedness. This mode of treating science, if persisted in, must end only in chagrin and defeat to the parties employing it, for the simple reason that it does violence to reason, nature, and all the laws of man's being. Science cannot be turned aside in her strenuous and ever-successful progress by any such impediments thrown in her way. The clear, calm, cogent facts and inferences of the philosopher cannot be met successfully by the half-suppressed shriek of the mere Biblicist. And it must be at once perceived that any such treatment of science, any such half-concealed fear of the progress of science, any such unfair and spiteful bearing toward scientific men, argues a secret distrust of the system or doctrine which is assumed to be held and professedly defended. These petulant and much disturbed editors and divines must be really afraid that the ground is being undermined beneath their feet. If a man really believes the inspiration and infallibility of the Scriptures, he may feel perfectly at ease as to any facts present or past in the wide universe. But if he is not so sure of them, and wishes, for some personal or interested motive, to believe them, he will be easily disturbed by anything which seems to militate against them. If the Scriptures are true, they can never be shown to be false--if they are not true, we ought not to wish to believe them.
The spirit and temper above indicated are wholly out of harmony with the general spirit of Protestant Christianity. It has ever been the boast of Protestantism that it seeks the light, that it seeks discussion, that it asserts the right of private judgment, that it courts investigation, and is willing to expose all its claims to the broad light of day. It claims to be an everlasting protest against priestly tyranny, and monkish authority, and abject spiritual servitude in the laity. Strange, if in this new phase of its history it should fail to be true to itself!
After the Christian world came generally to accept the statement