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

worse for science--that is its own affair.
This is the sentiment, distinctly uttered not long since by a learned
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