also to lend its aid to the propagation of scientific atheism, the sooner we know it the better.
"The interests of truth are paramount; and that publication is not trustworthy which perverts history in the interest of Romanism, or science in the interest of atheism."
The Catholic Review, which was probably aware how much terror there was in the "No popery" alarm, and ought to have learned a little caution, joins the Christian at Work in getting up the new scare, and, after making the same quotation from our article, observes: "In other words, Prof. Youmans is allowed, in a work intended for education and general uses, to broach the fundamental heresy that there is no personal God." As an indication of how far Catholics and Protestants are animated by the same spirit, we may note that, when the writers of these articles had been rebuked for their course by other newspapers, they both returned to the subject, and repeated the charges in subsequent issues.
Now, of this formidable indictment we have only to say that it is entirely trumped up, and is without the shadow of a foundation in fact. In preparing an article for the Cyclopedia, on the "Correlation of Forces," we first gave a brief sketch of the investigations that had been made during the past century, and which have brought the whole scientific world to the comparatively new conclusion that, although the different forms of force are convertible, force, or energy itself, is indestructible. After this preliminary statement of the results of experimental investigation, we said, "Therefore, it is now regarded as a fundamental truth of physical science, and a fundamental law of Nature, that force, like matter, is never created or destroyed." The proposition is stated as an inference, as an induction from observations, as a result of experimental inquiry into the physical processes of Nature, and as a pure principle of science. We were not discussing the subject of matter, but of force, and what we declared in regard to force we assumed in regard to matter that, so far as science knows, it is never either created or destroyed. We did not say that matter is eternal; we did not say that matter never was created, for these are questions beyond the limits of science. We avoided all theological implications, and did not go a hair's-breadth beyond the strict inductive conclusion that in the course of Nature there is no evidence of its creation or destruction. For us there is only one question: Was the statement true? That matter "is never credited or destroyed," has been established "as a fundamental truth of physical science and a fundamental law of Nature" for more than a hundred years, or ever since the science of chemistry was founded. Every fact known to chemists or physicists confirms it, and not a solitary fact casts even the slightest doubt upon it. There cannot be shown a particle of evidence within the whole sphere of physical science that a single atom of matter is ever either created or destroyed. The proposition, although for thousands of years it was not believed, is now the corner-stone of all science. If the statement that matter is indestructible be not a truth of physical science, then there are no truths of physical science; if it be not a fundamental law of Nature, then there are no fundamental laws of Nature. The doctrine which we laid down has been held as a demonstration in the whole scientific world, and has become elementary in all our text-books, for generations.
But, for stating it in the American Cyclopædia, that work is charged with being a perverter of science, radically antichristian, and a propagator of atheism. Now, let the reader remember that we are not the parties that have raised this question of atheism. We neither affirmed atheism, nor insinuated it, nor implied it. We strictly avoided a mode of statement which
