of the full-grown man. Let Science go on with its keenest analysis. It will return, when it is completed, to the living synthesis. If, with all our processes, we cannot manufacture a man, if even the mineral water we concoct is not quite the same as Nature brews in her laboratory, much more shall we give up the fruitless task of dissolving the ultimate facts of mind and life. I have been struck with a sentence of the late Mr. Mill, in his autobiography, where he speaks of a long stage of mental depression which destroyed his zeal for all his favorite studies. "I saw," he says, "that the habit of analysis tends to wear away the feelings. My education had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist this dissolving influence, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made such analysis the inveterate habit of the mind. I was thus left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any desire for the ends I had been so carefully fitted to work for." That is the autobiography of our time, of its strength and of its weakness. Let such experience teach us the honest pursuit of science, but teach us also its limit. Our age will gather up the real gains of its knowledge. We shall have learned many of the laws of our being; we shall apply ourselves to a broader culture of the mind; we shall feel a more earnest interest in all aims for the improvement of the race. But we shall prize no less the treasures of letters and art bequeathed us by the past; the ideal truths which have employed the wise and good; and, above all, that Christian faith which has inspired the richest knowledge of mankind, and without which our best culture will be as dead as the fossils of a prehistoric cavern.
Such, gentlemen, is the result I anticipate for the next period of our scientific growth. Pardon me if I have given you too long or too dry an essay; but let me beg you to receive it as the conviction of one who feels a generous sympathy with all the real aims of his time. This is the best spirit of your noble profession. If you so pursue it, as honest interpreters of Nature and reverent worshipers of Him who is above Nature, you will make it a sacred ministry for not only physical knowledge, but for the service of God and man.
| THE DEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.[1] |
THERE are two very opposite parties among us at the present day, whose language is in one respect very strikingly similar. The Christian Church has from the beginning spoken with a certain contempt of learning. "The wisdom of the world," "oppositions of
- ↑ This article appeared in Macmillan's Magazine under the title of "Natural Religion."
