Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/347

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CHRISTIANITY AND AGNOSTICISM.
327

rainy days. The women-folk make the clothing, rear pigs and fowls, and do all the house-work. Their dwelling, with its site, is valued at a hundred and twenty dollars, their furniture at forty-four dollars, their clothing at forty dollars, their farming appliances at forty dollars. They have a water-buffalo, two hogs, thirty fowls, ten ducks, a pair of geese, a dog, and a cat. Last year Pong Hia sold twenty dollars' worth of rice from his farm, and paid $3.60 in taxes. He has two hundred dollars out at interest, at eighteen per cent.

At this rate of production and consumption, the arable land in the State of New York, with a reduction of one half its returns on account of its more northern latitude, would support the total population of the United States at the present time; and the occupied arable land of the United States, with its producing power diminished, on account of climate, to one half that of land at Swatow, would feed a population equal to that of the whole world, or over 1,400,000,000.

CHRISTIANITY AND AGNOSTICISM.

By Rev. Dr. HENRY WACE,

PRINCIPAL OF KING’S COLLEGE.

READERS who may be willing to look at this further reply on my part to Prof. Huxley need not be apprehensive of being entangled in any such obscure points of church history as those with which the professor has found it necessary to perplex them in support of his contentions; still less of being troubled with any personal explanations. The tone which Prof. Huxley has thought fit to adopt, not only toward myself, but toward English theologians in general, excuses me from taking further notice of any personal considerations in the matter. I endeavored to treat him with the respect due to his great scientific position, and he replies by sneering at "theologians who are mere counsel for creeds," saying that the serious question at issue "is whether theological men of science, or theological special pleaders, are to have the confidence of the general public," observing that Holland and Germany are "the only two countries in which, at the present time, professors of theology are to be found whose tenure of their posts does not depend upon the result to which their inquiries lead them," and thus insinuating that English theologians are debarred by selfish interests from candid inquiry. I shall presently have something to say on the grave misrepresentation of German theology which these insinuations involve; but for myself and for English theologians I shall not condescend to reply to them. I content myself with calling the reader's atten-