the horrors of the latter, as you know, have been ameliorated only within very few years.
I fear that the unhappy spirit of contention still survives, and that there are yet a few who fight for victory rather than for truth. The deceptive spirit of Voltaire still buds forth occasionally; he who, as you remember, disputed the organic nature of fossil shells, because in those days of schoolmen their occurrence on mountains would be used by others as a proof of a universal Noachian deluge. The power of such spirits is fortunately gone for any potent influence for evil, gone with the equally obstructive influence of the scholastics with whom they formerly contended.
Since, then, there is no occasion for strict science and pure religion to be in conflict, how shall the peace be kept between them?
By toleration and patience—toleration toward those who believe less than we do, in the hope that they, by cultivation or inheritance of æsthetic perception, will be prepared to accept something more than matter and energy in the universe, and to believe that vitality is not altogether undirected colloid chemistry.
Toleration also toward those who, on what we think misunderstood or insufficient evidence, demand more than we are prepared to admit, in the hope that they will revise additional texts which seem to conflict, or may hereafter conflict, with facts deduced from actual study of Nature, and thus prepare their minds for the reception of such truths as may be discovered, without embittered discussions.
Patience, too, must be counseled. For much delay will ensue before this desired result is arrived at; patience under attack, patience under misrepresentation, but never controversy.
Thus will be hastened the time when the glorious, all-sufficient spiritual light, which, though given through another race, we have adopted as our own, shall shine with its pristine purity, freed from the incrustations with which it has been obscured by the vanity of partial knowledge, and the temporary contrivances of human polity.
So, too, by freely-extended scientific culture, may we hope that the infinitely thicker and grosser superstitions and corruptions will be removed which greater age and more despotic governments have accumulated around the less brilliant though important religions of our Asiatic Aryan relatives. These accretions being destroyed, the principal difficulty to the reception by those nations of higher spiritual truths will be obviated, and the intelligent Hindoo or Persian will not be tardy in recognizing, in the pure life and elevated doctrine of the sincere Christian, an addition to and fuller expression of religious precepts with which he is familiar. In this manner alone may be realized the hope of the philosopher, the dream of the poet, and the expectation of the theologian—a universal science and a universal religion, coöperating harmoniously for the perfection of man and the glory of his Creator.
