XI. THEOLOGY VERSUS SCIENCE.

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE PROCEEDINGS.

(1879.)

In the preparation of this Essay I am under obligations to the following works :-Professor Draper's "History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," two vols., 1875; "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," by the same; Lecky's "History of Rationalism," 1877; Milman's “Latin Christianity," nine vols, 1872-79.

MANY modern writers make theology synonymous with religion. This is not correct. Theology is the science that treats of God, whether it be natural theology which studies God in His works, or Christian theology (a term first introduced by Abelard in the 12th century), which considers God in His relation to the scheme of man's redemption. The Professors of this science of Christian theology have hitherto been the priests and the clergy, who formed what was called the Church; and it was not until the Church came to be regarded as the People plus the Clergy, that the sheep considered they had any right to a mouthful of ecclesiastical grass without the consent of their Shepherds, many of whom

were wont to claim a very large handful of wool for a very small mouthful of grass.

Science differs from natural theology in this. Instead of studying the attributes of God as manifested in His works, it seeks to discover the laws by which Cosmos is governed. Every Theist admits that God is the Author of Nature-the only First Cause. Many good people unacquainted with scientific method sometimes charge scientific men with trying to do without God. But they are not aware that since

the time of Bacon it has not been the business of science to seek for First Causes. The scientific man studies phenomena in order to ascertain the law; knowing which, he has secured a powerful means of getting at higher and more subtle phenomena, governed by higher and more subtle laws.

When science, therefore, is seeking by natural means to account for natural phenomena, she is not forgetting God, but is working with her own most appropriate tools.

The moral law, or man's relation to God, as revealed in Holy Scripture, is supposed by the Church to be the sole object of her teaching; and she has been and is practically blind to the fact, that some of the most beautiful passages in Holy Writ dwell on the beauties of nature, and invite us to study God in His works-thus clearly admitting that nature, or God's relation to man, ought to be studied by the theologian. The laws by which we are governed, whether moral, physical, chemical, or physiological, own the same Divine Lawgiver, and are marked by the same attributes, which are chiefly these-they are self-acting-they inflict their own penalties on transgressors, which penalties are transmissible even to the third and fourth generation. But how rich in reward are these laws to obedience-showing mercy unto thousands of those that love Me-of those that obey my

laws for sin is the transgression of the law; and it is punished. Pull down the houses of the poor to build your mansions and warehouses, and crowd the poor upon the already crowded poor, and fever is bred and pestilence, and they assail you and your household, and you send for the doctor, who says there is something in the air, and for the priest, who says it is what pleases God, and no one suspects that outraged laws, of divine origin are inflicting their selfacting penalties.

What ignorance is this! The teachers of the Church, that ought always to have cherished Science as the twin sister of Faith, begotten by the same Almighty Father, have ever been her deadliest enemy.

Glancing through the long vista of ages, from the murder of Hypatia by Bishop Cyril in the year of Grace 414, to the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, I shudder at the ignorance, superstition, cruelty, selfishness, sinfulness of man. The Church became a political power, and grew every day more rich and more corrupt, so that it might truly be said the clergy were the Church, the shepherds owned the sheep, and woe be to those that refused to come in and be sheared.

In order to retain their supremacy the Romish Church extinguished the literature of Greece and Rome, and quenched all science and philosophy; and the horrible death of Hypatia, and the murders, tortures, and imprisonments, the fines and forfeitures inflicted on thousands of others, served as a warning to all those who dared to cultivate profane knowledge.

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The Church held that all the science that the world required is to be found in Holy Scripture and when any question arose, the appeal was, not to nature, to experiment, to observation, but to the Bible, or what was held to

be almost equivalent, to the Fathers. Among these no one did more than St. Augustine to bring science and religion into antagonism. The true purpose of the Bible-that of showing man how to save his own soul-he turned aside, and placed that sacred Book in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, the result of which was, as already remarked, to overshadow man's intellect during many centuries with a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, "out of which flashed too often the lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance."

Consider for a moment what a divine revelation of science would be. It must be as perfect and complete as the scheme of man's redemption, and the last sentence of the book containing it would be, "Cursed is he that shall add to or take away from the things written in this book!" Further advance in human knowledge would thenceforth be impossible, and we should be reduced to the hopeless condition of the followers of Mahomet, who, acting on the precept that all things necessary for man to know are contained in the Koran, logically ask, "What need then for any other book ?" And they logically act when, as under Othman, they destroyed the great library of Alexandria, just as Cyril dispersed and destroyed the daughter library, the Serapion, and tore the living flesh off the body of Hypatia, because she lectured to admiring crowds on geometry and philosophy. If the Bible contain the sum and substance of human knowledge, what is the use of any other book? Nay, any other book would be a useless and dangerous heresy, and every expounder, unless he were an orthodox priest, a dangerous and noisome heretic.

I fear that in our own day many good people, under a mistaken notion of the objects and purpose of revelation,

regard the Bible as the only book that has any real value, and would be disposed to admit that if all other books were destroyed mankind would be none the worse. I know that it was once my fortune-or misfortune—to sit under a good orthodox man who gravely maintained that all science and all human knowledge are contained in the Bible, and that had we only the eyes to read it properly, we should recognise in it every great discovery that had benefited mankind. As the Fathers had declared, so the Church adopted this view; and affirmed on patriotic and Scriptural authority, that th1 earth is a flat surface over which the sky is spread or stretched like a skin, as St. Augustine has it. The sun, moon, and stars move in this sky so as to give light to man by day and by night. Above the sky is heaven, in the dark and fiery space beneath is hell. The earth is the central and most important body of the universe, all other things being intended for and subservient to it.

This view is natural to man in the early phases of his intellectual life. The earth is for him the centre of the universe, geocentric; and man is the central object of the earth, anthropocentric. Early in the history of the Christian Church the heretical doctrine of the globular form of the earth had crept in. The Church by its mouthpiece, Lactantius, said, "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth hang downwards, and that men have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask them how they defend these monstrosities, how things do not fall away from the earth on that side, they reply that the nature of things is such, that heavy bodies tend toward the centre like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies--as clouds, smoke, fire-tend from the centre to the heavens on all sides. Now, I am really at