artillery of a new pattern, warranted to drive solid bolts of fact through the thickest skulls." The old landmarks are swept away. By the discovery of Evolution science has invalidated the old world arguments, and among others the proofs of the existence of a Deity, etc., etc., etc.

2. Such is the objection, popular nowadays, but urged by sciolists, not scientists. Real students of science do not ramble thus. The leaders of science are among the first to admit that religion and science move on different and non-intersecting planes, and no more conflict than a whale conflicts with a camel. For the question of God's existence is not a problem of science at all. It belongs to metaphysics. It is the business of mind-science, not of matterscience. The physical scientist has for his subject-matter the material universe as he finds it, and the origin of this universe is no concern of his. He deals with matter (whatever matter may be) and with force (whatever force may be); or rather he deals with the relations between matter and force, for he can only define one by the other, and has no notion what his terms, taken absolutely, may mean. Of the relations between matter and force he can say much, but what matter may be in itself is an inscrutable mystery, and what force may be in itself is an inscrutable mystery.27 But the whence of matter and force does not fall within the scope of his inquiries. In his weighing and measuring of the relations between matter and force he has no more to do with the metaphysical question of their origin than a stonemason has to do with the geological question of the origin of stone, or the bridge-builder with the mathematical question of the laws of geometry in accordance with which he carries out his work. If the student of physical science interests himself in questions that lie outside his domain-for instance, as to how that domain came into being-he has passed from physics into metaphysics, he has ceased to be a specialist, and his speculations deserve as much, or as little, respect as the speculations of any other active minded person who thinks fit to propound opinions on subjects for the consideration of which his training has in no way prepared him. As Lord Rayleigh in his presidential address to the British Association, 1884, remarked: "The opinion of a scientific worker may have a special value, but I do not think that he has a claim, superior to that of other educated men, to assume the attitude of a prophet. The higher mysteries of being, if penetrable at all by

27 Matter is that which can be acted upon or can exert force. Force is that which changes, or tends to change, the state of rest or uniform motion of a body. Body is a portion of matter which is bounded by surfaces, and which is limited in every direction.-"Status and Dynamics," by S. L. Loney, fifth ed., Pt. II., ch. iv., n. 52. Matter and face are therefore known only as relations.

human intellect, require other weapons than those of calculation and experiment."

This view of the limitations of science is borne out by scientists themselves. Professor Huxley2s said: "The scientific investigator is wholly incompetent to say anything at all about the first origin of the material universe." And Sir Robert Ball thinks the same: "We do not inquire how the original nebula came into being. We begin with the actual existence of this nebula." The existence of "this nebula," by the way, is a pure guess.

Professor Tyndal coincides:29 "If you ask the materialist whence is this earth, of which we have been discoursing, he has no answer. Science is mute in regard to such questions. Science knows nothing of the origin or destiny of nature. Who or what made the ultimate particles of matter science does not know."

Professor E. Ray Lankester30 wrote: "So far as I have been able to ascertain, after many years in which these matters have engaged my attention, there is no relation, in the sense of a connection or influence, between science and religion. . . . Science proceeds on its path without any contact with religion; and religion has not, in its essential qualities, anything to hope for or to fear from science."3

Professor Karl Pearson32 also wrote: "It cannot be too often reiterated that the theory of Natural Selection has nothing whatever to do with Christianity."

28 Nineteenth Century, Feb., 1886.

29 "Scientific Materialism," p. 80.

30 Letter to the Times, May 19, 1903, p. 3.

31 "Religion has not anything to fear from science," but indirectly it has "something to hope from it." For though truth cannot conflict with, it can elucidate truth. The author of "Luke Delmege" has quaintly expressed this: "Has science pushed back religion behind its ramparts; and is it now forming en echelon for a final and overwhelming attack? No; religion is like the thrifty rook that follows behind the sower, pecks up the seeds he has dropped, and assimilates them into itself. Science tried to frighten religion away with a battered hat and a tattered coat streaming on a pole, but it only got laughed at for its pains. Religion uses every fact dropped from the bag of science for its own use. Science labels it 'Poison,' but religion smiles and pecks it up, stares at the scarecrow mocks at it and flies off with the plunder. Science would like to string up religion, but cannot catch it; it fires, but only blank cartridge. When science discovers that a new star has swum into our horizon; or has investigated a new cell; or has found out a new germ; or fished out a new animalcule, it expects religion to bring forth its treatises on Apologetics, to take off its hat and genuflect, and to say, 'Venite, adoremus! Yet scientists are but delvers in darkness. Every jet of flame thrown on the secrets, down the subterranean vaults of nature, lights a lamp before the throne of the Eternal. Shout down to the blackened and begrimed miners in the coal pits of nature, 'Come up, come up, ye unbelievers! Ye are but laying bare, amid your 'potencies and potentialities of nature,' proof after proof of the Infinite Creator who formed it all."

32 Letter to the Times, May 9, 1903.

4. Whether or not the material universe began as a nebula or a cosmos no amount of word-scattering can obscure the fact that the First Cause of that universe is a Being extrinsic to that universe. For the efficient cause of an effect is prior to and outside its effect. Now, a cause external to all matter is not material; and, if not material, it must be spiritual, a Spirit, a Mind. That Mind created. Matter is conceivable, but that Matter was evolved into Mind is a hysteron proteron which is not conceivable.

This is the opinion of the greatest men of science of the modern world. But it was also the often-repeated doctrine of two minds of the old world, whose intellectual superiors, in all probability, earth will never witness-Plato and Aristotle.

Plato said: "Mind is the Orderer of the Universe." And again:34 "Mind is the ordering and containing principle of all things." And again:35 "Mind was the Dispenser and Cause of all." And even more emphatically still:38

"Socrates:..'Wisdom and mind cannot excel without soul?' "Protarchus: 'Certainly not!'

"Soc.: 'And in the Divine Nature of Zeus, would you not say, there is the mind and soul of a King, because there is in Him the power of the Cause?

"Pro.: "True!'

"Soc.: 'Mind

.

is the cause of all!'"

And Plato's pupil, Aristotle-the greater disciple of a great master -in his own crabbed way, repeated the same truth: "Whoso affirms Mind to be, in the nature, the cause of the cosmos, and of the whole ordering thereof, is of sober temper, compared with the vain theorists of earlier ages. 9937

5. Moreover, a Mind competent to produce, out of nothing, by an act of will, the entire material universe, must wield infinite power; infinite, not because of the finite thing produced, but because of the mode of production-out of nothing. The First Cause of the material universe is an Omnipotent Mind, an Infinite Spirit-God.

That position Aristotle laid down with unmistakable clearness: "To all men doth God appear as a Cause and First Principle."38

6. These doctrines have, of course, not escaped attack. Both Bücher and David Strauss,40 to take two instances, in order to

33 Laws XII., 967.

34 Cratylus, 400 A.

35 Phædo, 97 C.

36 Philebus, 30.

37 "Metaphysics," I., ch. iii., 984 B. Christ's ed.,

38 Ibid., I., ch. ii., 983 A, p. 7.

39 "Kraft und Stoff," fifth ed., pp. 9, 78, 86.

40 "Der alte und neue Glaube," p. 225.

p. 11.

avoid the First Cause, assume an infinite, and therefore headless, chain of effects; for, as matter cannot be destroyed, it cannot have been made; what cannot end cannot have begun! But, surely (we reply), an "effect"-whether one or an aggregate-presupposes a cause. The effect must be subsequent to and dependent on its cause. So that, even if the material universe were eternal, it would still be dependent on its Cause, and subsequent (if not in time, at least in nature) to that Cause. You cannot hang a chain in mid-air without a support by increasing the length of the chain! Moreover, though the chemist cannot destroy, and therefore did not create matter, God can destroy and did create it.

All opponents-materialists, evolutionists, pantheists-always suppose an Eternal Something; whether "Matter," or the "Great Unknown," or the "Absolute," or "Pure Ego," or the "Idea of Being," or "Will," or the "Unconscious." The point of their denial is this, that this Something is not intelligent, not free, not a person. They would write "First Cause" without capitals. Herbert Spencer, for instance, who par excellence is the philosopher of Evolution, denies that the First Cause is a Person; not indeed because that Cause is below, but because it is above, personality. The Spencerian "Unknown" is supereminently a Person.

To this sound philosophy replies that the First Cause (the Something) in time created, and therefore must forever have precontained, intelligence and free will, and thus must be a Person. For every created attribute which, in its very notion, contains no imperfection, can and must be predicated of its Maker. We cannot, it is true, say that God is a stone any more than we can say that a sovereign is a penny. God contains what perfection is in a stone, as a sovereign contains all the value that is in a penny. For matter (stone), by its very definition, is limited, and therefore imperfect. But we can say that the First Cause is wise, holy, good, intelligent, free, personal, etc.; because not one of these attributes (though all found in man) of itself connotes imperfection. Of course, no attribute is in creature and Creator in the same way; the mode is different; for in the creature the attribute in question is limited, dependent and of finite perfection; in the Creator it is unlimited, independent and of infinite perfection.

Moreover, that the First Cause is an Intelligence and therefore a Person is the repeated declaration of the distinguished scientists whose views are about to be set forth below.

7. Such is the bare outline of a proof which "Natural Theology" works out in detail, a proof which the advances of physical science have helped and have not harmed. That theology goes on its course independent of physical science is the concurrent testimony of nearly

all masters of physical science, as a few quotations from scientists themselves will clearly show.

Professor Huxley said:" "The doctrine of Evolution is neither anti-theistic nor theistic. It simply has no more to do with theism than the first book of Euclid has. There is a great deal of talk and not a little lamentation about the so-called religious difficulties which physical science has created. In theological science, as a matter of fact, it has created none. Not a solitary problem presents itself to the philosophical theist at the present day which has not existed from the time that philosophers began to think out the logical grounds of theism."

And Professor Jevons is equally plain:42 "I cannot for a moment admit that the Theory of Evolution will destroy Theology. Atheism and Materialism are no necessary results of the scientific method.”

Sir Oliver Lodge is just as clear:43 "Science has never really attempted to deny God's existence." And Dr. Lodge might have added that science would have made itself a laughing-stock if it had!

Lord Rayleigh, president of the British Association, 1884, joins in the chorus: "Many excellent people are afraid of science as tending towards materialism. That such apprehension should exist is not surprising, for unfortunately there are writers, speaking in the name of science, who have set themselves to foster it. It is true that amongst scientific men, as in other classes, crude views are to be met with as to the deeper things of Nature; but that the life-long beliefs of Newton, of Faraday and of Maxwell are inconsistent with the scientific habit of mind is surely a proposition which I need not pause to refute."

And Lord Salisbury in his presidential address to the British Association at Oxford, in 1894, was but voicing the views of those competent to form an opinion on the subject when he said: "Few men are now influenced by the strange idea that questions of religious belief depend on the issues of physical research."

So that "the so-called religious difficulties" caused by the Evolution Guess are only vaporings of the third-rate "scientific" wordweaver, on whom the criticism of Professor Tait" does not seem too severe: "When the purposely vague statements of the materialists and agnostics are stripped of the tinsel of high-flown and unintelligible language, the eyes of the thoughtless who have accepted them on authority are at last opened, and they are ready to exclaim with Titania: 'Methinks I was enamored of an ass!'"

41 "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," II., c. 5, p. 203. 42 "Principles of Science," pp. 762, 766.

43 Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1903, p. 220.

44 Nature, July 17, 1879.