OBJECTIONS ON SCIENTIFIC GROUNDS.

The progress of the physical sciences in late years, and especially in the present century, has been indeed marvellous, has opened up new avenues for industry and new fields for thought. If the “oppositions of science falsely so called " (1 Timothy vi. 20) were a dangerous snare to young preachers of the early Church, the peril of them has not passed away, but is renewed and increased with all the wider research, the rapid advance of discovery, and the daring freedom of investigation characteristic of these later generations. The Christian soldier of to-day needs to acquaint him self with all the lines of assault adopted by the enemy, and to arm himself at all points. Especially should he familiarize himself earnestly with those methods of attack which seem most in accordance with the spirit of the age, which are most fortified by appeals to the modes of argument and inquiry that have yielded such admirable results, and that claim to be associated with the advance of truth and light and free investigation. These are noble words, — TRUTH and Light and FREEDOM: they are watchwords of progress. And the ideas they represent are justly dear to the hearts of all men, and not less dear to us, as lovers of the Bible, which has so greatly promoted that advance.

It is not our purpose to consider in detail the various points of alleged discrepancy between the Bible and modern physical science. This is the business of full and elaborate treatises on Science and the Bible. All that is practicable for us here is to state some general principles as to the relation between God's two revelations, in his Works and in his Word.

A. All Truth is consistent with all other Truth.

The human mind is so constituted as to desire to perceive this consistency, in order to produce and maintain conviction. No system of belief can command intelligent confidence, unless we have the conviction that it is in harmony with whatever else we know. We do not affirm that we shall always be able to see the points of contact between truths, each of which is satisfactorily proved by its own in dependent line of argument. The meeting place of the two may be out beyond the sphere of our vision. But all truth, rightly understood, is harmonious.

There are truths, the full connection of which with each other, or with other truth that we know, may not be clearly seen, yet concerning which we do not doubt. Such are the existence of evil com pared with the divine attributes of goodness and omnipotence; the divine efficiency considered in connection with human freedom and responsibility; the Trinity, three persons in one God, and similar doctrines. But these do not at all invalidate the general principle that all truth is consistent with all other truth. A thing cannot be true in theology and false in fact, or reliable in science but wrong in practice, any more than it can be both true and false at the same time, — or than black can be white.

B. The Bible does not profess to teach Physical Science.

That does not come within the scope and object of Scripture. Its grand design was the manifestation of God in his revelation to Man. In revealing this it touches, at numerous points, human history and affairs. All that can be expected of the Bible is, that, when it makes allusions to matters outside of its special topic, the statements shall be correct so far as they go. Omissions of things historical or scientific, however important and interesting these things might be to the general scholar, may naturally be expected; they are unavoidable, in accordance with the plan on which the Scripture was given. So far from being fairly objectionable, they form a part of the fitness of the Bible to its end, as could readily be shown.

It was never objected to Euclid's work on Mathematics, that it did not contain an account of the dramatic performances of that age; or that it was defective because it gave no sketch of Physics or Metaphysics, as 'expounded by Aristotle. It would be equally futile to object to the Scriptures that they fail to give an account of the science of that day, whether correct or incorrect. They do not profess to teach that thing; they were not in tended to do it; there was no need that they should, in carrying out their grand and spiritual design. It would have been a palpable turning aside from the great theme of revelation, and un suited to the end in view; i. e. to meet the moral necessities of man, and restore him from the ruins of the Fall.

C. Our Interpretations of Scripture are not Scripture.

Though they may seem to us quite obvious, though they may be hallowed by long traditional belief, or sanctioned by the judgment of many of the good and great, our interpretations of Scripture may be erroneous. We may have mistaken its meaning. If apparent discrepancy arises, either with other Scripture or with facts otherwise made known, let us re-examine, and see what the pas sages really mean. Let us compare Scripture with Scripture, and find out the total aggregate result of such comparison, for one text is often limited or interpreted by another. This passage, if considered alone, might seem to assert a particular idea; but, by comparing it with others, it is seen that that would be a misinterpretation. Another passage may have been erroneously translated, and the ap parent inference will be at once set aside on considering the real meaning of the original. Or facts of nature or of secular history may have come to light, which help to fill up the deficiencies of our apprehension, which point to new and better interpretations of misunderstood or obscure texts. The true Biblical scholar will welcome light from what ever source, old or new, hostile or friendly. His reverence for God and for his truth will bind him, instead of repelling, to accept whatever is fairly proved. Only let us be sure that it is proved, and not merely asserted.

D. In like manner, Scientific Conclusions and Opinions are not always correct.

We must wait for Science to have reached a settled conclusion before any legitimate argument, or any well-grounded objection to the Bible, can be fairly deduced from it. How opposite to this, and how inconsistent with candor and common sense the course usually pursued by opponents of revelation, we need scarcely pause to describe. As soon as any idea has been started by some scientific man which seems to conflict with the received views of Christians, — an idea thrown out, perhaps, as a mere conjecture, or a theory, novel, peculiar to himself, and as yet untested, — some are ready to exclaim, and to trumpet it in all the newspapers, “Ah, Moses was mistaken! The Bible is in error. The learned Professor So-and-so has just discovered it. There can be no mistake about it this time. Science never lies."

True: science never lies. And so, figures never lie; but they often deceive, they are often misinterpreted and misapplied. They tell no untrue story, but we take from them an untrue meaning. Our inference, our understanding, our observation of the facts, or our induction from the facts, may have been fallacious.

In this, as in other topics, we must draw the distinction between science and scientists, as we have to draw it between theology and theologians. Certain critics say so and so; therefore that is the verdict, we are told, of criticism, of Modern Criticism, of ADVANCED CRITICISM! Therefore it is un questionable. Some geologist, or biologist, says thus; therefore Geology or Biology testifies to that conclusion. Perhaps not!

Much of what has been called the conflict of science with religion was really the conflict of science with science, the overthrow of one false opinion after another, which Bible readers as well as others of their day had adopted, not from the Bible, but from their predecessors or contemporaries.

As long as human knowledge continues to be progressive, such experiences may be repeatedly expected.

E. The Language of Scripture in describing Physical Facts is the Language of Common Life, the Language of Appearances.

The Bible describes phenomena, not the essence or abstract nature of things. We cannot see how it could well do otherwise. If it used any other language than that of common life, it would be misunderstood, or not be understood at all, by plain people, and would fail to accomplish the purpose for which it was given. And as we do not look for what is called scientific precision in the colloquial use of every-day terms, so we need not be surprised to find the same sort of terms used in the Bible. No one counts you an ignoramus, or charges you with a blunder, because you speak of the sun's rising and setting, as if that necessarily implied your belief that the sun is higher, i. e. more remote from the centre of the earth, at one time of day than at another, or as if it indicated your ignorance of the revolution of the earth on its axis. You are using, as every sensible man does on such subjects, whether philosopher or not, phenomenal expressions.

The language of science itself is also, for the most part, the language of appearances. Very often also it contains etymologically some implication, which originally represented a crude, temporary, erroneous phase of scientific opinion. What are oxygen and hydrogen, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, rays, reflection, refraction, focus, and the like, — in fact, almost all the familiar terms of science, – but words that wrap up in them allusions to ancient theories, some of them exploded, or references to men and ideas of a past age?

May I not speak of rays of light, without being chargeable with ignorance that the undulatory theory of light is now generally preferred to the corpuscular? Must I necessarily be understood to allude to amber whenever I use the term electricity, because the word elektron means amber?

Had the Scriptures used the language of modern science, itself subject to perpetual modifications and even revolutionary transitions, with reference to the common physical phenomena incidentally mentioned, they would have been unintelligible to those to whom they were at first given, and no more instructive to us of modern times. There was no alternative, then. It would have been necessary, if that idea was carried out, to occupy the pages of revelation with merely scientific statements and explanations of physical facts, and so to make it a book of scientific rather than religious teaching; in which case it would either have been so brief and fragmentary as to be utterly unsatisfactory, incomplete, and obscure, or else so huge a volume as to be practically inaccessible; and even then it would have been obscure, because the world was not prepared for it.

The plan adopted was the obvious, the practical, the only reasonable plan. It was to use the language of the appearances of things and of common life, — not as indorsing any errors which may be supposed to be involved in the etymology of the words, but simply to become intelligible. In speaking to men, the terms which men used and under stood at the time must be employed.

Had the other course been adopted, it is easy to see, not only that the book must have been extremely burdensome in bulk, but that its communications would have been as sure to meet with opposition at one period from being ahead of the age, unintelligible and preposterous to their minds, as at another from being behind the age.

Its scientific communications, if it undertook to teach science, must have been complete, anticipating even those brilliant and now unimagined discoveries which await the zeal of future explorers of the twentieth, or perhaps the thirtieth century, when the science and the scientific phrases of to-day may be as much the jest and scorn of the learned world as mediæval ideas on such subjects are now. The student who graduated from college even forty years ago would find himself to — day bewildered and utterly at a loss, in reading the text-books or attempting to use the apparatus of instruction in Chemistry, if he had not diligently kept up with the progress of research and the changes of technical nomenclature.

God does not reveal either scientific or moral truth in the way that the objectors demand; not all at one time, and especially not all the first time. He gives scope and need for the exercise of our own powers of research. He gives us faculties, and expects that we shall use them.

There was sound philosophy in the answer of the little five-year -old girl, when some one teased her about curling her hair, instead of leaving it to her Maker. She replied, “When I was little, he curled it for me; but now he thinks I am old enough to curl it myself.” God leaves us something to do, in searching into his works and his word.

Bearing these ideas in mind, it will not be difficult to apply fair principles of interpretation to both records, that of Science and that of Revelation. Both volumes were written by Almighty direction. The latter was recorded and unfolded by degrees, during centuries of human progress, but now lies before us complete and full. The other began to be recorded far earlier, but is even as yet only partially unfolded and read by us. God permits human hands to open and reveal it to our view, under the guidance of his providence. Some of the pages have been turned, and earnest minds are at work deciphering their meaning. More re main to be brought to light, and read in the progress of science. How many, we cannot tell, and what is in them we cannot imagine.

As we advance in the process of investigating and comparing the teachings of these two records, these two divine volumes, God's Word and God's Works, it may well be that seeming contradictions will arise. But as leaf after leaf is turned and offered to our perusal, as fact after fact falls into place in the great system of inductive truth, we find fresh instruction arising, and may be sure that ultimately, when both are correctly understood, the two records will thoroughly agree.

This has been actually the experience of devout and patient students of both records, in age after age. There has been no period, perhaps, in which some apparent contrarieties have not been either discovered or imagined. But each generation has seen some difficulties solved, and new ones arising, to be soon relieved by further investigation.

F. The Number of Remarkable Agreements between Science and Scripture is very great.

It is far more difficult for these unexpected coincidences to be explained, on the principles of the un believer, than for any of the apparent contradictions to be cleared up, which are so boastfully alleged. It would be easy to point out a number of these in de tail, and to show how Science, in each of her departments, is casting light on Revelation. At present it may suffice to give a single example taken from an able article by Dr. McCosh, President of Prince ton College.

“The correspondence between Genesis and Geology as to the order of creation has been expounded scientifically by the three men on this continent most competent to speak on the subject; viz. Professor Dana of Yale, Dr. Dawson of McGill University, Montreal, and Dr. Guyot of Princeton. . . . I doubt much whether any geologist in the present day could, in so brief a compass, give as accurate a compendium of the changes which our earth has undergone as is in these thirty -one verses in the opening of our Bible. Except on the supposition that the Scriptural statement is inspired, it is impossible to account for its being written and published three thousand years before Science made its discoveries. " — Homiletic Monthly, January, 1884, p. 234.

The same point is presented by the Hon. William E. Gladstone, in his memorable discussion with Mr. Huxley in the “Nineteenth Century,” in 1886. We quote simply a few sentences:

“I do not suppose it would be feasible, even for Professor Huxley, taking the nebular hypothesis and geological discovery for his guides, to give, in the compass of the first twenty-seven verses of Genesis, an account of the cosmogony, and of the succession of life in the stratification of the earth, which would combine scientific precision of statement with the majesty, the simplicity, the intelligibility, and the impressiveness of the record before us. Let me modestly call it, for argument's sake, an approximation to the present presumptions and conclusions of science. Let me assume that the statement in the text as to plants, and the statement of verses 24 and 25, as to reptiles, cannot in all points be sustained; and yet still there remain great, unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact that such a record should have been made at all. Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chronological order, reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to a consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a peopled world. Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the nineteenth century, to draw more and more of countenance from the best natural philosophy; and, Fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of the five great categories of pres ent life with which human experience was and is conversant in that order which geological authority confirms. How came these things to be? How came they to be, not among Accadians, or Assyrians, or Egyptians, who monopolized the stores of human knowledge when this wonderful tradition was born; but among the obscure records of a people who, dwell ing in Palestine for twelve hundred years from their sojourn in the valley of the Nile, hardly had force to stamp even so much as their name upon the history of the world at large, and only then began to be admitted to the general communion of mankind when their Scriptures assumed the dress which a Gentile tongue was needed to supply? It is more rational, I contend, to say that these astonishing anticipations were a God-given supply, than to suppose that a race, who fell uniformly and entirely short of the great intellectual development of antiquity, should here not only have equalled and outstripped it, but have entirely transcended, in kind even more than in degree, all known exercises of human faculties.” — Nineteenth Century, January, 1886, p. 16.

G. The Absence of definitely established Contradictions so far is a remarkable Phenomenon.

Many have been alleged, and some insisted on with great zeal and positiveness. All the dogmatism and boldness of assertion has certainly not been confined to the theologians. But, when closely considered, many of the contradictions claimed have disappeared under the re-examinations of a wiser exegesis of Scripture; many have been re moved by the advancing discoveries in science or history, showing that it was not the Bible that was mistaken, but its assailants; and all have admitted some fair and reasonable explanation.

This may encourage us, when new difficulties are alleged, to wait candidly, patiently, and hope fully for further light.

But furthermore, this fact is itself a tribute of no small importance to the accuracy of the Bible, and a proof that more than human wisdom has presided over the composition of its pages. Here is a volume made up of sixty-six different books, written in separate sections, by scores of different persons, during a period of fifteen hundred years, – a volume antedating in its earlier records all other books in the world, touching human life and knowledge at hundreds of different points. Yet it avoids any absolute, assignable error in dealing with these innumerable themes. Of what other ancient book can this be said? Of what book even one hundred years old can this be said?

The sacred books of India, of Zoroaster, of Mohammedanism, reveal their human origin by the obvious human errors they distinctly affirm, by the misconceptions and falsehoods which are wrapped up inextricably in their theological systems.

In like manner, the works on Systematic Theology so late as the Reformation period, and equally with them the philosophical and scientific writings of the same era, or even of four or five generations ago, are marked by blunders of fact, or errors of theory, which can be exposed by the schoolboy of to-day.

These books are comparatively little read now. Their mistakes are unknown to the masses of even well — informed men, are only noticed by scholars who know how to account for them, and to appreciate the value of the works, notwithstanding these deficiencies.

Not so with the Bible. Every line in it has been subjected to a minute, jealous, microscopic scrutiny, by friend and by foe, such as no other writing has ever experienced. The fires of criticism have kindled all around it and over it, hot enough to detect and to burn out the dross, if there was any. It stands today the book in all the world most loved, most hated, most studied, most mis used; the book upon which the converging light is cast from every source, from every science and from every age of human research, and to which the concentrated attention of the most vigorous minds of the race has been directed for centuries. It is only simple justice to say, that it stands a monument of marvellous accuracy.

H. Men of Science of the highest Rank sustain the Bible.

Finally, let it never be forgotten that, if there be scientific men who assail the Bible, there are others, cqually eminent or more so, who defend it; men not less honest in their love for truth, not less zealous and candid in their search for it, and not less bold and frank in declaring it when found. If there have been a Voltaire and a Diderot to assail it, there have been on its side a Newton and a Davy, a Hugh Miller, an Agassiz, a Maury, and a Guyot. If there are a Huxley and an Ingersoll to attack, there are a Hitchcock, a Silliman, a Dana, a Gray, and a Dawson to defend and honor it, — men in whom devotion has not blinded the eye of science, nor learning palsied the heart of piety. Even among the votaries of pure science, who have no professed acquaintance with theology, or who take no distinct religious position, they that are with us as to the divine origin of the Bible are more and mightier than those that are against us.