t may, however, be objected that by the introduction of a cosmogony
the Bible exposes itself to a conflict with science, and that thereby
injury results both to science and to religion. This is a grave
charge, and one that has evidently had much weight with many minds,
since it has been the subject of entire treatises designed to
illustrate the history of the conflict or to explain its nature. The
revelation of God's will to man for his moral guidance, if necessary
at all, was necessary before the rise of natural science. Men could
not do without the knowledge of the unity of nature and of the unity
of God, until these great truths could be worked out by scientific
induction. Perhaps they might never have been so worked out. Therefore
a revealed book of origins has a right to precedence in this matter.
Nor need it in any way come into conflict with the science
subsequently to grow up. Science does not deal so much with the origin
of nature as with its method and laws, and all that is necessary on
the part of a revelation, to avoid conflict with it, is to confine
itself to statements of phenomena and to avoid hypotheses. This is
eminently the course of the Bible. In its cosmogony it shuns all
embellishments and details, and contents itself with the fact of
creation and a slight sketch of its order; and in their subsequent
references to nature the sacred writers are strictly phenomenal in
their statements, and refer every thing directly to the will of God,
without any theory as to secondary causes and relations. They are thus
decided and positive on the points with reference to which it behooves
revelation to testify, and absolutely non-committal on the points
which belong to the exclusive domain of science.

What, then, are we to say of the imaginary "conflict of science with
religion," of which so much has been made? Simply that it results
largely from misapprehension and from misuse of terms. True religion,
which consists in practical love to God and to our fellow-men, can
have no conflict with science. True science is its fast ally. The
Bible, considered as a revelation of spiritual truth to man for his
salvation and enlightenment, can have no conflict with science. It
promotes the study of nature, rendering it honorable by giving it the
dignity of an inquiry into the ways of God, and rendering it safe by
separating it from all ideas of magic and necromancy. It gives a
theological basis to the ideas of the unity of na