ishes or enhances the position of their
order among men?

Are not the votaries of natural science subject to a prejudice against
Theism as something that dethrones them from supremacy?

Is there not among these last a writhing invisible agony to escape from
the avowal that God governs? And why is this? Perhaps because man
proudly relishes freedom, and hates to say that his life is inspected and
controlled by another Being who will also judge him hereafter; and
because the student of physical science knows that if there is a God,
then moral science must be a far nobler pursuit than his own pursuit,
even if it is less palpable and popular; also because the scientific man
is tempted to do all he can to ignore that anything is outside the ken of
science--that there is a Being on quite another plane, far above him and
his researches.

But science has no exclusive or even predominant right in the decision of
this matter; nor has it any solid success in the long battle, though one
or other in its ranks may triumph in a skirmish. When one philosopher
demolishes the Bible, an ordinary man cannot convince him he is wrong.
But when a dozen savants tilt in the fray, even an ordinary man can see
that their weapons demolish each other, and the old Book stands.

This geologist has scratched the varnish on the globe, and forthwith
frames his new theory of creation. In ten years he is proved utterly
wrong by that microscopist who has detected animal remains in an igneous
rock. The simple bystander cannot understand either side, and far less
tell which side is true. But when the combatants slay each other, the
wayfaring man can understand this neutralization. The philosopher
strikes me with awe so long as he keeps aloft beyond my knowledge or
comprehension. When he comes down I can love him, but the reverence of
his mystery is gone, and he is soon found out to be a brother mite. My
friend can walk faster and farther on earth than I can; but when he wades
into the water, I find I can swim just as well as he--while if we try to
fly in the air, neither of us can soar a yard.

Thus the mind that is great in observing, collating, and even
generalizing facts, gets immediately out of its depth a few feet from
land in the ocean of hypothesis, and it can be drowned there like my own.

Reaching up higher, in search of First Cause, the clever brain grasps the
liquid aether above, and yearns; but it holds nothing, not one atom more
th