ted which conflict with the declarations of the Bible. They would
thus place the Scriptures and nature in a posture of antagonism; and
require Christian faith to trample upon and triumph over the evidence
of the senses, as it is required to triumph over the world, the flesh,
and the devil. What must be thought of an otherwise educated body of men
who would willingly reduce the faith of the Christian world to such a
posture as that?

Furthermore, in the general spirit and temper of the religious press
with reference to science and scientific men, there is much to criticize
and condemn. It is often snappish, petulant, ill-humored, unfair, and
sometimes malicious in the extreme. Such opprobrious terms as
infidelity, irreligion, rationalizing tendencies, naturalism, contempt
for the Scriptures, etc., are freely used. Scientific men are called
infidel pretenders, and are charged with a secret conspiracy to
overthrow the faith of the Christian world. A respectable religious
weekly paper in this country, in noticing Sir Charles Lyell's work,
while carefully withholding from its readers the slightest notion of the
array of evidence adduced in the book, is prompt to inform them that the
learned author shows his want of respect for the Word of God. Another,
in noticing the account of the last hours of Mr. Buckle, is almost ready
to exult in the fact that in the wreck and prostration of his great
powers he whined out piteously: 'I am going mad!' and intimates that his
mental sufferings are to be attributed to the judicial visitation of
God, inflicted as a punishment for the employment of those powers in the
service of infidelity. An able, though generally absurd quarterly
journal, in reviewing Hugh Miller's 'Testimony of the Rocks,' finds in
some of his gorgeous speculations premonitions of that mental aberration
which ended his life, and does not hesitate to attribute the final
catastrophe to the overworking of his powers in the service of
pretentious and unsanctified science. Noble and true-hearted son of the
Church though he was, and though laboring with herculean strength to set
the Bible and science in harmony, he has not escaped the envenomed
shafts of a portion of the religious press. By some he has been openly
branded as a traitor in the camp.

Now this unseemly heat and this unbecoming spirit and temper may be
cloaked under a zeal for religion. It may be said that we are to
'contend earnestly for the faith.' We answer, v