al philosophy; that it has produced
innumerable inventions tending to promote the convenience of life; that
medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering, have been very greatly
improved, that government, police, and law have been improved, though not
to so great an extent as the physical sciences. Yet we see that, during
these two hundred and fifty years, Protestantism has made no conquests
worth speaking of. Nay, we believe that, as far as there has been change,
that change has, on the whole, been in favor of the Church of Rome. We
cannot, therefore, feel confident that the progress of knowledge will
necessarily be fatal to a system which has, to say the least, stood its
ground in spite of the immense progress made by the human race in
knowledge since the days of Queen Elizabeth.

"Indeed, the argument which we are considering seems to us to be founded
on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to
which the law of the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once a
proposition has been demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested. Every
fresh story is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the original
foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition to the stock
of truth. In the inductive sciences, again, the law is progress....

"But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural
religion (Revelation being for the present altogether left out of the
question), it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is
more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just
the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe which the
early Greeks had.... As to the other great question, what becomes of man
after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his
unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than a Blackfoot
Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences, in which we surpass the
Blackfoot Indians, throws the smallest light on the state of the soul
after the animal life is extinct....

"Natural Theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of
our origin and of our destiny which we derive from Revelation is indeed of
very different clearness, and of very different importance. But neither is
Revealed Religion of the nature of a progressive science.... In divinity
there cannot be a progress analogous to that which is constantly taking
place in pharmacy, geology, and navigation. A