supposing the existence of any such supernatural omnipotent influence,
would be bound to receive the new explanation, and might abandon the
old conviction."[42] That is, all evidence of the truths of religion not
founded on nature and perceived by the senses, amounts to nothing.

Now as religion does not rest on the testimony of the senses, that is on
scientific evidence, the tendency of scientific men is to ignore its
claims. We speak only of tendency. We rejoice to know or believe that in
hundreds or thousands of scientific men, this tendency is counteracted
by their consciousness of manhood--the conviction that the body is not
the man,--by the intuitions of the reason and the conscience, and by the
grace of God. No class of men stands deservedly higher in public
estimation than men of science, who, while remaining faithful to their
higher nature, have enlarged our knowledge of the wonderful works of
God.

A second cause of the alienation between science and religion, is the
failure to make the due distinction between facts and the explanation of
those facts, or the theories deduced from them. No sound minded man
disputes any scientific fact. Religious men believe with Agassiz that
facts are sacred. They are revelations from God. Christians sacrifice to
them, when duly authenticated, their most cherished convictions. That
the earth moves, no religious man doubts. When Galileo made that great
discovery, the Church was right in not yielding at once to the evidence
of an experiment which it did not understand. But when the fact was
clearly established, no man sets up his interpretation of the Bible in
opposition to it. Religious men admit all the facts connected with our
solar system; all the facts of geology, and of comparative anatomy, and
of biology. Ought not this to satisfy scientific men? Must we also admit
their explanations and inferences? If we admit that the human embryo
passes through various phases, must we admit that man was once a fish,
then a bird, then a dog, then an ape, and finally what he now is? If we
admit the similarity of structure in all vertebrates, must we admit the
evolution of one from another, and all from a primordial germ? It is to
be remembered that the facts are from God, the explanation from men; and
the two are often as far apart as Heaven and its antipode.

These human explanations are not only without authority, but they are
very mutable. They change not only from generation to gene