it to the ground, present in miniature everything to which exact science has reference. How far the author, if pressed, would take shelter under the word "exact," we cannot say, but subsequent quotations will throw light on the meaning which he probably attaches to the whole sentence. "Since Force cannot be created from nothing, and is in its very nature indestructible, it (science) must determine from what source that which is displayed by animals has been obtained, in what manner it is employed, and what disposal is made of it eventually. The Force comes from the Sun, the Matter from the Air." p. 20. "Without the Gulf * * Stream, Newton would never have written his Principia, nor Milton his Paradise Lost." p. 25. "If we consider the successive races of organized beings, beginning from the lowest and passing to the higher tribes, it would seem as if the general idea, under which Nature is acting, is, as the more complex structures are evolved, to emancipate them from the direct control of external physical forces. The Lion can retire to a shade in the middle of the day; yet still he is held in a state of subjection, and instinctively submits to the operation of an overruling power, and is kept to the sands of his desert from cool and temperate climates. The sunbeam is his chain. In man alone the emancipation is complete, for nature has committed a control of her forces to him. It matters not whether he be in the torrid zone or frigid, he can temper the seasons by resorting to artifices of clothing or by the management of fire. * But though thus seemingly the master, man is really the dependent of physical agencies. The development of his intellect, which gives him a control over them, is in truth determined by them." pp. 28 and 29. "He who is immersed in the turmoil of a crowded city sees nothing but the acts of men; and, if he formed his opinion from his experience alone, must consider that the course of events altogether depends on the uncertainties of human volition. But he who ascends to a sufficient elevation loses sight of the passing conflicts, and no longer hears the contentions. He discovers that the importance of individual action is diminishing as the panorama beneath him is extending. And if he would attain to the truly philosophical, the general point of view, disengaging himself from all terres trial influences and entanglements, rising high enough to see the whole globe at a glance, his acutest vision would fail to discern the slightest indication of man, his free will or his works." pp. 34, 35. "There is a course through which we must go. [The italic word here is Dr. Draper's]. Let us cast from ourselves the untrue, the unworthy belief that the will of man determines the events of the world." p. 240. "Man presents the utmost perfection thus far attained. His brain has reached a maximum organization by a continued and unbroken process of development." p. 246. "From a purely mechanical state, appropriately termed automatism, a higher state, the Instinctive, is educed; from that in its turn, still a higher, the Intelligent." p. 244. If the Professor, searching through the long ages of the past, would actually show us a single instance, in which Nature is caught in the very act of transforming a creature out of the automatic state, into the instinctive, or out of the instinctive into the intelligent-if he knows of a single well attested fact, showing any such transition, then we would concede that his argument was proceeding upon the Baconian foundation, and that his conclusion might have some claim to be called Scientific. But so long as he and other men choose to talk of the development theory, as though it were a settled thing, when it comes not by an observation of the facts of nature, but as a simple figment of their own brains, in the service of materialism, they must consent to be ranked where they belong-not on the sacred roll of science, so far forth at least as this theory is concerned, but as men who substitute dogmatism for thinking, and superficial hypothesis for the careful deductions of the scientific method. There is a science of Mind as well as of Matter. Human consciousness gives the fact of freedom of the will, as certainly as the laboratory shows the elements which enter into the composition of air or water. No Professor of physical science can any more upset that fact, than a metaphysician can alter the fixed relations of oxygen and nitrogen in forming the atmosphere we breathe. Whoever attempts, as our author has done, to override the freedom of the human will, cannot go far in his philosophy before he will show that he him self believes in freedom as other men do. Prof. Draper has abundantly shown that he believes it, as we shall have occasion by and by to point out. It is a real freedom too, not an imaginary one, such as is occasionally hinted at in the quotations given. The Science that gives us this fact of freedom is real Science, built upon a solid and philosophical basis, and not at all like that shadowy speculation which goes without the aid of facts, and runs itself out into idle theories and developments. But surely we have brought forward passages enough to show that we did not misrepresent the book, in saying that man appears deeply imbedded in matter, waiting helplessly to be pushed up, by the material forces beneath. He is anything but a lord of this lower world, as he is here presented to us. It is often made a matter of complaint, by certain classes of men, when the doctrines of the Word of God are faithfully preached, that Man is dishonored-that by charging him so freely with sin and guilt-by holding him up as a sinner, needing pardon of God through Christ, needing a renovated nature that he may be fitted for happiness and heaven; we strip him of his inborn glory—we humiliate him in his own sight and in the sight of others-we cast him down from his high estate. Does it not occur to these men to enquire whether man is dishonored by such doctrines as the book before us contains? Do they ever attempt to follow such doctrines out to their conclusions, and conjecture what would be the condition of human society if ideas like these should become universally prevalent? On the other hand, we contend, that the Bible, by its influence direct and indirect, and especially by the stern and humbling doctrines of the cross, is the one great power at work on earth, which tends in any good degree to preserve the digninity of the individual man, and to throw around every soul, even the humblest, an everlasting consequence and worth. Wherever man has lived and developed his ideas and his institutions in what may be called a natural way, without this light and influence of revelation, there the dignity of man as manthe rights of the individual-the grandeur of the soul-have always been lost sight of. Woman becomes a slave or a drudge, of hardly more consequence than the brute, and among men, the many exist for the few. This experiment has been tried so long, and in every variety of way, that Prof. Draper ought not to expect that the Christian world, at least, should be willing to try it over again, especially with the addition of such theories as he has to propose about man's nature and origin. If the whole race should be put upon such a trial, with all conflicting and restraining influences removed, it would descend into the quagmires of corruption and moral death with amazing rapidity. And yet we are compelled to hear, in various directions, these whisperings of men calling themselves scientific, who are greatly shocked and disgusted at the way man is treated from the pulpit, where an evangelical gospel is preached; but who seem to take a strange delight in holding him up as a mere development from the mud of the earth, or as having been pushed up to his present state, out of some order of the animal creation. If they can find on some island of the sea, or in any remote corner a fragment of the race thrown off in the convulsions of his. tory, which has sunk step by step, through sin and vice, so that it is pointed at as a disgrace to humanity, these vile and fallen specimens are paraded before us, as showing what man is in some stages of the ascending scale, and through what track we ourselves have probably come. Not to such sources of information do we turn, when we would keep alive in our souls an exalted idea of what man is. We open the Bible, and at once man rises before us in his godlike dignity. He is no longer an accidental formation out of dead matter, or a slow result of mere physical agencies. He does not come before us, mixed up promiscuously with the mere animal world. He stands apart in his majesty-vast and immortal interests clustering around him—great in his origin and great in his destiny. We hear God saying, "Let us make man in our own image. So God created man in his own image, * * and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." Here is a being not coming up by slow and painful stages according to some law of development, but fashioned into perfect form and issuing from the hand of his Creator-born for thought and contemplation VOL. XXV. * * * * 3 born for freedom-born for dominion. How beautifully and naturally does this ancient narrative carry out the idea of his inherent dignity-of his lordship over nature and over the animal world. "And out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam, to see what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam called every living thing, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to the beasts of the field." This is the biblical story of man's origin. But to those naturalists, who are delving forever amid forms of matter-dead and living organisms-until they utterly forget the soul, as a real and independent existence, the Bible is a book of old superstition-crude and antiquated notions-presenting a very low idea of man. They come in with their splendid systems of philosophy to help elevate him, by showing that he is not in any sense an original creation, but only the highest animal, that he is fast bound in the fetters of matter that if he thinks he has liberty it is a delusion, for in fact he is entirely under the control of physical influences and forces. This is the glory in which modern science, in some of its more advanced and illuminated forms, gives to man. For ourselves we prefer the ancient superstition. We are not at all pleased with the companionship into which we are brought by these great lights and benefactors of mankind. Moreover, when man had fallen into sin, the Bible looks upon him as worth saving, and that, too, at a great cost. His godlike origin and nature are not lost sight of, under these sad conditions. There is greatness in these ruins. Just as we muse over the wreck of some ancient temple or palace, with its broken arches and fallen columns, till before our mind's eye, the structure rises again in all its old magnificence, so God sees the greatness of his creature man, under this wreck and ruin of sin, and with a great ransom he opens the way for his deliverance. It is through the power and presence of such ideas, borne in upon us from above, that man is raised little by little in the scale of being. Prof. Draper has drawn his illustrations from wide fields of history. We commend to him the whole field of history, since the world began, as bearing evidence of the truth of what we say. |