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The Fundamentals man * * * runs, in Britain, at least, the smallest risk of making it. * * * With a few, and these very singular exceptions, the truly scientific men and true theologians of the present day have not found themselves under the neces sity ©f quarrelling.” The late Professor G. J. Romanes has, in his “Thoughts on Religion,” left the testimony that one thing which largely influenced him in his return to faith was the fact that in his own university of Cambridge nearly all the men of most eminent scientific attainments were avowed Christians. “The curious thing,” he says, “is that all the most illustrious names were ranged on the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Manson, Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, and Bayley—not to mention a number of lesser lights, such as Routte, Todhunter, Ferrers, etc.,—were all avowed Christians” (page 137). I t may be held that things are now changed. To some extent this is perhaps true, but anyone who knows the opinions of our leading scientific men is aware that to accuse the majority of being men of unchristian or unbelieving sentiment is to utter a gross libel. I f by a conflict of science and religion is meant that grievous mistakes have often been made, and unhappy mis understandings have arisen, on one side and the other, in the course of the progress of science,—that new theories and dis coveries, as in astronomy and geology, have been looked on with distrust by those who thought that the truth of the Bible was being affected by them,—that in some cases the dominant church sought to stifle the advance of truth by persecution,— this is not to be denied. It is an unhappy illustration of how the best of men can at times err in matters which they imperfectly understand, or where their prejudices and tradi tional ideas are affected. But it proves nothing against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight into the ways of God of the men who made them, or of real contradiction between the new truth and the essential teaching of the Scriptures. On the contrary, as a minority generally
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