that discovered truth will ever conflict with revealed truth. The multiplication table will never refute conic sections. The intelligent Christian believer hears with unalloyed pleasure of the brilliant discoveries of our age, and cherishes the hope of still greater advances in coming years.

There has never been a conflict between true science and true religion. There have, indeed, been collisions between scientists and ecclesiastics; but this does not prove the charge. The collisions of scientists among themselves have been far more numerous and far more bitter. When Galileo published his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, there was at first a general expression of incredulity; and one astronomer refused to look through the telescope, lest he should see and be convinced. Men become famous for their acquaintance with the science of their times; and when some advance is made which calls upon them to retract, and reconstruct, and become learners again, they are slow to surrender their honors.

It is said that when Harvey, in 1628, published his discovery of the circulation of the blood, no physician forty years old at that time ever believed it. The professors in the medical colleges of the Continent attacked him, and in London itself, notwithstanding court favor, his professional practice declined. When Jenner, in 1796, introduced vaccination as a preventive of small-pox, he was treated with derision; a medical society with which he was connected threatened to expel him; and the medical profession generally, both in England and the United States, vigorously resisted all attempts to introduce the "diabolical" device.

Professor Newcomb nowhere directly avows his belief in the Hebrew Scriptures, but he takes positions which can in nowise be reconciled with atheisin. The idea that the whole Solar System once existed as an immense volume of glowing gas, and became what we find it by a process which occupied a million ages, is not irreconcilable with the first two verses of Genesis. If it can be shown that the gerins of the various forms of life now existing were gradually evolved by forces working in the primordial atoms, the next twenty verses do not deny it. And the idea that the Creator made the worlds by gradual process, first calling into being the glowing mass of vapor, and clothing its myriad atoms with all the possibilities of the com

pleted work, is really an exalted conception of His boundless intelligence and infinite power.

We count these evolution theories "the stuff that dreams are made of;" but, whether verities or dreams, they are logically theistic. To be eternal, things must be changeless. If the visible creation is the product of lengthened processes, it surely had a beginning. Prove any sort of process which advances by successive stages, and you prove a beginner as well as a beginning. The teachings of science are very significant in another direction; they assure us that, left to itself, and as controlled by the laws of matter only, the whole visible universe must come to an end.

All modern science seems to point to the finite duration of our system in its present form, and to carry us back to the time when neither Sun nor planet existed, save as a mass of glowing gas. How far back that was it cannot tell us with certainty; it can only say the period is counted by millions of years, but, probably, not by hundreds of millions. It also points forward to the time when Sun and stars shall fade away, and nature shall be enshrouded in darkness and death, unless some power now unseen shall uphold or restore her.-Page 489.

The progressive change exhibited by the operations of nature. consists in a constant transformation of motion into heat, and the constant loss of that heat by radiation. As Sir William Thompson has expressed it, a constant "dissipation of energy" is going on in nature. We all know that the Sun has been radiating heat into space during the whole course of his existence. . . But it is now known that heat cannot be produced except by the expenditure of force, actual or potential, in some of its forms; it is, also, known that the available supply of force is necessarily limited. Hence, this radiation cannot go on forever unless the force expended in producing the heat be returned to the Sun in some form. That it is not now so returned we may regard as morally certain.-P. 500.

That which approaches an end must certainly have had a beginning. If it had existed from all eternity, then the processes which bring it to an end would have been completed, and the end reached, a whole eternity ago. We have, then, as the result of the boldest research, and the severest logic of modern science, the conclusion that the visible universe had a beginning, and, unless sustained by a power above itself, must end in universal darkness and death. Spencer himself admits that nature tends to universal equilibrium, and that universal equilibrium is the cessation of light and heat, and all the

forms of life which depend upon them. Thus science and religion, so far from being hostile to each other, are seen to be in perfect accord, science laying her trophies at the feet of religion, and religion crowning science as a true interpreter of the divine workmanship.

But if this is so, it may be asked, Why do we not find the language of revelation clearly adjusted to the facts of modern science, or even some of those facts incorporated into the Scripture itself? This, for many reasons, would be unwise.

1. The word of God is not given to teach the whole circle and sum of human knowledge, but only one branch of it, which transcends in value all the rest. What we most need to know, in addition to what every man's senses teach him, is the being and nature of God, our origin and immortality, the fall, the plan of salvation, the true standard of right living, and the nature of the life which lies beyond death. These we need to know now; the joys of scientific research we may learn hereafter. One volume suffices to show us God: whole libraries are needed to explain the work of his hands.

2. If the word of God had contained statements of things, as modern science knows them, those statements would have been for centuries worse than useless. Some would long remain words utterly without meaning to them who read them, and, in the hands of dreamy interpreters, a fruitful source of wild and fantastic doctrine. Others would have been cited by opposers as proof positive that the Scriptures are false. To say that the Earth revolves around the Sun is to contradict what the Hottentot sees, or thinks he sees, with his own eyes. If the psalmist, "considering the heavens," had said, as our author does, that the stars visible to man number, perhaps, fifty millions, all the infidels for twenty-five centuries would have flatly contradicted the statement, and triumphantly pointed to the sky for proof of its falsehood. And when Galileo and his

telescope came upon the stage of action, and the existence of the starry myriads is demonstrated, how triumphantly would modern infidels show that the telescope is a recent invention, that David never saw these millions of stars, and, consequently, the Psalms of David are a modern forgery!

3. The fact that the word of God nowhere makes a definite statement which modern science contradicts, is no small proof of

its divine origin. Written, as it was, in an age when the foundations of the sciences were scarcely laid--written by men many of whom were not learned, even according to the low standard of their times if their pens had not been guided by the Author of nature their errors would have been so numerous and so palpable that their claims to inspiration would have found abundant refutation in their own pages. Every general reader knows that the cosmogonies of the heathen are mere childish fables, hardly up to the level of the nursery story of Jack and his Beanstalk. The sacred books, so called, of the Hindus contain statements so utterly absurd, so fatally at variance with modern knowledge, that every native graduate of the English college at Calcutta leaves the school an unbeliever in the religion of his fathers. They state, for example, that the earth is a circular plane one hundred and seventy millions of miles in diameter, and that there are mountains sixty miles high. The Koran tells of "the seven solid heavens," and of Mohammed's splitting the Moon. If the Bible contained one such childish conceit, how endlessly would skeptics harp upon it! John Bunyan, in one of his religious treatises, gravely informs the reader that the stars are at a prodigious distance from the earth, some of them at least thirty thousand leagues. If Job, speaking of Orion and the Pleiades, had said that, what would be the inference?

A recent instance of the same kind, immeasurably ludicrous because immeasurably pretentious, is found in the writings of the great prophet of spiritism, Andrew Jackson Davis. The introduction of his volume states that in 1845 Davis, then a wholly uneducated young man of about twenty-one years, fell into the trance state, and was inspired by "the spirits" to deliver lectures describing the Sun, Moon, and stars, and the whole system of nature; that an amanuensis wrote, as the spirits inspired, and Davis uttered this supernatural wisdom. Describing the planets in their order, and giving the facts as they were set forth in every school-book of the day, he at length comes to the Asteroids, the four Asteroids, and proceeds to assign reasons why there should be just four of them, and no more. His worthless octavo was hardly in type before Hencke, of Dresden, discovered a fifth. Since then, about one hundred and seventy have been discovered, and no one can

conjecture how many more there are. It is not to be supposed that the faith of the dupes of this shallow imposture will be at all weakened by this huge error; but what would be the effect of such a blunder if found in the books of Moses?

In fine, we regard Professor Newcomb's Popular Astronomy as an admirable work, without an equal in the field of popular scientific literature. The author's style is clear, correct, and often eloquent. The one hundred and twelve engravings are unusually good, as may be seen by the five kindly furnished by the publishers for this article, at the request of the writer. The five star maps will aid those who desire to study the heavens for themselves. A glossary of astronomical terms and technical phrases will assist the general reader, while sundry tables of the elements of orbits, parallaxes of fixed stars, etc., will gratify experts. The mechanical execution of the book is all that could be desired, even by those who are growing somewhat critical in such matters. We commend the work to all, and especially to the younger ministerial readers of the Quarterly, who may not have previously traversed this field, as one that will give them a larger idea of God than they ever had before.

ART. IV.-ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

Life of Alexander H. Stephens. By RICHARD MALCOM JOHNSTON and WILLIAM HAND BROWNE. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.

TEN or twelve years ago the speeches and political letters of Mr. Stephens were gathered into a volume and published, with a brief biographical sketch of his life; but the only elaborate biography is the book which stands at the head of this article. It is neatly printed, the paper is good, and the mechanical execution in all its parts such as to give it a very attractive appearance. The literary work has, also, been well done. The authors were sufficiently familiar with the stirring events connected with the long public career of Mr. Stephens to enable them to give a clear and comprehensive narrative, holding the interest of the reader to the end.

It could hardly be expected that the biography of such a man, written during his life-time and with his concurrence and