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agination! What a generalization to address to the intellect! What a stupendous plan to utter the name of the Infinite, and awaken the religious sentiments of the soul! What an allembracing unity of method is here to proclaim one empire, one lawgiver, one God!(')

It is time that I leave the discussion to your reflections. My heart has burned with a desire to break through the crust of sensible things, which obscures the spiritual eye-sight, and help you to glimpse the sublime realities of the realm of thought and spirit, which "is not far from every one of us." How feeble have been my efforts!—may the Source of Truth to whom I have aspired forgive my failures! But, however impuissant may have been my endeavors to rise to the substantial First Principle of all, may I exhort you to seek still its revelation in the facts and thoughts of nature which lie around you. FEAR NO TRUTH-embrace all truth, for it is God's and yours; and as embassadors of God, take all His Truth, and use it to convince the world.

(1) Further illustrations of "intentionality" in nature will be found in the last paper of this volume.

REASON FOR THE FAITH.(1)

"It is of much more importance to give our assent to doctrines upon grounds of reason and wisdom than on that of faith merely."-Origen, Contra Celsum, book i., chap. xiii.

"Which subject he [Cyprian] did not handle as he ought to have done; for he [Demetrian] ought to have been refuted, not by the testimonies of Scripture, which he plainly considered vain, fictitious, and false, but by ar guments and reason."-LACTANTIUS, Institutiones Divinæ, book v., chap. iv.

TIME, which keeps all appointments, has brought the anniversary of culminating interest in collegiate life. You who have labored assiduously and long, through the rigorous curriculum, have seen the events of the final trial and triumph slowly rising in the horizon. We who have watched your efforts and prayed for your success, experience more keenly than ever the sense of responsibility for faithfulness to our trusts. I feel it a relief that the present occasion affords an opportunity to impress upon you, and all who hear me, a few words of wisdom, which, of all the lessons you have learned, I would commend to the deepest and warmest and most exclusive place of lodgment in your heart. As our relations to the world of invisible realities transcend in importance all other human interests, I have thought it might be useful to bring before you a systematic statement of the Reason of the Faith which, as Christians, we entertain. I shall undertake, therefore, to present a conspectus of the rationale of Christian belief. I shall

(1) A baccalaureate address to the candidates for graduation in the College of the Liberal Arts of the Syracuse University.

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speak, not as a divine, resting on Scriptural authority, but as a scientist and philosopher, seeking after the authority on which Scripture itself rests.

I feel that an inquiry of this kind may be peculiarly appropriate to the intellectual mood of the times. It is a questioning, iconoclastic age, which holds nothing sacred because it has been revered; and demands that even divine existence, divine providence, and religious faith commend themselves to human reason. I feel that I hazard nothing in accepting that issue. Bishop Butler tells us, "Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning any thing, even revelation itself." From that starting-point I see an open highway to a theistic faith and a Christian life.

Many obstacles to the progress of our argument will disappear on a summary statement of the causes of the modern phase of skepticism. We shall see that these causes are emotional, superficial, or inconsequential, and hence are not such. causes as he who appeals to logic can pronounce sufficient; and that he who pleads them is not standing squarely to the battlefront, but is skulking under subterfuges.

The first cause of skepticism is the evil heart. It is the old clamor of the appetites and passions to be released from the restraints which all religions impose. It is, therefore, not peculiar to our times; but stands by perpetually to prompt and abet the questionings of the intellect.

The second cause is the enforced abandonment of certain positions of traditional faith, necessitated by the progress of human knowledge. Thus, it used to be maintained, by authority of the Church, that the earth was the centre of the universe. It was a heresy to assert the doctrine of the habitability of other worlds. The Jesuit Scheiner was compelled to publish anonymously his discovery of the spots on the solar disk. Not yet wholly silenced are the murmurs of dissent from the doctrine of the high antiquity of the world; or the reality of

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SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.

physical death before the sin of our first parents; or the local character of the Noachian deluge. Still more audible are the sounds of disapproval when we assert that the history of planets is a slow evolution of results wrought out by forces still active, and according to methods exemplified before our eyes. And, again, how slow have we been to discern and admit the fact that, to our apprehension, all spiritual manifestations are conditioned by matter! Yet on all these questions the Church is taking, as it must take, an affirmative position. Men not controlled by their religious instincts, seeing the abandonment of old positions which it once defended with arguments and anathemas, and sometimes with cruelties, hastily assume that Christian faith has nothing whatever in it which can stand persistently the tests of reason and science. But every one must perceive the inconclusive character of such reasoning. In fact, it is no reasoning at all, but an illogical generalization, like that of a man who, from sundry unsuccessful attempts to digest a supper of oyster-shells, should conclude that the human stomach is not adapted to oysters. The most puerile intelligence must discern that the position of the earth in the universe can not be a question of religious faith, but is a question of observation and mathematical calculation. Whether other worlds are habitable, must be inferred from data which address themselves to the intellect. Whether the procedure in world-making has been slow, and according to the method of evolution, is of no consequence in the question of divine existence, or of creative and formative activity. It has been natural, in times past, to associate all generally accepted doctrines and dogmas with beliefs which are strictly religious; and then to forget the distinctions among the beliefs incorporated in the religious system. An age of intellectual sluggishness would favor such confounding of doctrines; an age of mental activity would be sure to expose the fallacy, and involve religious and secular truth in common peril. Against this we must guard. The

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world truly moves, as Galileo asserted; but prayer may still be a human duty, as the Church maintained.

The third cause of skepticism is the habit of rash and disingenuous generalizations on the part of the evil-disposed. There are those who would rejoice to see science and Christian faith in irreconcilable conflict. There are others who sincerely believe that they sustain no natural relations to each other. Persons of the former class make haste to seize upon every new development, or suggestion, or intimation which makes its appearance in the field of science, and, without waiting for that due certification which is the first canon of Baconian generalization, they proclaim oracularly the final overthrow of the "superstition of Christianity." Thus, when relics of pottery were announced as found at a certain depth beneath the alluvium of the Nile, all the world was at once informed that the Bible contained egregious misstatements respecting the antiquity of the human race; and the whole system based upon such authority must be abandoned. It was not the careful scientist who made this proclamation. It was the careful scientist, M. de Lanoye, who proceeded to test the alleged fact, and was thereupon led to publish to the world his conclusion, that geological Egypt is an alluvium twenty-six feet in maximum thickness, laid upon a bottom of marine sand; that of this alluvium four-tenths (0.4134) of a foot is deposited in one hundred years; so that the whole Nilotic deposit is but six thousand three hundred and fifty years old. So, when human relics were exhumed from the Mississippi delta, even Sir Charles Lyell was disposed to yield to the plausible claim of immense antiquity for our race; but now Humphreys and Abbot, in their patient and masterly study of the hydraulics of the Mississippi valley, formally enunciate the conclusion that the entire delta does not exceed five thousand years in age. So with the illogical claim that the discovery of the perpetual conservation and convertibility of physical force proves the mechanism of the universe self-sustaining.