Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:ANCIENT HINTS Modern Discoveries. The attempt to "reconcile science and religion" has of late been deprecated from many quarters. On the scientific side it has been urged, that the contradiction between the teaching of Scripture and the facts of nature as disclosed in our day is so complete, that the hope of their reconciliation is absurd, and the effort immoral in tendency, leading to an exegesis ingenious, but not ingenuous. Real religion, it is intimated, is not only harmed by a method having in it so much of irreligion, but even by such an aim; implying as it does a need of such formal adjustment for religion's sake. The Scripture, it is urged, is poetic and stimulant, not in any sense didactic or authoritative. It is therefore matter of indifference whether the obvious meaning be contradictory to the exterior truth of things, or whether there be any meaning whatever for the intellect, since the sphere .of religion is not intellectual but emotional.- From such a transcendental altitude the search for aparallelism in the utterances of science and the Bible must seem both childish and profane. This line of inquiry has, on the other hand, not infrequently been disparaged by Christian teachers, on various grounds. The purpose of the Bible, it is said, is not chiefly, nor indeed in any sense properly, scientific. It was given not to "teach us how the heaven goeth, but how to go to heaven." To submit it in any form to scientific canons is therefore needlessly to imperil its authority. And again,science is progressive—its teachings are incomplete and provisional—the unquestioned dogma of to-day may become the decaying heresy of tomorrow, and the text too hastily twined round it may be dragged down with it in its fall. Too great eagerness also tends to bring fanciful inte...