" He avows his faith in
miracles, and "those miracles on which Christianity is founded."
Nevertheless, his faith in all these points is provisional. He says that
a truly scientific man, "if the maintenance, continuity, and nature of
life on our planet should at some future time be fully explained without
supposing the existence of any such supernatural omnipotent influence,
would be bound to receive the new explanation, and might abandon the
old conviction."[42] That is, all evidence of the truths of religion not
founded on nature and perceived by the senses, amounts to nothing.
Now as religion does not rest on the testimony of the senses, that is on
scientific evidence, the tendency of scientific men is to ignore its
claims. We speak only of tendency. We rejoice to know or believe that in
hundreds or thousands of scientific men, this tendency is counteracted
by their consciousness of manhood--the conviction that the body is not
the man,--by the intuitions of the reason and the conscience, and by the
grace of God. No class of men stands deservedly higher in public
estimation than men of science, who, while remaining faithful to their
higher nature, have enlarged our knowledge of the wonderful works of
God.
A second cause of the alienation between science and religion, is the
failure to make the due distinction between facts and the explanation of
those facts, or the theories deduced from them.
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