Secondly. I would bespeak the candid attention of those sceptical minds, that are ever ready to imagine discrepancies between science and religion, to the views which I am about to present. The number of such is indeed comparatively small; yet there are still some prepared to seize upon every new scientific fact, before it is fully developed, that can be made to assume the appearance of opposition to religion. It is strange that they should not ere this time despair of making any serious impression upon the citadel of Christianity. For of all the numerous assaults of this kind that have been made, not one has destroyed even an outpost of religion. Just so soon as the subject was fully understood, every one of them has been abandoned; and even the most violent unbeliever never thinks, at the present day, of arraying them against the Bible. One needs no prophetic inspiration to be confident that every geological objection to Christianity, which perhaps now and then an unbeliever of limited knowledge still employs, will pass into the same limbo of forgetfulness.
Finally. I would throw out a caution to those friends of religion who are very fearful that the discoveries of science will prove injurious to Christianity. Why should the enlightened Christian, who has a correct idea of the firm foundation on which the Bible rests, fear that any disclosures of the arcana of nature should shake its authority or weaken its influence? Is not the God of revelation the God of nature also? and must not his varied works tend to sustain and elucidate, instead of weakening and darkening, one another? Has Christianity suffered because the Copernican system of astronomy has proved true, or because chemistry has demonstrated that the earth is already for the most part oxidized, and therefore cannot literally be burned hereafter? Just as much as gold suffers by passing through the furnace. Yet how many fears agitated the hearts of pious men when these scientific truths were first announced! The very men who felt so strong a conviction of the truth of the Bible, that they were ready to go to the stake in its defence, have trembled and uttered loud notes of warning when the votaries of science have brought out some new fact, that seemed perhaps at first, or when partially understood, to contravene some statement of revelation. The effect has been to make sceptical minds look with suspicion, and sometimes with contempt, upon Christianity itself. It has built up a wall of separation between science and religion, which is yet hardly broken down. For notwithstanding the instructive history of the past on this subject, although every supposed discrepancy between philosophy and religion has vanished as soon as both were thoroughly understood, yet so soon as geology began to develop her marvellous truths, the cry of danger to religion became again the watchword, and the precursor of a more extended and severe attack upon that science than any other has ever experienced, and the prelude, I am sorry to say, of severe personal charges of infidelity against many an honest friend of religion.