spheres of human life, occasional instances appear of a phlegmatic nature or a supercilious manner, which no education can wholly remedy. That persons of these and certain other types of character do not, however highly educated, succeed well in the ministry, is not the fault of their scholarship, which, in point of fact, is rarely ever superior.

On the other hand, young men of sterling sense and of absorbing devotion to God and his service are usually those who make the most of their opportunities of improvement, as they do of their opportunities for saving men, for Christ's sake. Their tastes may have been refined and elevated, and their love of books intensified, in the process of their education; but as they have coveted the best gifts as a means of promoting the glory of God, so their delight in consecrating all that they have attained to his service is the more intense. So far from not being able to "condescend to men of low estate," they do it most effectively and from the highest motives. Hence, while in our church no confidence is placed in learning as a substitute for piety, no reason is seen to fear the acquisition of too much knowledge, if it be duly seasoned with grace.

As to the logic of facts, it is a matter of great rejoicing that in the American Methodist theological schools, not less than in the English, the result of systematic education, so far from being prejudicial to the personal picty of the students, has been highly favorable to it. This has not only been shown by fruits following their graduation, but by numerous and sometimes extensive revivals of religion attending the ministrations of undergraduates while still engaged in their course of study. The same fact has been attested year after year by the general religious experience of the students themselves, who have found the institutions not less means of grace than helps to knowledge.

In further illustration of the fact that the Methodist Episcopal Church has committed itself to theological education through the agency of schools, it may be stated that, in addition to the three institutions referred to above, she

has established several in the Southern States for the education of freedmen, and several more in her mission-fields, e.g. in Germany, in India, in China, and in Mexico. Those last named are yet too young to have produced very mature fruit, although their beginnings are full of promise. That in Germany has had a successful career of nearly twenty years with satisfactory results. That similar and even increasingly encouraging results will follow in all our mission-fields, as well as throughout the United States, is the universal hope, if not expectation, of the church.

ARTICLE IX.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT between RelIGION AND SCIENCE. By John William Draper, M.D., LL.D. pp. 373. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1875.

There is so much manifest error in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, and there has been so much in her practices to be condemned, that it is very easy to pass from cool criticism of these into sweeping denunciations of everything that has the label of infallibility. Dr. Draper's book on the Conflict between Religion and Science, while justified to a great degree by the present attitude of the papacy, and by numberless instances of ecclesiastical illiberality in the past, is open to many objections, and needs to be read with a good deal of caution and scepticism.

In the first place, the author speaks with positiveness regarding too great a range of subjects to insure the confidence of his reader. The book carries you over the whole range of history, profane and sacred, of wars, of philosophy, of religion, and of science; it treats at some length of the genuineness of the Pentateuch, of the conquests of Alexander, of the influence of Tertullian and St. Cyrill, of Nestorius and Augustine, of Constantine and Torquemada, of Mohammed and Averroes; it has something to say concerning the virginity of the mother of Christ, the nature of memory, the proof of immortality, the origin and antiquity of man, the decline of the influence of the pulpit; it glorifies Stocism; it praises Mohammedanism for the attention its devotees gave to mathematics and the physical sciences; it brushes aside the orthodox doctrine of providence and prayer; it reproaches the church with having spent the Middle Ages in profitless speculations, with having repressed scientific investigations, with being, in fact, the embodiment of bigotry and intolerance, while asserting that scientific men are models of candor and toleration. Upon

these subjects, and many more, our author speaks; and he speaks not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as one having authority. With such confidence and rapidity is the reader taken over all this ground that the unsophisticated believer is likely to come out at the close breathless and dismayed. And well he may be breathless; for it would require more than a lifetime of leisure to verify, from original authorities, the facts and conclusions that are assumed and asserted in each single chapter. It would be entirely out of the question for us to criticise such a book as this in detail. We cannot, however, refrain from two or three remarks.

When our author satirizes the ecclesiastics for their opposition to vaccination, why does he say nothing of the obloquy that was for so many years Leaped upon Jenner by his own profession? Was there less bigotry in the doctors of medicine when they cast Jenner out of their society for attempting to "beastialize" humanity than there was among the doctors of theology when they applied the epithet " diabolical" to his discovery? Analogous questions suggest themselves regarding numerous other similar points.

Professor Draper's contrast between the encouragement which science received from Mohammedanism and the repressive influences of the church, when compared with the present actual condition of Christian and Mohammedan civilizations, may well remind us of Don Quixote's sage remark to Sancho Panza regarding pedigrees. There are, it appears, two kinds of pedigrees, one beginning very large and terminating in a point, the other commencing small, but rising to large volume in its present possessor. Somehow modern science has found its true development in the soil prepared by the Christian church, and by what some are pleased to style the senseless doctrinal discussions of the Middle Ages; and the majority of its ablest investigators have been believers in the infalibility of the Bible. The truth is that, till the revival of literature and theological discussion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, science had done scarcely anything to give it any claim to the recognition of those who were trying to regulate the general affairs of society. Even now it has only multiplied machinery; and the outcome still depends upon the question whether in our religion there is moral power enough left to control and keep in harness the giant we have awakened. Other forces besides those of material improvement have been conspiring together with them to secure our present degree of prosperity. Of these forces a well-regulated belief in the supernatural is, we are confident, the most important. It would be useless to commend to our author the perusal of certain theological writings as a means of tempering and correcting his overweening confidence in the final success of our present material civilization. But some attention to the writings of Malthus and Greg, of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, would partially answer the same purpose, though we are by no means disciples of any of these. Their pictures of the future have, however, no greater excess of shadow than Dr. Draper's have of light. G. F. W. VOL. XXXIII. No. 131.

74

THE GREAT ICE AGE, and its Relation to the Antiquity of Man. By James Geikie, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. pp. xxv and 545. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1874.

When speculating upon time-ratios, it is well nigh impossible for geolo‐ gists to be properly mindful of their ignorance. They are tempted to forget that the dynamical agents of nature whose actions come under their survey are not much more limited in power than geological time is in extent. We do not begrudge them any amount of time the facts call for; but in their popular statements it would be advantageous to their reputation for them to remember that the general public is acquainted with two rules of induction. One is that a cause must not be relied on to explain phenomena till it is proved to be adequate. Secondly, even what would in itself be an adequate cause, must not be made the basis of extensive speculations, except in cases where the causes combined with it may be fully measured and eliminated from the problem.

For those who are familiar enough with the subject to discern his weak points, Mr. Geikie has produced, in the work under review, a book of great value. As a member of the party commissioned by government to make a geological survey of Scotland, he has had rare opportunities to investigate the interesting glacial phenomena of that country. So long as he confines himself to a delineation of the apparent facts of his native country, and to speculations upon their proximate and local causes, we can speak only in commendation of his work. This part of his book is of interest to the general reader, because of the great similarity in the drift phenomena of all countries. We commend also to special attention, the admirable specimen of inductive reasoning which appears in the appendix, pp. 490-498, upon the former extent of the glaciers of Northern Italy. The reader will there see to what degree, sometimes, general considerations can outweigh negative evidence.

But when our author comes into the region of higher speculation, and attempts to account for the glacial period itself, and to determine the time of its occurrence relative to the introduction of man, he is inclined to speak with a positiveness which the facts do not warrant. In these portions of his interesting book we discern the disturbing influence of an a priori theory. Geologists generally are somewhat shy of the mathematicians. But Mr. Geikie has accepted, almost as a first truth, the conclusions of Mr. Croll regarding the influence of the variations of the ellipticity of the earth's orbit, the precession of the equinoxes, etc., upon the climate of the earth. According to him these causes would produce extreme alternations in the climate of the different hemispheres, once in about twenty thousand years, and these changes would attain their maximum in about two hundred thousand years. Mr. Geikie, and the school to which he belongs, speak not of one glacial epoch only, but of many. When sight fails them, as it does pretty much when they get back of the marks of what we call the glacial epoch, they are too ready to walk by faith. That these

astronomical changes are in themselves true causes we will not deny. But there are so many other causes that are more or less likely to have counteracted them, that we require a solid body of facts to notify us of their action. For example, there are, possibly, the changes of the temperature of the solar spaces through which we travel, the action of the heat existing in the nucleus of the earth, the variations in the temperature of the sun, and, most of all, the modifications of climate likely to be caused by elevation or depression of portions of the earth's crust. Any or all of these causes, and many others of which we have some knowledge, may have intervened to outweigh the influence of this one. It is not a mere problem of pure mathematics to be worked out with logarithms and the calculus. When we look for a posteriori evidences of intercalated glacial epochs in the history of the earth, they are, up to this date, entirely too few to be depended upon. As our author grants (p. 480): "If we were to judge only from the general aspect presented by their organic contents, we should be forced to admit that none of these formations, from the Silurian down to the Miocene, afforded any trace whatever of cold or glacial conditions." The evidences of glacial action afforded by the conglomerate rocks, and occasional erratics that appear in the strata earlier than the Post-tertiary, are not sufficient in the face of this admission to establish a period of extended glaciation at those times, though they may indicate the existence of local glaciers.

With these cautions, we commend the book as an interesting, though not sufficiently guarded, discussion of a subject now in its infancy, but which may yet throw considerable light on questions concerning the early history of our race. We do this the more heartily because these discussions, beyond most which relate to the physical sciences, concern phenomena that in some measure, have their counterpart, in every lake basin and rounded hill and bed of gravel and striated surface of rock north of the Ohio river. Correct habits of observing these will enable one to judge understandingly concerning much of the geological evidence of man's antiquity, and may show its weakness as well as its strength. This is now one of the border lands between geology and the Bible, and it will conduce to the establishment of the final harmony of the two records if the students of the Bible observe the field intelligently.

G. F. W.

CHIPS FROM A GERMAN WORKSHOP. By F. Max Müller, M.A., Foreign Member of the French Institute, etc. Vol. IV. - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language. With Index to Vols. III. and IV. 8vo. pp. 581. London. 1875. Am. ed., New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co. 8vo. pp. 565.

Professors Max Müller and W. D. Whitney have engaged recently in what may be styled, in more senses than one, a war of words. Their encounter illustrates a fact that is too often overlooked, namely, that theologians have no monopoly of the controversial spirit. It shows, too,