Newton, Leibnitz, the two Herschells, were religious men, and have never been surpassed in scientific ability. They found in the thought of the Christian's God the explanation and support of the profoundest conclusions. of their science. Descartes, who founded a philosophy that rivalled Aristotle's, was thoroughly a Christian.

Galileo, whose name is often quoted as proving the opposition of religion to science, incurred odium chiefly, we should note, for defending the discoveries of Copernicus of half a century before, to which he had added the rotation of the sun upon its axis. It is likely that his sufferings were due as much to his hasty and intractable temper as to his science. Pope Urban VIII. allowed him to spend his latter years, though he was nominally a prisoner, in the palace of the Medici at Rome and in his own country house at Florence, receiving his friends and pursuing his studies, which appear to have been praised both then and now quite as much as they deserved.

One of the most beautiful and typical of the sciences of modern days, botany, was the creation of Karl von Linne, Linnæus, the son of a clergyman of Rashult in Sweden. The child's passion for flowers was kindled, according to the story, even in his cradle, where he could be amused by their bright hues for hours. When twenty years of age Linnæus assisted Olaf Celsius in preparing a work on the plants of the Bible. When his great work, Species Plantarum, sent forth in 1753, had crowned his fame as the first naturalist of Europe, his philosophic mind had not learned to disdain the lessons of the pious home where his cradle stood.

The heathen poet lamenting the untimely death of a learned philosopher, who lay unburied after shipwreck, deplores the helplessness, in such an hour, of the mind 3

that could traverse the heavens and the round world, and even number the sand. The poor ghost cannot escape the indignities of the common lot. We have here a most expressive comment upon that praise of knowledge-how that it should be cultivated for its own sake, and not for any utility to the life of man-so familiar to readers of Plato and Cicero. That he who has triumphed over space, and unravelled the mysteries of time and number, should be doomed to flit helplessly for a hundred years around his unburied corpse, is certainly an affecting parable upon the impotency of learned fame. There was nothing in the teaching of the great heathen sages to kindle a general or public interest in the pursuits of science, such as that with which we are familiar. Science was more often made the instrument to silence alike the promises and threats of religion, and along with these to put out the colored lights with which fancy and imagination had decked the mysteries of existence. It is not unlikely that Horace may be satirizing the rationalism of Lucretius. The Baconian philosophy, which aims to turn the knowledge of nature and her forces to the use of man, if kept within the bounds that Bacon himself' prescribed, so that devotion to the natural may not blind us to supernatural light, is certainly more in conformity with Christian conceptions, which take account of whatever concerns the interests of man either in the life present or in that to come.

Chateaubriand, who treated of the genius of Christianity, says that "had the Reformation been completely successful from the beginning, it would have established, for a time at least, another species of barbarism. Viewing as superstition the pomp of divine worship; as idolatry, the chefs-d'œuvre of sculpture, of architecture, and of painting-its tendency was to annihilate lofty eloquence and sublime poetry, to degrade taste by repudiating its models, to introduce a dry, cold, and captious formality into the operations of the mind, to substitute in society 1 The Student's Prayer, Bacon's Works.

affectation and materialism in lieu of ingenuousness and intellectuality, and to make machinery take the place of manual and mental operations." Yet, after all this, the brilliant essayist adds with apparent inconsistency: "The Reformation was, properly speaking, philosophic truth, under the guise of Christianity, attacking religious truth." "Religious truth is the knowledge of one God manifested in a form of worship. Philosophic truth is the threefold knowledge of things intellectual, moral, and natural." This seems to be said in apparent forgetfulness that no truth of whatever kind can ever really contradict any other truth. The most perfect intellect ever bestowed on man, and at the same time the most acute (a modern logician thus describes Pascal), has shown how the same person can find entire harmony in the deepest mysteries of religion, the profoundest researches into nature, and the most subtle analysis of the human heart.

2

The religion of Christ can justly claim this testimony to herself. She teaches her children to do everything, the simplest action, to God's glory. She also teaches that no real knowledge can ever lead us away from Him. It is never enlightenment, it is simply pride, that suggests the imagination that there can be natural causes or laws independent of Him. The root of sin and of intellectual stupidity is the same-a turning away from Him in whom alone is happiness, who alone is truth. All beauty, all wisdom, all that is wonderful, the works that occupy our waking and our sleeping thoughts, as well as the more marvellous faculties that discern and remember and imagine and reason, in varying measure through our little day, while our personality remains, point to Him, and to Him alone, as the end of all knowledge, and suggest that what we do not know of Him, nor can imagine, is still more wonderful and glorious than what we do or

can.

Etudes Historiques, François I. Exposition.

There is no more truly Christian hymn than the Benedicite, Omnia

'Jevons's Logic, Less. XIII., p. 111. Opera.

LECTURE XII.

INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY UPON

LITERATURE.

IN English speech, I think, "literature" generally means elegant literature, whereas in French and German it signifies almost whatever can be written. A writer in the Spectator or Tattler would include under "literature," rhetoric, poetry, criticism, the classical authors; and by a man of letters we should understand one to whom polite studies had given a certain polish-a meaning illustrated also in our usage of the word "style." But if we should examine a French or German account of "literature," we should find that it included annals, political history, law, and in fact a development of most of the sciences. This latter conception of "literature" makes it, indeed, nearly equivalent to an account of civilization itself, so far as this can be committed to writing. The history of different nations is mirrored each in its own language and literature. "We have as many literatures, wrought into the highest forms of taste and art, as there have been civilized nations and languages.' " I

The very letters of different alphabets are suggestive of character and history. In one country we can trace them up to their original ideographic forms, as in Egypt; in another, as in China, these pictured forms are combined with the phonetic symbols. A large number of letters, indicating an elaborate analysis of elemental sounds, is

1 Felton's Greece, Ancient and Modern, Lect. III., Vol. I., p. 39.

usually the sign of a similar copiousness of words, and redundance in composition. The Zend language, for instance, has thirty-nine letters, and the Sanscrit forty-eight. The latter seems appropriate to a meditative people, whose life is spent not in action, but in dreamy contemplation. "The longest life," says Sir William Jones, "would not suffice for the single perusal of works that rise and swell, protuberant like the Himalayas, above the bulkiest compositions of every land beyond the confines of India." The epic poem called Ramayana has more than one hundred thousand lines; that is more than three times the length of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Æneid put together; and yet the Mahabharata is twice as long as the Ramayana. Passages of beauty and spirit are found in these compositions, but they are like rare flowers scattered amid the monotonous and interminable growth of their native jungles. The simple and rugged sublimity of the Hebrew tongue expressed in twenty-two letters, and in the same number of sacred books, according to the tradition mentioned by Origen,' the mysteries of Divine Revelation, the creation, the fall of man, and the preparation for a Redeemer. The Greek tongue, with twentyfour letters, attained the perfection of human speech, flexible, keen, vigorous, having the strength of primitive roots with endless power of combination and the raciness of dialects-"a musical and prolific language that can give a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy." No religious mind can doubt that this wonderful language, though glorified already by the masterpieces of human genius in poetry, philosophy, history, oratory, still waited its crowning honor in being made through inspiration the vehicle of God's final and perfect Revelation to man.

Literature proper is distinguished from other writing by its attention to form, whether metre and rhyme as in poetry, or the musical element that is apparent in finished