Mere physical, without spiritual science, has no bottom to hold
anything, and no foundation of peace. The king of science is not the
naturalist as such, but the saint conversing with Divinity,--not so
much Humboldt or La Place as Fenelon or Luther. So far as the progress
of outward science saps accredited writings, they must give way, or
rather any false conceptions of Nature they imply must yield, leaving
whatever spirituality there is in them untouched. But this is from
no essential contradiction between science and religious faith. What
faith or religion is there in believing the world was made in six
days? Less than in calculating, with Agassiz, by the coral reefs of
Florida, that to make one bit of it took more than sixty thousand
years. Religious faith, what is it? It is the trembling transport with
which the soul hearkens and gives itself up to God, in sympathy with
all likewise entranced souls. But from such consecrated listening to
the voice of Deity, fresh in our bosom or echoed from without by those
He has inspired, we verify the rule already affirmed, and fetch
advice and command for all the affairs of life. It is emphatically
the minister's duty thus to join the vision to the fact, that they
may strike through and through one another.
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