of science but not their fundamental facts, are not ready to discuss. And when assumptions of knowledge are easily overcome by the believer's instinct, or when a merely conventional and formal faith falls before the force of secular reason, it does not mean that reason is weaker than feeling, or that reason is mightier than faith. It only means that in one case the reasoner, and in the other the believer, was not prepared for the contest. It will often happen that some stripling, whose only weapons are the homely and athand defenses of stones from "the brook that flows fast by the oracle of God," will be more than a match for the gigantic boastfulness of braggart, physical power; because the trust of the one is in God, and the other relies upon the brute force of ridicule, or louder talking, or ranting blasphemy. But boyish ministers denouncing science, alike with young students aping the independence of irreligion, are likely, and for the same reason, to come to grief, in the encounter with the plain weapons of common sense or simple belief.

*

And the very preparation for discussion, the examination of the arguments to be used, is a perpetual discovery of new proofs. Consciously, and of purpose, the student of Scripture, for instance, will find fresh tokens of its inspiration and new amazements of divine revelation. The harmony of Scripture; the illumination of an old passage, when the Inspirer of all Scripture sets it, like a jewel, in the fresh surroundings of its quotation in the New Testament; the marvelous combination of spiritual truths with spiritual words, as when the difference in the number of a single word † is the keystone of an argument for the incarnation; the chronological line marked out by the varying terminations of the names of the first two and the last two of the greater prophets; the working out of the wonder of the Scriptural numbers, as Mahan worked it out in "Palmoni "—these are examples which any one, who has reveled in the depth and freshness of research into the text of the Holy Bible, can multiply infinitely.

This is equally true of scientific investigation. As an abstract first truth, as an inevitable axiom, we should claim this, and expect it at the start. And yet, so weak is the confidence of many Christian men, that they are perpetually surprised by the weapons of defense, discovered by those who are on the lookout for weapons of attack. In one of two ways it is safe to assume that every branch of physical research and every line of scientific inquiry has strengthened the evidences of revealed truth. And of these two ways the

one is this: Men trace back, as they think, and perhaps correctly, forms and phases of life to some atom, some molecule, some minute beginning; and behind that, which knife can not dissect, nor hammer break, nor chemist dissolve, nor spectrum analyze, nor microscope detect-behind that is "God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Like the old geological theory of the world, which got down to the tortoise, "underneath are the everlasting arms." This, negatively. And, positively, the statement is just as true. Science is the handmaid of Religion. Investigation, by slow and painful steps, with many an error, and after long delay, leads the few who have time and brains for it, toward the dim conception and the imperfect recognition of what Revelation long ago declared to clear-eyed Faith. Of course, it is not claimed that the more a man knows of science the more he believes the Scriptures. For the bias of the mind at the start, or the absorption in the more earthly things of physical study, or the desire to uphold preconceived opinions, or the arrogance of intellectual pride, or the moral difficulty of preferring not to believe-all these have made scientific men infidels, sometimes. But they are unbelieving apart from, and they were unbelieving without, their science. Against these are to be set the men whom science has led to devout worship-the Galileos, and Newtons, and Whewells, and Millers, and Agassiz, and countless more. While the fact holds true, to any one who is familiar with the religious controversial literature of the day, that the accumulation of the results of study in every department of physics or philology-in the study of monuments, in the deciphering of inscriptions, in the examination of the strata of the earth, in the collection of fossils, in the study of the stars-the accumulation of results, when time and careful tests have sifted true from false, serves as a series of outside buttresses, completing and supporting the temple of that universal worship in which the Lord is, "before whom all the earth keeps silence," from denying blasphemy, or bursts into the anthem of adoring praise. And while the great hymn, Te Deum, with its clear and full acknowledgment of the God who reveals himself, is learned only from that revelation, its liturgical alternate is the anthem of Nature, articulate or inarticulate"Benedicite, omnia opera Domini."

But in no way is the advantage of free religious discussion more marked than in its power of mutual correction of mistaken views of opposite opinions and its control of the universal tendency to exaggeration. For it is almost an axiom, that error is either a per

version or an exaggeration of truth; and discussion is the unraveling or disentangling of the knots and snarls of misstatement; or the reduction, to its original shape, of the bare and simple truth. While the unbeliever errs in insisting that Holy Scripture contradicts his theories, because he misunderstands and mistakes what the Scriptures do teach, the believer is no less apt to overstate the scientist's assertion, to inject his own opinions into the teaching of the Bible, and to write his own views between the lines of the creeds. The great story of the creation of the world, for instance, is told in two books. In one, the book of Nature, the characters are confused, difficult to put together, and, like letters of the alphabet, by different collocations, able to spell out very varying sentences. It would be rather a forcible, but not too strong an illustration, to say, of this sort of scientific spelling out of Nature's story with its letters of stone, and fossil, and bone, that, using the same three letters, g, and o, and d, one arrives either at the highest spiritual or at the merest animal result. In the other book the letters are put together; the characters are in their proper relation to each other; the story is told at length. But it is a strange and difficult story; condensed, not pretending to explain methods; adapting itself, not to the infrequent scientific, but to the usual, common mind; written with one simple end in view, the history of the present race of human beings who inhabit the earth, made of and redeemed by one blood, dying in the first and living in the second Adam. And different people reading this story have so mingled with it their own impressions of what it must mean, that, when the commentators of the two books face each other, it is often not the story of Nature against the story of Revelation, but the misspelling of one book against the misreading of the other. Fair, thorough, honest, earnest, anxious discussion gets back to first principles. Back from the assertions which scientists have reached by means of their air-suspended bridges of imaginative inferences from positive facts to utterly uncertain conclusions, to the stern and stark facts themselves; back from the interpretations, impressions, deductions, with which theologians and thinkers have overlaid, and sometimes "made of none effect," the "Word of God," to this Word itself—the discussion of truth for the sake of finding truth leads every man away from his idols into the presence of God. The length of time occupied in the creation of the world, for instance, is simply stated in Holy Scripture to have been six equal periods of time. "The day," as we account it, measured be

tween sunrise and sunset, could not have been before the creation of the sun. Saint Augustine read this in the Bible, before science thought of it. And when science has ascertained it, not by guesses, but by demonstrations in which astronomers and geologists will harmonize the stories of the stars and stones, the believer will fill up these periods with millions of years, if necessary. So, again, the book of Genesis, concerned simply with the beginning of this planet in which we live, implies (and reverent students found this out, too, before microscopists imagined it) that the formlessness of the chaos was really the ruins of a previous world. And when science has discovered pre-Adamite man or prehistoric traces of matter, the believer will accept them as wrecks and remainders of an earlier creation. These are but illustrations which might be multiplied to fill this Review. The same thing is true of differences and contests about miracles, about the character of endless punishment, about the actual resurrection, about the choice and grace of the elect, about the function and power of prayer. We have imported into them our own ideas of what they are, and often the ideas are utterly false. We may not put words into our opponents' mouths. They may not misstate our position. And neither they nor we can call our renderings or readings, of Nature or of Revelation, the word of God. And it is one untold "advantage of free religious discussion" that it clears the view, strips off disguises, blows away the distorting fogs of human inventions, and brings men eye to eye and face to face with facts and truths, with each other and with God.

WILLIAM CROSWELL DOANE.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AS IT WAS AND IS.

THE Republican organization began in the State of New York in 1855 with the nomination of Preston King for Secretary of State. Its national organization dates from the convention over which my father presided, held at Pittsburg, in February, 1856.

His object, and that of his Democratic associates who formed the organization, was to withstand the conspiracy against the Union then being matured by the use of the slave question.

He had been called to Washington by President Jackson in 1830, to aid in withstanding the conspiracy which was then being matured against the Union by the same class of politicians, by the use of the tariff question, and shared the conviction expressed by General Jackson in his letter of May 1, 1833, to his friend the Rev. Mr. Crawford, of Georgia, that the conspirators had been foiled in 1832 for the time being only, and that "disunion and a Southern confederacy was their object, and that the next pretext (upon which they would attempt to accomplish that object) will be the negro or slavery question." (See letter, McPherson's "History," p. 389.) Nor did any considerable time elapse before the conspirators set to work, with "the slavery question," to verify the General's prediction.

The ground taken at the outset of the new agitation was, that slavery was not, as held by the founders of of the Government, "a moral and political evil," but was "the most safe and stable basis for free Government," made a direct issue with the idea upon which the Union rested, and was itself a proclamation of war against it. For, while the Constitution tolerated slavery for the time being, it nevertheless condemned it by necessary implication, and contemplated its ultimate extinction, and its framers at once forbade it in all the territories, whereas the new creed demanded that it should be extended and perpetuated, and therefore involved the subversion of the old faith and of the Constitution and Government developed under it; and this was openly avowed by the leaders of the move