for the errors of their representatives. Take away human frailties, and
you shall see harmony established; the study of matter will thus agree
with the study of mind, and the idea of nature with the idea of God. You
will see all the sciences rise together in a majestic harmony. I say
rise, and I say it advisedly; for the sciences also form a part of that
golden chain which should unite the earth to heaven.

The assertion that the science of nature leads away from God, expresses
nothing but a prejudice. It is not true in fact, and on principles of
right reason it is impossible: the demonstration is complete. Atheism is
a philosophy for which the natural sciences are in no degree
responsible. We shall not undertake here the general discussion of this
philosophy. Let us confine ourselves to the examination of the pretence
which it puts forward to find a new support in the results of modern
science.

The nineteenth century bestows particular attention upon history, and it
is not only to the annals of the human race that it directs its
investigations. Geology and palæontology dive into the bowels of the
earth in order to ask of the ground which carries us testimony as to
what it carried of old. Astronomy goes yet further. It endeavors to
conjecture what was the condition of our planet before the appearance of
the first living being. It remarks that the sun is not fixed in the
heavens, and that our earth does not twice travel over the same line in
its annual revolutions. It appears that stars are seen in course of
formation; it is suspected that some have wholly disappeared. Nature is
not fixed, but is undergoing modifications--lives, in fact. The actual
state of the universe is but a momentary phase in a development which
supposes thousands of ages in the past, and seems to presage thousands
more in the future. These conceptions are the result of solid and