We have no disposition to charge such materialists as Professors Tyndall,
Bastian, Haeckel, Virchow, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, with directing their
experimental batteries against the phenomenal facts of "life" for the
purpose of overthrowing the foundations of religious faith and belief in
the world. They are all eminent scientists, and apparently earnest seekers
after truth in the several directions in which their respective paths of
investigation have been pursued. But they manifestly array their opinions
against the vitalists on the assumption that there is no scientific value
whatever in the many and singularly diversified statements respecting
"life" in both the Old and New Testaments. And this, it may be claimed, is
necessitated by the generally accepted dogma, that science and religion
are more or less hostile, the former resting on the inexorable logic of
facts only, and the latter entirely on _pre_conceived and _pre_judicial
notions respecting faith and belief. To this position of theirs we have no
objection to make, so long as they subject their scientific statements to
the one rigid ordeal of positively ascertained facts. But when they set
themselves to spinning their theories of life on the strength of "nebular
potentialities," and the possibilities of "undifferentiated sky mist," we
must insist that they are infinitely wider of the mark than the
theologians who claim that the great formative power of the universe is
God, and that his "spirit," and not gravitation, "upholds the order of the
heavens:"--certainly much wider of the mark than was Pope, when he wrote
of the universe:--

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

The truth is, that religion is quite as much the handmaid of science as
science can be said to be the handmaid of religion. She breathes far more
household laws for her devotees, if she does not veil her "sacred fires"