scientific philosophers. Moreover, the church, the only competent authority to promulgate dogmas of faith, has never yet attempted to impose on the minds of her children a purely scientific truth as an article of belief. From this it is evident that Mr. Bixby occasionally palters, and merely wishes to pave the way for an easier adaptation of his religious views to the so-called advanced scientific tendencies of the day.
He says that all theologies stand in the way of science, but that two dogmas especially exhibit this perversity—viz., 1, the assumed infallibility of the Bible; 2, the assumed intervention of God. “In consequence of the first of these dogmas,” he says, “there has been a struggle by theologians to limit modern science to the contracted circle of the ancient Hebrew knowledge of the universe, and any variation of statement from the letter of Moses or Job, David or Paul, is regarded as a dangerous loosening of another screw in the bonds of righteousness and the evidences of immortality.” Mr. Bixby is not himself a believer in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, and evidently thinks that whoever does not agree with him stands on the extreme opposite line and believes the very shaping of the letters to have been divinely commanded. This is wrong. The Scriptures were never intended as a manual of science. They merely state the great facts of human and cosmic genesis in a general way, so far as those two momentous facts affect the interests of the race. It has been proved time and again that the Mosaic books, fairly interpreted, contain nothing adverse to scientific truth. Why, then, will writers be ever harping on this well-worn
theme? It is not honest to advance a statement without proof, and try to clinch it with a sneer.
“In consequence of the second dogma,” he writes, “theologians have been jealous of any attempt at a natural explanation of the mysteries of the world, and have looked upon every extension of the realm of unbroken order and second causes as an invasion by science of the religious kingdom. They imagine that one must lose what the other gains; that, step by step, as the arcana of the Kosmos are penetrated, and the same laws and substances are found ruling and constituting these as rule and constitute the more familiar parts and operations of nature, the action and presence of the Deity must be denied, and the human mind landed more and more in the slough of materialism.”
These words bear their refutation with them. The accusation is serious, and yet not a word of proof to substantiate it. Too often is Mr. Bixby guilty of this illogical procedure of substituting statements for proven facts and captious deliverances for argument. When Dr. Draper denies the possibility of miracles, he does so at least logically; for he believes in the eternity, immutability, and necessity of law. With him there is no lawgiver, but with Mr. Bixby it is different. He speaks of God “pouring his will through the channels of unvaried law.” Now, it is an axiom in law that the framers thereof may derogate from it from time to time, if so it should seem good to them. Why not, therefore, God? Mr. Bixby cannot, then, deny the utter impossibility of a miracle, and yet he argues against it just as strenuously and in the same spirit as Mr. Draper or Mr. Tyndall. Should he charge that such exceptional deviations from apparently established laws would argue caprice or shortsightedness on the part of God, we beg to reply that they occur in consequence
of a higher law, representing the divine will, by which those secondary laws were established, and which, with far-reaching and clear-eyed gaze, made provision for those exceptional occurrences, so that they may be said virtually to come within the scope of the law itself. Should, then, the testimony in support of a miracle be of an unimpeachable nature, we see no reason why the possibility of a miraculous event is to be denied. When Voltaire said he would more readily believe that a whole citiful of people, separated by prejudices, social position, tastes, habits of life, and mutual distrust, might conspire to deceive him than he would that a dead man had arisen from the grave, he confounded physical with metaphysical impossibility; and this is precisely what every unbeliever since his time has done. To this charge Mr. Bixby is more grievously amenable, since he admits the reason for the validity of the distinction between the two impossibilities mentioned, by admitting God to be the author of law, and yet he virtually ignores it by the position he assumes.
But this chapter on the “Causes of Actual Antagonism” is so replete with reckless assertion and inconsequent reasoning that we have only to take up a passage at hazard to be confronted by an error. On page 41 he says:
“Neither is religion based on, nor bound up with, any one book. Had Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob no religion, because Moses had not yet written? Was there no Christianity in the lifetime of Jesus, or the first forty years of the apostolic generation before Matthew put his pen on to parchment? As well say that chemical affinity is based on Lavoisier’s or Dalton’s treatises, or that gravitation is ruined if Newton’s Principia is shown false in a single theorem.”
We assure our readers that we have selected this passage at random, lest we may be suspected of malice in having singled it out because of its surpassing fatuity. Who ever dreamt of saying that religion is bound up in a book? As well say that an author’s thoughts are nowhere to be found but between the covers of the book which bears his name. But mark the transparent fallacy of the underlying thought. Mr. Bixby evidently supposes that because religion had an existence prior to the books mentioned, we might therefore dispense with these, and still possess religion just as our predecessors had it before those books were yet written. But suppose those books happen to contain the previous body of religious doctrine, together with developments or disclosures inseparably connected with it; might we then carelessly reject them, as Mr. Bixby implies we might? Or does it follow that, because a “spiritual awakening” is defined to be of a special sort in one instance, it can never be so in another? Yet such is the irresistible inference to be drawn from the introductory portion of the passage just quoted. The same may be said of the reference to the priority of Christianity over the Gospel of St. Matthew. No one contends that Christianity did not exist in the lifetime of Jesus, or that it would not now exist had not St. Matthew written his Gospel; but it by no means follows that we are free to reject that evangelist’s history, since it is a compendium of Christian doctrine such as our Lord had preached it in his lifetime, and in rejecting it we would thereby reject the latter. The allusion to Lavoisier and Dalton is just as unhappy; for though it is true the science of chemistry might exist
without them, still we cannot reject their treatises, since these contain the essential principles of that science.