nies and theosophies framed in the
infancy of men's knowledge of nature; for history shows us quite the
contrary. Religious feeling has survived the heliocentric theory and
the discoveries of geologists; and it will be none the worse for the
establishment of Darwinism. It is the merest truism to say that religion
strikes its roots deeper down into human nature than speculative
opinion, and is accordingly independent of any particular set of
beliefs. Since, then, the scientific innovator does not, either
voluntarily or involuntarily, attack religion, it follows that there
can be no such "conflict" as that of which Dr. Draper has undertaken to
write the history. The real contest is between one phase of science
and another; between the more-crude knowledge of yesterday and the
less-crude knowledge of to-day. The contest, indeed, as presented in
history, is simply the measure of the difficulty which men find in
exchanging old views for new ones. All along, the practical question has
been, whether we should passively acquiesce in the crude generalizations
of our ancestors or venture actively to revise them. But as for the
religious sentiment, the perennial struggle in which it has been engaged
has not been with scientific inquiry, but with the selfish propensities
whose tendency is to make men lead the lives of brutes.

The time is at hand when the interests of religion can no longer be
supposed to be subserved by obstinate adherence to crude speculations
bequeathed to us from pre-scientific antiquity. One good result of the
doctrine of evolution, which is now gaining sway in all departments of
thought, is the lesson that all our opinions must be held subject
to continual revision, and that with none of them can our religious
interests be regarded as irretrievably implicated. To any one who
has once learned this lesson, a book like Dr. Draper's can be neither
interesting nor useful. He who has not learned it can derive little
benefit from a work which in its very title keeps open an old and
baneful source of error and confusion.

November. 1875.

VII. NATHAN THE WISE. [28]

[28] Nathan the Wise: A Dramatic Poem, by Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. Translated by Ellen Frothingham. Preceded by a brief account
of the poet and his works, and followed by an essay on the poem by Kuno
Fischer. Second edition. New York: Leypoldt & Holt. 1868.

Le Christianisme Moderne, etude sur Lessing. Par Ernest Fontanes. Paris:
Baill