ons from the
highest truths of Science; it is a system wherein no single doctrine
appeals for its acceptance to any principle of blind or credulous faith,
but wherein every doctrine can be fully justified by the searching light of
reason; it is a system wherein the noblest of our aspirations and the most
sublime of our emotions are able to find an object far more worthy and much
more glorious than has ever been supplied to them by any of the older forms
of Theism; and it is a system, therefore, in which, with a greatly enlarged
and intensified meaning, we may worship God, and all that is within us
bless His holy name. Assuredly a proclamation such as this, emanating from
the most authoritative expounders of modern thought, as the highest and the
greatest result to which a rigorous philosophic synthesis has led, is a
proclamation which cannot fail to arrest our most serious attention. Nay,
may it not do more than this? May it not appeal to hearts which long have
ceased to worship? May it not once more revive a hope--long banished,
perhaps, but still the dearest which our poor natures have
experienced--that somewhere, sometime, or in some way, it may yet be
possible to feel that God is not far from any one of us? For to those who
have known the anguish of a shattered faith, it will not seem so childish
that our hearts should beat the quicker when we once more hear a voice
announcing to a world of superstitious idolaters--"Whom ye ignorantly
worship, Him declare I unto you." But if, when we have listened to the glad
tidings of the new gospel, we find that the preacher, though apparently in
earnest, is not worthy to be heard again on this matter; and if, as we turn
away, our eyes grow dim with the memory of a vanished dream, surely we may
feel that the preacher is deserving of our blame for obtruding thus upon
the most sacred of our sorrows.

Mr. John Fiske is, as is well known, an author who unites in himself the
qualities of a well-read student of philosophy, a clear and accurate
thinker, a thorough master of the principles which in his recent work he
undertakes to explain and to extend, and a writer gifted in a remarkable
degree with the power of lucid exposition. Such being the intellectual
calibre of the man who elaborates this new system of scientific theology, I
confess that, on first seeing his work, I experienced a faint hope that, in
the higher departments of the Philosophy of Evolution as conceived by Mr.
Spencer