ances
treated of in Turner's Chemistry have you analyzed? One-half? One-tenth?
Would you face the laughter of a college class to-morrow upon the
experiment of taking nine out of the nine hundred, reducing them to
their primitive elements, giving an accurate analysis of their component
parts, and combining them in the various forms described in that, or any
other book, whose statements, because experimentally certain, have
filled you with a dislike of Bible truths, which you must receive upon
testimony? In fact, do you know anything worth mention of the facts of
science upon your own knowledge, except those of the profession by which
you make your living?

Or, after all your boasting about scientific and demonstrative
certainty, have you been obliged to receive the certainties of science
"upon faith, and at second-hand, and upon the word of another;" and to
save your life you could not tell half the time who that other is, by
naming the discoverers of half the scientific truths you believe? What!
are you dependent on hearsay, and probability, for any little science
you possess, having in fact never obtained any personal demonstration or
experience of its first principles and measurements, nor being capable
of doing so? Then let us hear no more cant about the uncertainty of a
religion dependent upon testimony, and the certainties of experimental
science. Whatever certainty may be attainable by scientific men--and we
have seen that is not much--it is very certain you have got none of it.
The very best you can have to wrap yourself in is a second-hand
assurance, grievously torn by rival schools, and needing to be patched
every month by later discoveries. Your science, such as it is, _rests
solely upon faith_ in the testimony of philosophers, often contradictory
and improbable, and always fallible and uncertain.

5. Nor would you cease to be dependent upon faith could you personally
make all the observations and calculations of demonstrative science. The
knowledge of these facts does not constitute science; it is merely the
brick pile containing the materials for the building of science. Science
is knowledge systematized. But if the parts of nature were not arranged
after a plan, the knowledge of them could not be formed into a system.
Chaos is unintelligible. Our minds are so constituted that we look for
order and regularity, and can not comprehend confusion. We possess this
expectation of order before we begin to learn sc