ame."

Much is said of a contradictory relation of science to faith. But the
statement is a misnomer. True faith is the lushest science, even the
knowledge of God. Putting fishes or birds, shells or flowers, stones
or stars, in a circle or a row is a lower science than the sublime
intercommunication of the soul by prayer and love with its Father.
Mere physical, without spiritual science, has no bottom to hold
anything, and no foundation of peace. The king of science is not the
naturalist as such, but the saint conversing with Divinity,--not so
much Humboldt or La Place as Fenelon or Luther. So far as the progress
of outward science saps accredited writings, they must give way, or
rather any false conceptions of Nature they imply must yield, leaving
whatever spirituality there is in them untouched. But this is from
no essential contradiction between science and religious faith. What
faith or religion is there in believing the world was made in six
days? Less than in calculating, with Agassiz, by the coral reefs of
Florida, that to make one bit of it took more than sixty thousand
years. Religious faith, what is it? It is the trembling transport with
which the soul hearkens and gives itself up to God, in sympathy with
all likewise entranced souls. But from such consecrated listening to
the voice of Deity, fresh in our bosom or echoed from without by those
He has inspired, we verify the rule already affirmed, and fetch
advice and command for all the affairs of life. It is emphatically
the minister's duty thus to join the vision to the fact, that they
may strike through and through one another. Certainly, so the true
minister's speech should run. Let him stand up and boldly say, or
always imply, "I so construe it; and if the _Church_ interpret it
otherwise, the Church is no place for me. If the _world_ will accept
no such method, the world is no place for me. I see not why I was
born, or what with Church or world I have to do. From Church and world
I should beg leave to retire, trusting that God's Universe, somewhere
beyond this dingy spot, is true to the persuasion of His mind. I must
apply religion universally to life, or not at all. If, when my country
is in peril, I cannot bring her to the altar and ask that she may be
lifted up in the arms of a common supplication,--if, in the terrible
game of honesty with political corruption, when '_Check_' is said
to the adverse power, I cannot wish and pray that '_Checkmate_' may
f