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Show Scientific And Religious Faith JOHN BURROUGHS, in the Outlook, has an article on "Scientific Faith" in which he expresses ex-presses the belief that man has emerged, through evolution, from some low animal life. Here is one paragraph: "Look at your friend, your child, your wife, or at the great man-poet, musician, philosopher and try to bring home to your mind the fact that hack in the abyss of geological time the ancestor of each of these persons was an animal 1 lower than those we spurn daily with our feet. Yet if we accept the authority of science, we ;-. are forced to this conclusion. There is no escape; we have to believe it, whether we will or not." Wo may have to believe that the origin of man was some infinitely low order of animal life, but we do not have to believe that it was a monkey or chimpanzie. Whatever it may have been, it was different from all others, and evolution evo-lution could make it nothing but a reasoning, intellectual in-tellectual being. It is easier to believe that at some time evolution reversed its engine and caused man to degenerate into a monkey, than to believe the opposite. It is easier to believe that all there is in evolution, when referring to animal ani-mal life, is that under the slow expension of the years certain species have been greatly improved, im-proved, but to believe that what was a monkey finally developed into a man that another monkey mon-key developed into a woman, is something that no scientific conclusion can convince us is true. There was, at last accounts, a dog in Germany which had mastered a vocabulary of eight words. But to believe that, with proper inducements, induce-ments, that kind of dog could develop into an auctioneer or alderman is improbable. By scientific scien-tific grafting, Luther Burbank creates a fruit or JJ flower out of two species of fruit or flowers, but while the new plant has qualities of both the fruit and flowers, It is still only one or the other. By scientific breeding great improvements are made in cattle and horses, but no breeding can nroduce a new species of animal. The mule is the result of crossing two distinct animals, but nature steps in at once and refuses posterity to the hybrid. j We all, in contemplating the wonders of cre ation, are forced to conclude that they never could have been, save that an infinite intelligence and Infinite power called the worlds into existence, exist-ence, and established for them the order that holds them in their spheres. And there must have been an object; they must have been for the homes of intelligent beings, else they would have been but wastes, which would be contrary to our conception of infinite wisdom, justice and power, Is there anything improbable in the thought that the intelligence that creates a world J creates also the beings to people it? And if the intelligence needed to make reasoning beings ff i was to be had, there was but one Source and that source was the creative source that first j evolved tlid world from His thought and then the ' boings to people it. Looked at that way, there is I nothing improbable in tht thought that He breathed the breath of life into the first man's nostrils and made him a living soul and that, " tt thus divinely endowed, the other animals were C ' created for his use. Hugh Miller went daft , in trying to reconcile the statements in the n Bible with the facts of geology. He was a hard- headed Scotchman; he made no allowares for Oriental imagery, took everything as Absolute statements of facts, and was baffled in trying to reconcile the one with the other. He evidently If never thought that great as had been the dis- coveries of science, after all they had progressed only a little beyond the anti-chamber; that the field beyond extended, doubtless, beyond this world, i and that no one playing with the shells on the shore should venture to put limitations upon what the great ocean beyond might contain. Mr. Burroughs has what he calls a "Scientific Faith." Possibly the evolution that is now at work upon his mind may soon enable him to reconcile all the differences between scientific and religious relig-ious faith, and he may realize that the order which holds the universe in motion without a jar will do as much for his own soul. |