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Show Science and Religion A GREAT many people now living heard Professor Tyndall lecture. It is but a very few years since he died. He did not believe in any form of revealed religion. His was an ab-i ab-i solutely scientific mind. What was not suscep tible of proof, he rejected. Hugh Miller in trying try-ing to reconcile his scientific knowledge with the teachings of the bible went distraught and killed himself. Tyndall in the pride of his sclen-tiilQ sclen-tiilQ achievements, decided that the purported facts of the bible were but the compilations of oriental imaginations that would not bear the test of scientific research. Each established what they believed to be indisputable truths about the processes of nature; neither seemed ever to question themselves whether or not what they had proven was all that could be discovered relating to the question under consideration. They each looked from the bottom of the trail up and knew naught of tho glories which at the summit were revealed. t Tyndall goes into history as the man who more than any other man "made known the great scientific truth of the mutual convertibility 1 of heat and motion." Were he still alive would he not have to correct some of the btatemento which he made? He was one who agreed that " X the universe was mado of atoms. Did he ever think that each atom was a little world, holding I ' in its matrix thousands of other atoms? He i said: "We cannot bo content with knowing that I the light and heat of tho earth illuminate and ' ' warm tho world. We are led irresistibly to en 's t quire, what is light, and what is heat?" Then he proceeded to explain. Ho ascribed both to tho light and heat of the sun transferred K to us on waves of ether. Ho accepted tho belief that the sun was a i rolling globe of fire, consuming annually material I enough to make a planet, and that such light and tf heat as come to tho earth come on waves of j ether, but he never tried to explain, how the heat : I' was maintained through millions of miles of 1 space that is vastly colder than ice, except that ft this was accomplished by the motion of the 4 f waves that it came on. J The first assumption makes the sun a world I' . that is consuming Itself, and which at last must burn itself out, and of course leave all the planets but frozen and dark derelicts flooding in tho abysses of space. As though in God's economy j so fearful a tragedy was made inevitable. The 1 other theory that the heat comes through that ! fearful distance of frozen space is still more untenable. ' How vast tho pity is that Tyndall could not have lived to seo one arc light and to know that its substance was gathered by machinery turned by a motor power miles away and transmitted on a wire to where, under man's guidance, it Hashed out in its constituent elements, precisely the same light as that of the sun. Then when he learned further that cold is a natural conductor conduc-tor of electricity, that the natural conclusion Is that tho parent sun throws off electricity to his planets, that when it strikes our atmosphere then the friction begins which heats tho air around us, and when the atmospheric conditions are right for it, the surplus electricity blazes out in electric storms with its thunder drums rolling, and sometimes bends down to rend the oak or crush some structure reared by man? And could he have lived until a wireless message mes-sage was brought to him, the words say of a iriend from whom he was separated by mountains moun-tains and valleys and rolling oceans. What would he have said then? Would it not have been in the words of Newton: "To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting myself my-self in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean (of truth) lay all undiscovered before me." Tyndall said the study of science intensified the Imaginations of men. Our thought is that a profound study of the sciences ought, with every succeeding problem solved, make the proudest man grow humble in the consciousness of how little he knows. But the doors of science are being opened more and more frequenlty all the time; the more that are opened the richer are the treasurrs found within; with each new discovery God's power and God's mercy are the more . apparent, and this is so manifest that wo do not think it unreasonable to believe, that, after all, it will be science through its rovealments that will cause all men to bow in reverence to the power that fashioned the universe and set its mysterious planets and suns, fully freighted and compari-Boned, compari-Boned, on their sublime voyages. |