Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Essay on the Common Features Which Appear in All Forms of Religious Belief
It is a mistake to suppose, that men of Science attack Religion from pure malice, for it is to be feared, that they do not think of Religion at all: they are led on in spite of themselves in search of absolute tested Truth. The real contest is betwixt one phase of Science and another, betwixt the crude knowledge of yesterday and the less crude knowledge of to-day. The contest is merely the measure of the difficulty of exchanging obsolete notions for new and accurate ones. Our ancestors transmitted to us certain notions, which they honestly and piously entertained, but to which we cannot assent without considerable revision. The discovery by Copernicus of the rotation of the globe is an instance. It had nothing to do with man's belief in God, and yet at the time of the discovery it was deemed atheistic, and contrary to the Scriptures. As in the newly-discovered ruins of an ancient city, students occupy themselves in digging, and sorting, everything, that the spade turned up, and speculating on its origin and object: so in the pages of ancient Manuscripts, he tried to look below the actual written words, and with the lens of Higher Criticism try to find out the motive, the environment, the materials available, and the antecedents, of the writer. Among his large acquaintance he had never taken intimate counsel with any: he was not a thoughtless observer: he had known many, who all their life had been worldly, immoral, with no thought of ever turning to their Creator, careless of the future, unrepentant of the past, and yet Prosperity of every kind had accompanied them from the cradle to the grave. On the other hand, he knew of good men and women, whose life had been embittered by sorrow, suffering, want, and bereave ment, the result of the errors of others. He read in the papers of hundreds being suffocated in a mine, drowned in a shipwreck, or crushed to death in a railway accident, of some bright angel of purity and goodness being drowned in a boat-accident. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
