Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: light which has guided the many and diverse Christian nations into a civilisation far nobler and happier than any that has preceded it, is unperceived and the very existence of that civilisation is to the unbeliever one of those many riddles to whose solution he can only offer that meaningless and depressing phrase— blind chance. Science and Religion IV. '"Che fool hath said in his heart, tTAere is no God."— "Pialm, xle., I. AST time we dwelt on the gradual evolution of man's powers of perception. How first in his earliest ancestors, the protozon, the sensation of weight was developed, and how his wormlike forefathers increased this narrow domain of knowledge by adding a rudimentary sense of sight and hearing, and I think I moy add smell. jJnd then we thought of our fish ancestors and our reptile ancestors completing these senses, and that the latter began to add to these that great power of mental perception which we call intelligence, the production of reason, 'ci'ence aud I Religionthat reason which our opossum forebears, and our ape grandfathers so far perfected that our immediate father, the primitive man, was ready to pass down to oursehes, members of the genus homo sapiens, a perfect measure of this inestimable gift. We. further thought of the subsequent development of the sense of beauty and the sense of faith which are the two greatest powers of the perception, and are the especial attributes of the cultured and the religious man. cA£ou / want to put before you the reason of these developments, and to shew you that they all depend on this one great principle that this world is one in which Qod's creation is being gradually 1cience and I Religion perfected. I suppose my scientific friends would be annoyed by such an unscientific phrase, but r...