than they bear at present; and an unsuspected addition to their ancestral portrait galleries be found in the bowels of the earth. Man is a slavish engine, fancying himself free; a tool of flesh and blood to be worn out with use, then broken and flung away. His prayers are futile, his tidings of a higher world are all a flattering dream, and his hopes of a life beyond the grave are vain. The divinity of Christ is a fraud, and Christianity is doomed, like every other superstition, to die of being found out! It is an age, too, which is socially unstable and corrupt. We are struggling for wealth and distinction, forgetful of higher things. Doing is all in all; being is lost sight of, for the beauty of life does not reveal itself to us. Faithless and hopeless, men, weary of the restraints of Christianity, have sunk into a new paganism. Gilded vice now sneers at virtue, ambition scoffs at law, and luxury smiles at ruin. Whether or not the scientific scepticism of the time be a direct cause of this degraded state of society, it is of course impossible to say. There are certain philosophers who hold that materialism cannot have a pernicious effect on society at large; but since society is composed of individuals, it is difficult to see how that should be. At all events it will be granted that at such a time it is dangerous for a young man or woman to be without a guiding faith and rule of life. When winds are fickle and seas are raging, the bark should not be rudderless. Yet the present writer can assure these philosophers, that the hard gospel of atoms and force, which they so eloquently preach, has fallen like lead upon the souls of numbers of the youth of this country, and shadowed many a bright young life with sunless gloom. Scientific materialism preys upon the very noblest natures; for they accept it seriously in their devotion to the truth, although the new doctrine too often blights their enthusiasm and stifles their loftiest aspirations. The writer was trained in the ways of the old faith by Christian parents, but as he grew up he became a student of the new truths; and felt for years the internal warfare of knowledge and belief, the shadow and the void within a soul robbed of its creed. He has experienced many of the doubts of the time, and has been impelled to become their humble exponent; while at the same time he is seeking their antidote. Amid the multitude of polemical voices, clerical and scientific, the scientific sceptic can find none which resolves the difficulties of the subject in at once a masterly and simple manner. If he goes into a church he hears only the old doginas preached once more, the old hymns sung, the old prayers said. Yet all the while, he is harbouring a conviction that the service is a delusion and the creed a mockery. The clergy are, as a rule, so deficient in scientific training, that they cannot grapple with the scepticism which is paralysing their efforts. They have not thought out the bearing of all the new scientific doctrines on the articles of the faith they teach; and either in fear, or in trust, they shut their eyes to the danger which is threatening, and go on blindly as they have been going. Finding no cure for his complaint, which he believes to be the complaint of thousands more young men and women of the period, the writer sought, by private study of the problem, to arrive at his own solution of it, and if possible to recover his lost faith. He therefore undertook a systematic comparison of the old faith with the new truth, and what is put forth as such. The present work is the result of his task. In it the leading doctrines and the established laws of science are, it is hoped, clearly and popularly explained, so that all readers may readily understand them; and a comparison is drawn between them and the leading articles of the Christian belief. The writer makes no pretensions to that philosophic arena where pugnacious professors cleverly contend in throwing intellectual javelins at each other, very much for their own vainglory and the amusement of their friends; the stakes at issue being things no less sacred than men's Faith in Christ, and the Goodness of God. His aim has been to utter to the world the conflicting ideas which are floating in the minds of the younger generation, and to bring them into harmony where he could. Where he has failed in reconciling them he will at least have shown their disagreement, and having in this way stated the case, it will perhaps be easier to find the remedy. The work being a progressive study, the reader is invited to suspend his judgment of it until he reaches the close. The method which has been followed consists in explaining and comparing the views of so-called revelation and science on those great mysteries of his origin, habitation, |