SPECIAL BOOKS.
We know of no man better fitted to deal with the Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences[1] than Professor Wright. He is both a man of science and a theologian; a trusted professor in an orthodox seminary who is at the same time a fearless investigator of the geological record and of the antiquity of man—and even a sturdy advocate of Glacial man. He is thus bound by the very nature of his attitude to give fair and even attention to both aspects of the question he sets out to discuss. He begins by admitting that Christianity is not capable of demonstrative proof, and is open to objections not easy to answer; but, he retorts, it is not alone among well-founded beliefs in being thus situated. In a large number of cases it is unreasonable to demand such proof. From a philosophical point of view, even modern science is more superficial than it is popularly represented to be, and has often to assume and even depend upon data that it can not prove or even comprehend. Its great advances have in reality only slightly touched the true basis of religious hope and aspiration. After showing that there are limitations to scientific thought and enumerating some of the paradoxes which science has to encounter in basing its fundamental principles, Professor Wright defines the view of God's relation to Nature most generally held by Christian philosophers as being that the operations of Nature go on in the main by virtue of forces communicated in the beginning but subject to insulated and systematic interpositions expressing the divine will. This leads to the question of miracles, of which "the economy of the strictly miraculous element in the Bible can never cease to be a surprise to the scientific students of human history." Such events as the Flood, the passage of the Red Sea, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are accounted for as having been brought about by the regular operation of natural laws, while the miraculous element in them lay in the co-ordination by which they were made to concur with other incidents to produce a special result. Concerning the grand culminating miracle of the wonderful life and the death and resurrection of Christ, it is shown that an unbroken chain of evidence exists from eyewitnesses down; and it has been re-enforced by very recent discoveries of documents composed by authors removed by at most only a single life from the possibility of personal communication with eyewitnesses. While these evidences, as well as evidences of the accuracy of Old Testament history, have always been ample, the author now finds them superabundant. "The question, then, which we are brought to face [concerning the story of Christ] is, Were the Christians of the first century under a delusion?" To this the last pages of the book are devoted.
The amusement and interest of watching a child's gradual initiation into the mysteries of "things" is best known to the "better half" of the community. But even our mothers do not properly appreciate that with this entertainment may be gathered much information of scientific value—of value
- ↑ Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences. By G. Frederick Wright. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 362. Price, $1.
