tions that have been raised, and that are so easy to raise, against a work of this character. But one criticism, particularly, deserves attention, because it lies against the whole reason and purpose of the book, and has been made on all sides; in fact, it forms the only unanimous basis of attack on the part of Dr. Draper's assailants. It is said that his work is a fiction, and represents no reality; that his subject is an illusion, his title a misnomer, and his book a mere figment of the imagination. He professes, it is said, to write a "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science," when there is not, and never has been, any such real conflict, and therefore no possibility of its history. The organs of all the orthodox denominations are in emphatic accord upon this point, and even the outside sects—Jews, Unitarians, and Catholics, whom the orthodox repudiate as beyond the pale of Christianity, as knowing nothing of true religion—take precisely the same ground in regard to Dr. Draper's work. The Jewish Times, for example, says: "Is there really a conflict between science and religion? We answer emphatically, no! There is no such conflict! there can be no such conflict!" Dr. Thomas Hill, in the Unitarian Review, says of Draper's book, that "so far from giving us a history of the conflict between science and religion, it gives us nothing to show that such a conflict ever existed;" and Dr. Brownson, at the Roman Catholic extreme, declares of our author's volume, "He professes to give in it the history of the conflict between religion and science, or of a conflict that has never occurred, and never can occur." There is, at all events, little conflict here, but an harmonious strain of denial of the legitimacy of Dr. Draper's subject, all along the line, and which reaches even to the dubious borders of that which is recognized as no religion at all.
What, now, are we to make of this? It can hardly be that these diverse parties have solemnly conspired to perpetrate a huge joke; and we can only suppose that they are serious at the expense of their intelligence. Religion and science have certainly coexisted in the world for a long time, and they have both figured pretty largely in human thought and human affairs. They must have had some relations with each other, and these relations must have had a definite character. If they have not been in conflict, then they have been out of conflict, or in harmony. Those who deny the antagonism must affirm the opposite, or that the relations of religion and science are, and always have been, those of concord and harmony. But, if this be so, let it be understood that Dr. Draper's work is not the only one that is discredited. What means the multitude of books that have been written professedly to bring these subjects into harmony? There is a vast body of theological literature, going back for centuries, that is devoted to the work of reconciling religion and science. Whole libraries of such literature have been consecrated to the harmonization of separate and special phases of that relation. Generation after generation have spent a large part of their theological force in reconciling Christian doctrine which has been held as religion, with astronomical, geological, biological, and ethnological science. If Dr. Draper is a romancer, then all this must also go to the account of romance. If there has been no conflict, then there could be no reconciliation, for the attempt to reconcile that which is already harmonious is absurd. If it be said that our ignorant predecessors may have fancied a hostility which we now know to be unreal, the reply is, that the work of reconciliation was never so rife as to-day. We could run The Popular Science Monthly alone on the papers we receive from the theological side, aiming to harmonize present religious thought with the
