We then said to ourselves, But ministers are modest, truthful men;
they would not knowingly pass themselves off as competent on a
subject with which they were unfitted to deal. They are no less
candid and self-distrustful, for instance, than lawyers and doctors,
and a lawyer or doctor who ventured to tackle a professed scientist
on a scientific subject to which he had given no systematic study
would be laughed at by his professional brethren, and would suffer
from it even in his professional reputation, as it would be taken to
indicate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps, then, the
training given in the divinity schools, though it does not touch
special fields of science, is such as to prepare the mind for the
work of induction by some course of intellectual gymnastics.
Perhaps, though it does not familiarize a man with the facts of
geology and biology and astronomy, it so disciplines him in the work
of collecting and arranging facts of any kind, and reasoning from
them, that he will be a master in the art of proof, and that, in
short, though he may not have a scientific man's knowledge, he will
have his mental habits.
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