TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS
The recent address delivered by Professor Tyndall before the British
Association at Belfast, in which he "confessed" that he "prolonged
the vision backward across the boundary of experimental evidence,
and discerned in matter the promise and potency of every quality and
form of life," produced one by no means very surprising result. Dr.
Watts, a professor of theology in the Presbyterian College in that
city, was led by it to offer to read before the Biological Section
of the Association a paper containing a plan of his own for the
establishment of "peace and co-operation between science and
religion." The paper was, as might have been expected, declined. The
author then read it before a large body of religious people, who
apparently liked it, and they passed him a vote of thanks. The whole
religious world, indeed, is greatly excited against both Tyndall and
Huxley for their performances on this occasion, and papers by no
means in sympathy with the religious world--the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
for instance--are very severe on them for having "recourse to a
style of oratory and disquisition more appropriate to the chapel
than the lecture-room," or, in other words, for using the meetings
of the Association for a sort of propagandism not much superior in
method to that of theological missionaries, and thus challenging the
theologians to a conflict which may make it necessary, in the
interest of fair play, to add a theological section to the
Association.
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