matter, of the immutability of law (under ordinary experiences, and excluding the question of the miraculous), of the conservation of energy, and of the persistency of motion, the corollary became clearer and clearer that, if nothing was ever lost, yet everything was constantly changed, and that change under law might be used for human benefit, physical, industrial, educational. Nothing could be annihilated, everything could be used. With this light the search for truth became systematic and well directed, no longer a vague wandering at a venture. Says Fiske: "The old statical conception of a world created all at once in its present shape... is replaced by the dynamical conception of a world in a perpetual process from one state into another state. . . . The dynamical conception, which is not the work of one man, be he Darwin or Spencer or any one else, but the result of the cumulative experience of the last two centuries, this is a permanent acquisition." And so far from this theory of science being inconsistent with divine purpose, the same author points out that "the creature whose intelligence measures the pulsations of molecules and unravels the secret of the whirling nebula is no creature of a day, but the child of the universe, the heir of all the ages, in whose making and perfecting is to be found the consummation of God's creative work." time has changed since Newton was condemned "because he substituted blind Gravitation for an intelligent Deity." That God works through law is now an axiom questioned by none. Century of enlightenment, century of science, century of reconciliation," says Büchner, are the descriptive titles to be given to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The

To trace the progress of the century's science in detail would demand a volume; only to name scientific discoveries and recognized inventions of far-reaching value would fill pages. Some of the old Steps of restraints, traditions empirical folprogress lies, and imaginative delusions of pseudo-science had disappeared when the century began; astronomy had taken the place of astrology; chemistry of alchemy; verification and analysis were beginning to take the place of imaginative theorizing. Priestley's great discovery of oxy

gen (1774) had already set in motion a thousand inquiries into chemistry and physics. Herschel's telescope had opened the heavens to man's gaze, but the new chemistry has made possible the spectroscope, and spectrum analysis became a magical tool for inquirers, not only for astronomy but for many other branches of knowledge. Everywhere one science gave aid and suggestion to others. Lyell's astounding demonstrations in geology incited zoölogists and led to reclassification all along the line. It was seen that continuous changes, growth, not spasmodic and erratic forces, were at work. Chemistry, geology, zoölogy, all led to the modern biology. Cuvier's enormous work of classification gave Darwin and Wallace and Huxley their starting-points, and theoretical science reached its flower in Darwin's great “ Origin of Species ❞—— the only book for which every vote was cast as one of the ten most influential books of the century in the recent consensus of opinions of distinguished men published in The Outlook. Apart from the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, apart from any special theory of mode, the fundamental idea of evolution took hold on general belief, and is still the greatest problem agitating scientific thought. In medicine, chemistry and biological chemistry led to entirely new and startling results; Pasteur and Koch and others have established the germ theory of disease, and have indicated the line upon which the enemy must be fought; vaccination has superseded inoculation; quinine and other effective medicines have been called into use; anæsthetics and antiseptic surgery have proved a blessing to the suffering; surgery has found a way to enter the human body and opérate directly within the organism; sanitation and preventive measures have been so developed that it may almost be said that they have come into existence; empiricism has in large measure yielded to true scientific methods. In travel, communication, and industry, steam and electricity have given us the railway, the steamship, the transmission of power by cable as in the vast Niagara power-works, the telegraph, the telephone, the trolley-car; in the domain of light we have the marvels of photography, of the Röntgen rays, of gas illumination, while even the now almost antiquated lucifer

match dates its discovery within the century. A hundred other discoveries of value in science could be named which have practical utility or are serious additions to our stores of knowledge. Hardly one of them stands by itself as born of chance. One branch of science has leaned upon another, all have been vitalized by the new belief that the universe is living, growing, developing from day to day; that the forces at work elsewhere are at work here; that interdependence of causes is nowhere inconsistent with purpose, and that the words character and duty are by every new development of true science made more imperative in meaning.

The new aim

EDUCATION

The movement in education during the nineteenth century, while, of course, evolutionary in fact, has been revolutionary in form. Its contrasts with the education of earlier centuries are so great that its likenesses to it and its dependence upon it are concealed. During the century education has changed its aim, its content, and its basis. The aim of education has ceased to be that piety of mind and heart which the mystics valued, and which seemed to them to involve withdrawal from the world and its activities. It has ceased to be the accumulation of that ancient lore, the beauty and significance of which concealed from humanists, early and late, the fact that it was a root and not a flower in their time. It has ceased to be the upbuilding of the individual "according to nature," as conceived by that crude philistinism which sees in human institutions, not opportunities for individual enrichment, but only limitations upon individual development. Education has absorbed each of these partial truths into the larger and richer conception that culture, efficiency, and power are its true aim. It interprets culture to mean acquaintance with the varied aspects of civilization and insight into them -the scientific, the literary, the aesthetic, the institutional, and the religious. It interprets efficiency to mean the trained capacity to lay hold of life at some definite point, and to express one's nature and purposes in terms of accomplishment. It interprets power to mean that strength

and beauty of character which no scholarship and no practical skill can give, but which grows on a life of service and self-sacrifice-a life which completes self by surrendering selfishness to gain selfhood. These three-culture, efficiency, power-are the aim of education to-day. The test of the effectiveness of any educational institution, method, or process is, Does it contribute to this aim or does it impede its accomplishment?

The content of education has expanded of necessity, in order to keep pace with its broadening aim. Not language alone, least of all ancient language alone, sup

plies material for an instruction Material of which is truly educational. Na

education

ture, man's past as recorded in history, his home and his relations to it as recorded in geography; the arts, both useful and fine, which he has developed; the society in which he lives and its interdependences-all these are part of education's content. The so-called three R's, which involve merely a knowledge of the tools of intellectual acquisition, might suffice to train a dog or to educate a pig, but they are lamentably insufficient for the needs and capacities of a spiritual being, as education now conceives him. This conviction has so broadened and deepened the course of study as to make it no longer recognizable by an eighteenth-century observer.

The basis of education has become democratic. For centuries the eye of the educational reformer was fixed upon a select few-a ruling or guiding class,

The

democratic basis

whose proper training was a matter of concern. To-day his successor is content with no ideal of an educated class for which every human being is not eligible by reason of his humanity. This has of necessity made education national, in the sense that it rests upon and reflects the genius of an entire people. It is this also which has so improved and developed the administration of education the world over. In its administration the nation expresses, through its appropriate organs, its determinations. As these determinations become increasingly clear and conscious, the administration gains in effectiveness, directness, simplicity.

Through all this great movement which has so altered the aim, the content, and

The

basis

the basis of education, there has run the vitalizing conception of the essential spirituality of the universe, so spiritual much better understood to-day than ever before. The grosser and baser interpretations of man and his environment have faded away before the bright light of that nineteenth-century philosophy which finds in reason the ultimate presuppositions of all experience, and of that nineteenth-century science which follows every thread back to a manifestation of that energy which means nothing save when conceived in terms of that will-action which every spirit knows in itself. As a consequence, educational philosophy was never so sound and so hopeful, and educational practice, with all its limitations, was never so efficient.

THEOLOGY

The popular theology, at least in the Protestant Churches, at the beginning of the nineteenth century may be briefly described as follows: God was conceived

theology

as an embodied person inhabitThe old ing some central place in the universe, the Great First Cause, the Creator of matter and force. The world was conceived as ordinarily ruled by secondary causes, which were, however, subject to the control of the Creator. Man was conceived as subject to God, who was the moral as well as the physical governor of the universe, and who issued his laws as a sovereign his edicts. Thus God's relation to the physical universe was analogous to that of an engineer to his engine; his relation to humanity was analogous to that of a king to his subjects. The first parents had sinned, and by this sin the essential nature of man had been changed. He was no longer akin to God. An unfathomable abyss separated him from God, which was bridged only by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Över this bridge could pass to his mercy only, according to Roman Catholic theology, the baptized, according to Calvinistic theology the elect, according to Methodist theology the repentant. The rest of mankind were outside the covenanted mercies, and subject only to the inflexible justice of the Creator and the King. The method by which men could escape this justice and secure this mercy was revealed through an infallible Church according to the Roman

Catholic, through an infallible Book according to the Protestant. To disbelieve the infallibility of this Church or of this Book was to be a disbeliever who was by his disbelief cut off from the only avenue to the divine mercy.

Sir Charles Lyell in his Geology familiarized thoughtful men with the truth that the world was far more ancient than the writers of the Bible had supposed, and

Effects of evolutionary theories

had been created by gradual, not instantaneous, processes. Charles Darwin, by his "Descent of Man," familiarized thoughtful men with the truth that man was far more ancient than the writers of the Bible supposed, and had ascended from a lower order of creation, not fallen from a perfect manhood. Both positions, at first strenuously resisted by the great body of theologians, and still doubted or denied by a portion of them, have gradually passed into general acceptance, which, in our opinion, will become almost universal in the next generation. the next generation. The adoption by theology of the theory of evolution has involved a radical reconstruction, and it is this radical reconstruction in theology which characterizes the progress of relig ious thought in the century now drawing to its close. In interpreting this change we must speak, not of results universally accepted, for there is no universal acceptance of any results, but of tendencies as we understand them.

The present tendency is to conceive of God, not as the Great First Cause, but as the one sole, omnipresent, universal cause, the "Infinite and Eternal Energy from

The new theology

which all things proceed;" thus his relation to the physical uni

verse appears analogous rather to that of the spirit of man to his body than to that of an engineer to the engine. which he directs. Man is conceived of as essentially or at least ideally akin to God, if not made, at least making, in the divine image, with the dormant possibilities if not the actual faculties of divinity inherent in him; thus the relation of God to humanity is conceived of as that of a father to his children, rather than that of a king to his subjects. The moral laws are conceived of, not as edicts or statutes issued from a moral governor, but as the laws of man's own nature, because the laws of God's own naturę. All men, there

fore, belong to God, whether baptized or unbaptized, elect or non-elect, repentant or unrepentant. This belonging to God lies inherent in his nature and in their nature; they belong to him as the branches belong to a tree. Sin is conceived of as having its origin, not in the fall of first parents, but in the relics of an animal nature from which man is gradually emerging, and to which in his willfulness he perversely clings. Redemption is regarded as the completion of that process of evolution which has been in the thought of God from the beginning-the perfect and final emergence of man from the animal into the spiritual state. Jesus Christ is conceived of as the ideal or typical man, in whom God dwelt as he will finally dwell in all humanity, the manifestation of God to man because the manifestation of God in a human life. Revelation is conceived of as an unveiling of the divine in human experience, the development of the consciousness of God in the soul of man, and therefore necessarily progressive and imperfect in its successive stages. The Bible is conceived of as the literature of this spiritual life, and the Church as the spiritual organism united and vitalized by this spiritual life.

The

leaders

It is impossible within the limits of such an article as this to do more than suggest the names of some of the thoughtleaders in this great progressive movement. Coleridge, by his philosophical theological interpretation of the reason, laid a philosophical foundation for the doctrine that there is no antithesis between rationalism and religion, that true religion is always rational. Erskine in the Scottish Church, Maurice in the Anglican Church, and Martineau in the Unitarian Church emphasized the truth that spirituality and reason are co-ordinating and cooperating powers, and thus prepared the way for that reconciliation of science and theology of which Henry Drummond, both in his person and by his pen, was a distinguished representative. In this country Channing, repudiating the doctrine of natural depravity and emphasizing the essential divineness of man, and Dr. Finney, emphasizing the freedom of the will and the responsibility of humanity for its right exercise, contributed to the same result, the ennobling of humanity. Dr. Bushnell, building on the same foundation,

may be regarded as the Puritan teacher of the essential trustworthiness of the intuitions, and contributed more perhaps than any other man to the overthrow of that form of Puritan rationalism which constructed theology wholly out of the analytical faculty, discarding the spiritual vision. While these three men taught in different manners the divineness of man, Henry Ward Beecher taught the humaneness of God, and by his teaching did more than any other one teacher of our age to transplant the religious life; it had been rooted in conscience, henceforth it was to be rooted in love; he did more, therefore, than any other man to emphasize and make vital in the Puritan churches the Fatherhood of God and the essential unity between God and his children. Strauss by his Life of Jesus, though his conclusions have been disproved by historical scholarship, and Renan by his Life of Jesus, though his too imaginative portrait is not accepted by sober historians, converged the thought of the world and the Church on Jesus Christ as a historical personage, while it had before been centered on him as the subject of a theological dogma. The work of such preachers as Robertson in England and Phillips Brooks in America was that of familiarizing men with these fundamental principles, and applying them to the actual experiences of living men. Almost contemporaneous with these teachers, and growing out of their ministry, was a new interpretation of the Bible, miscalled the "Higher Criticism." There is no place here to formulate the results of this new method of interpretation. It must suffice to say, generically, that it has carried back the authorship of the New Testament books to the close of the first and the beginning of the second century, and has done much to make impossible the notion that the Gospel narratives are to any great extent mythical. It has at the same time brought the authorship of the Old Testament books to a period very much later than that to which formerly they were attributed, and done much to make impossible the notion that they are historically infallible. But, what is more important than either result, this new method has accustomed men to regard the Bible as literature to be studied and interpreted as is other literature.