It is surprising that so many good Christian people should feel touchy on this question of an enormously remote ancestry, although they would, upon occasion, join with earnestness and true humility in the confession that ‘dust we are, and unto dust shall we return.’ In their reluctance even to examine the real truth of the question, they fail to perceive that the true sons of the Prophets are not their lineal descendants, but those who inherit their wisdom; and that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that,’ although his great-grandfather should prove to have been a lob-worm or a toad-stool. Too much injury to religion has been done already by confounding false science with Scriptural truth, to make it either ‘fair or reverent’ to hold back from protesting, whenever occasion offers, against the mischief. Persons accustomed with presumptuous or careless ignorance to denounce geology and Darwinism, and the results connected with them, may have had their consciences soothed and encouraged by your correspondent. My charitable object is to make those consciences uneasy again[64]. March 23rd, 1870. SCIENCE AND RELIGION. Sir,--One of your correspondents has pithily observed, that if he has denounced Darwinism, it is simply because he believes it to be untrue. Could you not, Sir, in the interests of science and Christian charity, prevail upon him to recall his denunciation, by showing him that intellectual error requires not to be denounced, but to be set right? The prejudice against Darwinism has undoubtedly arisen from a conflict--real or apparent--between its conclusions and certain passages of Scripture. Such a prejudice arose against the earlier advancement of astronomy and geology, and the new conclusions arrived at were ‘denounced in the interests of Christian orthodoxy,’ _simply because those who denounced them believed them to be untrue._ It is a little sad, though withal a little amusing, to observe how many persons, eminent at once for piety and Protestantism, inveigh against the Papal assumption of infallibility, while assuming an infallibility of their own. They know precisely what is Scripture doctrine and what is not. They know exactly what measure of inspiration God has been pleased to give to this writer or the other. At one time they are sure that a science is not true, because the Bible does not speak in accordance with the language of the science; at another time they discover that the science had all along been very clearly revealed in the Bible under a disguise. It unfortunately escapes their notice that by this means, while they are reverently denouncing the science ‘in the interests of Christian orthodoxy,’ they are under a disguise denouncing the Bible.