apostles, first took coherent shape in the writings of this mighty Roman, who was separated from the apostolic age by an interval of time like that which separates us from the invention of printing and the discovery of America. The idea of God upon which all this Augustinian doctrine is based is the idea of a Being actuated by human passions and purposes, localizable in space and utterly remote from that inert machine, the universe in which we live, and upon which He acts intermittently through the suspension of what are called natural laws. So deeply has this conception penetrated the thought of Christendom that we continually find it at the bottom of the speculations and arguments of men who would warmly repudiate it as thus stated in its naked outlines. It dominates the reasonings alike of believers and skeptics, of theists and atheists; it underlies at once the objections raised by orthodoxy against each new step in science and the assaults made by materialism upon every religious conception of the world; and thus it is chiefly responsible for that complicated misunderstanding which, by a lamentable confusion of thought, is commonly called "the conflict between religion and science." VII. _Conflict between the Two Ideas, commonly misunderstood as a Conflict between Religion and Science._ In illustration of the mischief that has been wrought by the Augustinian conception of Deity, we may cite the theological objections urged against the Newtonian theory of gravitation and the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Leibnitz, who as a mathematician but little inferior to Newton himself might have been expected to be easily convinced of the truth of the theory of gravitation, was nevertheless deterred by theological scruples from accepting it. It appeared to him that it substituted the action of physical forces for the direct action of the Deity. Now the fallacy of this argument of Leibnitz is easy to detect. It lies in a metaphysical misconception of the meaning of the word "force." "Force" is implicitly regarded as a sort of entity or dæmon which has a mode of action distinguishable from that of Deity; otherwise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the one for the other. But such a personification of "force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting each other with a "force" which varies directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase as a convenient metaphor by which to describe the manner in which the observed movements of the two bodies occur. It explains that in presence of each other the two bodies are observed to change their positions in a certain specified way, and this is all that it means. This is all that a strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is all that observation can possibly prove. Whatever goes beyond this and imagines or asserts a