内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill RELIGION AS IT STANDS TO-DAY Section I I Propose in the present chapter to reopen the old and perennially interesting subject of Religion, and to endeavour, if possible, to find some solution of the difficulties arising from the new elements which have been imported into the problem in recent years, and which are now giving rise to a good deal of perplexity in the minds of thinking men. Twenty years ago, Evolution, Darwinism, Natural Selection and the rest, together with the deductions of Scientific Medicine and Pathology, were in full swing, sailing freely in a sky as yet unclouded by hesitation or doubt of their own principles, methods or aims; Supernaturalisms of all kinds, Christian or other, being ruled out of their purview as empty and exploded superstitions. The consequence was that men were able to choose freely the side in the controversy to which they should attach themselves; those who went over from the Religious to the Scientific camp being able to do so with a wholeheartedness and conviction, a sense of personal duty and devotion to truth, which did much to neutralize the ultimate dreariness of their new creed, and to compensate them for the consolations of the old religion which they have lost. It was a time when men like Professor Tyndall could boldly challenge the " efficacy of prayer," and offer to have it put to a public test in a hospital; when Professor Huxley undertook to demonstrate that all supernatural manifestations of energy not set down in the official scientific catalogue, such as Table- rapping and the like, were due to conscious or unconscious trickery; and when Mr. Labouchere was so amazed at the effrontery of a Thought-reader who professed to be able to read the number of a five- pound note in his pocket, that he was prepared to sta...