Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/249

CHAPTER IX. REPORT OF THE CONNECTION OF RELIGION WITH THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. IN a fifth-day paper Dr. George Washburn recalled how science and philosophy, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, flourished at Bagdad and Cordova, under Moslem rule, while darkness reigned in Europe; not, however, under Arab or orthodox Mohammedan scholars and thinkers, but under Jews, using Moslem auspices and enjoying the favor of princes whose Moslem orthodoxy was very uncertain. On the ninth day Prof. Max Muller, whose learning and reasoning have thrown much light upon the science of re- ligion, expressed in a paper sent to the Parliament his con- viction that all religions are natural, that there was a purpose in the ancient religions and philosophies of the world, that Christianity was built upon these, from materials, as to its form and substance, furnished by them, was in fact a synthesis of the best thoughts of the past, as they had been slowly elabor- ated by the leading peoples of the human race, the Aryan and the Semitic. The place of man in nature, according to science, was dis- cussed in a ninth-day paper by Prof. A. B. Bruce. So far from hesitating to accept evolution, we may say that making man out and out the child of evolution — not his bodily organization only, but the whole man, mind as well as body — has advant- ages, rather than the contrary, for the cause of Theism. If the process of evolution has been the absolutely universal mother of creation, whereof man in his entire being is the highest and final product — reason and conscience, soul as well as body, hav- ing resulted from evolution — we gain a point of view at which we naturally claim that design must have arranged such a move- ment of long-descended, far-reaching, and marvelously effect- ive forces of nature. And under evolution we are bound to