Much is said of a contradictory relation of science to faith.  But the statement is a misnomer.  True faith is the lushest science, even the knowledge of God.  Putting fishes or birds, shells or flowers, stones or stars, in a circle or a row is a lower science than the sublime intercommunication of the soul by prayer and love with its Father.  Mere physical, without spiritual science, has no bottom to hold anything, and no foundation of peace.  The king of science is not the naturalist as such, but the saint conversing with Divinity,—­not so much Humboldt or La Place as Fenelon or Luther.  So far as the progress of outward science saps accredited writings, they must give way, or rather any false conceptions of Nature they imply must yield, leaving whatever spirituality there is in them untouched.  But this is from no essential contradiction between science and religious faith.  What faith or religion is there in believing the world was made in six days?  Less than in calculating, with Agassiz, by the coral reefs of Florida, that to make one bit of it took more than sixty thousand years.  Religious faith, what is it?  It is the trembling transport with which the soul hearkens and gives itself up to God, in sympathy with all likewise entranced souls.  But from such consecrated listening to the voice of Deity, fresh in our bosom or echoed from without by those He has inspired, we verify the rule already affirmed, and fetch advice and command for all the affairs of life.  It is emphatically the minister’s duty thus to join the vision to the fact, that they may strike through and through one another.  Certainly, so the true minister’s speech should run.  Let him stand up and boldly say, or always imply, “I so construe it; and if the Church interpret it otherwise, the Church is no place for me.  If the world will accept no such method, the world is no place for me.  I see not why I was born, or what with Church or world I have to do.  From Church and world I should beg leave to retire, trusting that God’s Universe, somewhere beyond this dingy spot, is true to the persuasion of His mind.  I must apply religion universally to life, or not at all.  If, when my country is in peril, I cannot bring her to the altar and ask that she may be lifted up in the arms of a common supplication,—­if, in the terrible game of honesty with political corruption, when ‘Check’ is said to the adverse power, I cannot wish and pray that ‘Checkmate’ may follow,—­when some huge evil, sorely wounded, in its fierce throes spreads destruction about, as the dying monster in Northern seas casts up boat-loads of dying men who fall bruised and bleeding among the fragments into the waves with the threshing of its angry tail, if then I cannot hope that the struggle may be short, and the ship of the Republic gather back her crew from prevailing in the conflict to sail prosperous with all her rich cargo of truth and freedom on the voyage over the sea of Time,—­if