a tendency to accept without inquiry whatever is established.  Quite opposite is the mental tone generated by the cultivation of science.  Science makes constant appeal to individual reason.  Its truths are not accepted on authority alone; but all are at liberty to test them—­nay, in many cases, the pupil is required to think out his own conclusions.  Every step in a scientific investigation is submitted to his judgment.  He is not asked to admit it without seeing it to be true.  And the trust in his own powers thus produced is further increased by the uniformity with which Nature justifies his inferences when they are correctly drawn.  From all which there flows that independence which is a most valuable element in character.  Nor is this the only moral benefit bequeathed by scientific culture.  When carried on, as it should always be, as much as possible under the form of original research, it exercises perseverance and sincerity.  As says Professor Tyndall of inductive inquiry, “It requires patient industry, and an humble and conscientious acceptance of what Nature reveals.  The first condition of success is an honest receptivity and a willingness to abandon all preconceived notions, however cherished, if they be found to contradict the truth.  Believe me, a self-renunciation which has something noble in it, and of which the world never hears, is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science.”

Lastly we have to assert—­and the assertion will, we doubt not, cause extreme surprise—­that the discipline of science is superior to that of our ordinary education, because of the religious culture that it gives.  Of course we do not here use the words scientific and religious in their ordinary limited acceptations; but in their widest and highest acceptations.  Doubtless, to the superstitions that pass under the name of religion, science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these superstitions merely hide.  Doubtless, too, in much of the science that is current, there is a pervading spirit of irreligion; but not in that true science which had passed beyond the superficial into the profound.

“True science and true religion,” says Professor Huxley at the close of a recent course of lectures, “are twin-sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both.  Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis.  The great deeds of philosophers have been less the fruit of their intellect than of the direction of that intellect by an eminently religious tone of mind.  Truth has yielded herself rather to their patience, their love, their single-heartedness, and their self-denial, than to their logical acumen.”

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious—­it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that