we know all too little about how their evangelicalism affected, if at all, the
empirical side of Benjamin Silliman's geology, James Dwight Dana's mineralogy,
Arnold Guyot's glacial geomorphology, Joseph Henry's physics, Matthew Fon-
taine Maury's oceanography, to take just a few American examples. Through
the work of Michael Gauvreau and Nancy Christie we see just how important
practical engagement was in the arena of sociology. For it turns out that Ca-
nadian sociology in the decades around 1900 emerged out of a Christian tra-
dition of social survey energized by social conscience. Here the theoretical works
of Marx, Durkheim, and Spencer were largely irrelevant to the initial growth
of the social sciences where practical involvement and the search for the reso-
lution of pressing urban and rural social problems were the real catalysts.

In a different arena again D. G. Hart highlights another battlefield -- that over
the nature of the biblical documents. The struggle by evangelical Christians
committed to an inerrant view of the Bible to find a place in the modern
academy and the varying ways in which they have engaged "scientific" biblical
scholarship are thus the objects of his scrutiny. These in turn become the vehicles
by which Hart provides commentary on the uneasy relationship evangelical
communities have sustained with the secular world of the university in the
twentieth century.

Our last chapter offers a reward for readers who persevere to the end. The
dialogue that George Marsden overheard on Mt. Olympus among Socrates,
Thomas Jefferson, and William Jennings Bryan is filled with whimsey of a deadly
serious sort. What these three worthies have to say about science in se as well
as about science for its social and political purposes amounts to a final rationale
for the book as a whole. By recording encounters of evangelicals and science,
the volume demonstrates again what has been shown so often before, that study
of the physical universe matters in western society because, for at least 500 years,
science has always concerned much more than science.

Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective is to be regarded more as a begin-
ning than an ending. It begins the task of uncovering the historical connections
between the cultures of evangelical religion and scientific endeavor. If it succeeds
in its aims it will convince readers that a full history of the connections between
various sciences and various branches of evangelicalism, as well as other forms
of religion, is a real desideratum. The essays drawn together here are designed
to illustrate something of the rich material that is available for just such a syn-
thetic study and to hint at how complex, though enriching, that story will
eventually turn out to be.

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