"No man, whose intellect has been trained in the severe school of the inductive method," Wilson told the readers of the Methodist Quarterly Review, would ever make the kinds of intellectual leaps that Robert Chambers made when formulating his theory of natural development.
The Methodist Quarterly Review's evaluation of Draper's work clearly endorsed the idea of "secondary causes"--the notion that God used people and natural laws to accomplish his work in the world.
The notion that interpretations of Scripture might need to be "corrected" in the light of science was not problematic for the authors who contributed to the Methodist Quarterly Review. Many people of faith in the nineteenth century, Methodist or otherwise, angrily denied the challenges to a literal reading of Scripture that were inherent in the findings of geologists Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell.
(59) To fully understand the southern commitment to science, though, one must look beyond the journal Whedon edited because, after the breakup of the Methodist Church in 1844, the Methodist Quarterly Review ceased, really, to be an official voice for Methodists in the South.
What is less clear, though, is whether they or their leaders could--as Whedon of the Methodist Quarterly Review had done--accept the idea that the human species might not have been initially created by God in His own image, that is to say, in an already perfect form.
Bennett, "Catholicism and Protestantism as Patrons of Christian Art," Methodist Quarterly Review, Jan.
Short, "Symbolism of the Pre-Christian Cross," Methodist Quarterly Review, Oct.
