NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 733 



rian Church declare that " the method of procedure to destroy 

 evolution by the majority in the Church is vicious and suicidal," 

 and that " logical dynamite has been used to put out a supposed 

 fire in the upper stories of our house, and all the family in the 

 house at that." Wisely, too, did he refer to the majority as " sow- 

 ing in the fields of the Church the thorns of its errors, and cumber- 

 ing its path with the debris and ruin of its own folly." 



To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy 

 from teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and his 

 election to a far more influential chair at Harvard University ; 

 the driving out from the American College at Beyrout of the 

 young professors who accepted evolution as probable, and the rise 

 of one of them at least, Mr. Nimr, to a far more commanding posi- 

 tion than that which he left — the control of three leading journals 

 at Cairo ; the driving out of Eobertson Smith from his position at 

 Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more important and in- 

 fluential professorship at the English University of Cambridge ; 

 and multitudes of similar cases. From the days when Cotton 

 Mather drove out Henry Dunster, the first President of Harvard 

 College, for "falling into the briers of Antipedobaptism " until 

 now, the same spirit is shown in all such attempts. In each we 

 have generally on one side a body of the older theologians who, 

 since their youth, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, 

 sundry professors who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and 

 a mass of unthinking ecclesiastical persons of little or no impor- 

 tance save in making up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical 

 tribunal ; on the other side we have as generally the thinking, 

 open-minded, devoted men who have listened to the revelation of 

 their own time, as well as of times past, and who are evidently 

 thinking the future thought of the world. 



Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought 

 by theology which has cost the modern world so dear ; the system 

 which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of depri- 

 vation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the earth ; 

 that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a wicked 

 world ; that insanity is diabolic possession ; that anatomical in- 

 vestigation of the human frame is sin against the Holy Ghost ; 

 that chemistry leads to sorcery ; that taking interest for money is 

 forbidden by Scripture ; that Geology must conform to ancient 

 Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in Austria the rule 

 of the " Immaculate Oath," under which university professors, 

 long before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined 

 by the Church, were obliged to swear to their belief in that dogma 

 before they were permitted to teach even Arithmetic or Geom- 

 etry : in England, the denunciation of inoculation against small- 

 pox ; in Scotland, the protests against using chloroform in child- 



