NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 153 



All these well-meaning defenders of the faith have but wrought 

 into the hearts of great numbers of thinking men the idea that 

 there is a necessary antagonism between science and religion. 

 Like the landsman who lashes himself to the anchor of the sink- 

 ing ship, they have attached Christianity by the strongest cords 

 of logic which they could spin to these mistaken ideas in science, 

 and, could they have had their way, the advance of knowledge 

 would have ingulfed both together. 



On the other hand, what has science done for religion ? 

 Simply this: Copernicus, escaping persecution only by death; 

 Giordano Bruno, burned alive as a monster of impiety ; Galileo, 

 imprisoned and humiliated as the worst of misbelievers ; Kepler, 

 hunted alike by Protestant and Catholic gave to religion new 

 foundations, new and more ennobling conceptions. 



Under the old system, that princely astronomer, Alphonso of 

 Castile, seeing the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic theory, yet know- 

 ing no other, startled Europe with the blasphemy that, if he had 

 been present at creation, he could have suggested a better order 

 of the heavenly bodies. Under the new system, Kepler, filled with 

 a religious spirit, exclaimed, " I do think the thoughts of God." 

 The difference in religious spirit between these two men marks 

 the conquest made in this long struggle by Science for Religion.* 



Nothing is more unjust than to cast especial blame for all this 

 resistance to science upon the Roman Church. The Protestant 

 Church, though rarely able to be so severe, has been more blame- 

 worthy. The persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the 

 older Church was mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century ; the persecution of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and 

 Woodrow, and Toy, and the young professors at Beyrout, by 

 various Protestant authorities, was near the end of the nineteenth 

 century. Those earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly 

 in accordance with principles held at that time by all religionists, 

 Catholic and Protestant, throughout the world ; these later per- 

 secutions by Protestants were in defiance of principles which all 

 Christendom to-day holds or pretends to hold, and none make 

 louder claim to hold them than the very sects which persecuted 

 these eminent Christian men of our day, whose crime was that 

 they were intelligent enough to accept the science of their time, 

 and honest enough to acknowledge it. 



and July, 1871, pp. 157 et seq. For a good summary of the various attempts, and for 

 replies to them in a spirit of judicial fairness, see Th. Martin, Vie de Galilee, though there 

 is some special pleading to save the infallibility of Pope and Church. The bibliography at 

 the close is very valuable. For details of Mr. Gosse's theory, as developed in his Om- 

 phalos, see my chapter on Geology. 



* As a pendant to this ejaculation of Kepler may be cited the words of Linnaeus : 

 " Deum omnipotentem a tergo transeuntem vidi et obstupui." 



