RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 295 



small compared with that of his rival. How could the churchmen of the 

 thirteenth century possibly know this? It has taken six centuries for 

 us to learn it. Bacon's Opus Majus was first printed in its complete 

 form in 1897 — seven years ago, six centuries after his death. 



His colleagues only knew that his brilliant and profound scientific 

 ideas were too hard for them to follow. His theory of the rainbow, 

 for instance, was not confirmed until the time of Descartes (1630). 

 His correct theory of the Milky Way was not proved until 1610. His 

 doctrine of 'species' — of the radiation of energies like gravitation — 

 was not completed so as to be generally intelligible until the time of 

 Huyghens, Hooke and Newton (1700). His conclusion that light is 

 not propagated instantaneously, but takes time to pass from place to 

 place, was not confirmed until the day of Eoemer (1700). His guesses 

 at the nature of heat could not have been understood or verified till 

 the day of Count Eumford (1790). Bacon died in the year 1291. 



How were his colleagues to judge of such profundities? They 

 could not. But in looking through his scientific works they found 

 that he held, with equal tenacity, a conclusion which they were entirely 

 capable of judging. He declared that at a future conjunction of the 

 moon and Jupiter the christian religion would perish. They believed 

 their religion to be immortal. Bacon subjected a spiritual truth to 

 material things ; a divine institution to configurations and conjunctions 

 of the planets. The first duty of institutions, states and individuals 

 is self-preservation. For the church to accept Bacon's conclusions 

 was sheer suicide. They were accordingly condemned. Along with 

 the false the true suffered. It was an immense loss to the science of 

 the middle ages and of the world that these things so fell out. But 

 can it be wondered at? Were they, in any strict sense, the signs of a 

 conflict between religion and science ? The science that was especially 

 condemned was false science; it was not true; it was, moreover, an 

 attack on the very life of the church. Is not the whole episode just 

 one step in the laborious, painful, slow, disheartening struggle between 

 enlightenment and error — between illumination and ignorance? Must 

 we not interpret the melancholy history of Jordano Bruno in the same 

 way ? Science had far less at stake in his case than in that of Bacon. 



It may fairly be said, that up to the time of Galileo there never was, 

 in any true sense, a conflict between religion and science. I am not 

 here concerned to push the inquiry beyond this date of 1615. The 

 controversies of the nineteenth century are, perhaps, of a different 

 nature. During the earlier centuries there were endless warfares 

 between one religion and another, between religion and heresy, 

 between science and pseudo-science, but not between religion and 

 science, as such. Looking backward, we now discover that the science 

 of the nineteenth century would have been in conflict with the 

 theology of the thirteenth. But in the thirteenth century itself, and 



