68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men this feeling of contemj^t for learning is concealed; they will pro- 

 fess to admire scholarship and erudition, speaking of it as a graceful 

 accomplishment ; and it is only in unguarded moments that they be- 

 tray their conviction that it is nothing more ; others proclaim it loud- 

 ly, and some even wish to bring piiblic opinion to bear upon the mat- 

 ter, so as to i^revent as an immorality the acquiring of useless knowl- 

 edge. 



Thus, the old religious school, and that new school whose convic- 

 tions we see now gradually acquiring the character of a religion, 

 agree in combining a passionate love for what they believe true 

 knowledge, with a contempt for so-called learning and philosophy. 

 The common enemy of both is what the one school calls, and the 

 other might well call, " the wisdom of the world." But though agree- 

 ing so far, these two schools hate their common enemy much less than 

 they hate each other. For each regards the " true wisdom " of the 

 other as worse and more mischievous than the wisdom of the world 

 which each rejects. To the scientific school the Christian yvQaig is a 

 mystical superstition, compared with which " learning and philoso- 

 phy" are science itself. To the Christian, modern science is a dark- 

 ness compared with which the science that St. Paul rejected might 

 almost be called Christianity. 



Nothing is so terrible as this clashing of opposite religions. Dif- 

 ferences on important subjects are always painful, but the direct shock 

 of contrary enthusiasms has something appalling about it. That one 

 man's highest truth should be another man's deadliest falsehood ; that 

 one man should be ready to die in disinterested self-dcA^otion for a 

 cause which another man is equally i*eady to oppose at the sacrifice of 

 his life ; this is a horror which is none the less horrible becavise it has 

 often been witnessed on this perplexed planet. But often it has been 

 seen, long after the conflict was over, that there had been misappre- 

 hension ; that the difference of opinion was not really any thing like 

 so complete as it seemed. Nay, it has often happened that a later 

 generation has seen the difference to be very small indeed, and has 

 wondered that so much could have been made of it. In such cases 

 the mind is relieved of that fancy of a radical discord in human na- 

 ture. We see that self-devotions have not really clashed in such fell 

 antagonism. We see that with self-devotion there may mix less noble 

 feelings, and that the immitigable hostility of religious strife may be 

 caused by a mixture of ardent conviction with some impulses less 

 noble, with some that are blamable and some that are even ludicrous, 

 with mere pugnacity, with the passion of gratifying self-importance, 

 with the half-noble pleasure that there is in fighting, and the ignoble 

 pleasure that there is in giving pain. 



It would certainly be hard enough to show that the present strife 

 between Christianity and science is one in which insignificant differ- 

 ences are magnified by the imagination of the combatants. The 



