ON THE DREAD AND DISLIKE OF SCIENCE. 419 



vow it, for they replace prayers and incantations by drugs and diet. 

 Only the small sect called " The Peculiar People " trust entirely to 

 prayer ; and Christian magistrates are so outraged at this trust that 

 they punish it as a crime ! In vain are epidemics declared to be visita- 

 tions, in vain are books written with such titles as " God in Disease ; " 

 the practical sense of the nation decides that cholera or cattle-plague 

 are not to punish landlords and farmers for the skepticism of a few 

 speculative minds, and hence that we had better seek to avert them by 

 a course of treatment and " an order in council," than by pulpit elo- 

 quence and a " day of humiliation." 



I have taken the case of disease because it is less open to the am- 

 biguities and difficulties which beset a moral problem, but a similar dis- 

 crepancy might be pointed out between the theological precepts and 

 the moral practices. Here, as everywhere, it is patent that as knowl- 

 edge advances, theology loses its hold; and morality, instead of remain- 

 ing stationary like theology, advances with an enlarging insight into the 

 healthy conditions of human relations. Science is often taunted with 

 its imperfections and its inability to explain the mysteries of life. Im- 

 perfect it is, and that is why we should all strive to make it less so. 

 Mysteries will doubtless forever encompass us. But Science may an- 

 swer the taunt by challenging Theology to show that its explanation of 

 the mysteries has any claim to our acceptance. The question is not 

 whether an explanation can be given, but whether the given explana- 

 tion has any verifiable evidence. Kant has truly said that now criticism 

 has taken its place among the disintegratory agencies, no system can 

 pretend to escape its jurisdiction. The Church has its texts, and has 

 decided once for all what meaning these texts must bear. But the 

 criticism of scientific method asks for the evidence which can prove these 

 texts to be of divine origin, and the evidence which can prove these in- 

 terpretations to be in agreement with fact. In both respects the an- 

 swer is unequivocal. There is no evidence to prove the texts. The 

 interpretations are discordant with experience. Thus the Catholic who 

 accepts Galileo and Newton must give up the texts, or take the first 

 step toward Protestantism, which asserts the right of interpreting the 

 texts according to private judgment. And the Protestant who asserts 

 this right of interpretation, and forsakes the literal meaning of the 

 texts, has taken a step toward rationalism, and implicitly disavowed 

 the authority of the texts, since what he obeys is not their teaching, but 

 the teaching of the culture of his day and sect. The rationalist, in 

 turn, has taken a step toward the scientific position ; he regards the 

 texts as symbols of an earlier stage of culture, which need the interpre- 

 tation of our present culture ; and when he learns as easily he may 

 learn that all the facts of the moral world are to be investigated and 

 systematized on the same principles as the facts of the physical world, 

 setting aside in the one as in the other all supernatural and metem- 

 pirical conceptions, because these cannot enter into the framework of 



