204 GROVE KARL GILBERT— DAVIS 



loss of status as a Presbyterian minister, but the alienation of friends, and then followed a period 

 of such unhappy remembrance that he afterward shrank from the mention of it, even to the 

 members of his family." A comment on this is clearly indicative of Gilbert's own liberal atti- 

 tude: 



It is to the credit of advancing civilization that here at the end of the 19th century our community finds 

 difficulty in realizing how hard was the temporal way of the apostate at the century's middle. ... It is proper 

 to add that while" his [Orton's] belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity survived the perils sometimes 

 attributed to scientific training, his science suffered nothing from theological bias. His writings ascribe the 

 phenomena of nature to natural causes, and his hypotheses seek verification by appeal to visible and tangible 

 facts. 



If one recalls in this connection the experience that Gilbert's father had on leaving the Pres- 

 byterian church in Rochester a few years before Orton's "apostacy," the above extract gains an 

 almost autobiographic flavor. 



Another memoir written at about the same time also gives expression to liberal feelings 

 characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century rather than of its beginning or its middle. 

 The subject was Joseph H. James, 6 and it is told that he lost his position in an Ohio college 

 because of the " disruption of the faculty arising from religious prejudices. . . . When religious 

 beliefs were under fire . . . professor James was accused of being an agnostic and defended 

 as being essentially a Unitarian. So far as I knew it," Gilbert writes, "his religion was an 

 unswerving devotion to science. Science gave him only a modicum of that fame which is dear 

 even to the least selfish of her votaries, and she utterly failed to shield him from adversity, 

 but his fealty endured to the end." These memoirs are significant because one may judge fairly 

 well of Gilbert's own feelings on religious matters by what he said of such feelings in others, 

 and especially by the way he said it. In tliis instance, the passage emoted clearly reads as if 

 he believed that unswerving devotion to science was a good religion, and that unbroken fealty 

 to it was to be admired. 



Religion is usually so largely concerned with supernatural beliefs that omission of all men- 

 tion of such matters in the preceding paragraphs concerning Gilbert's religious views may lead 

 some readers to regard them as chiefly negative and as lacking in faith. It is not to be questioned 

 that he went farther in his disbeliefs than many modern churchmen, even though they also 

 are in large measure "unbelievers" because they have discarded the great majority of the 

 theological complications which encumbered the faith of their early Christian forebears; but 

 those who should judge Gilbert's views to be in large measure negative would fail to recognize 

 the great affirmations that he founded upon his experience of life, and the loyal acceptance that 

 he gave to the natural order of the world. To these positive principles he was devoutly attached. 

 They represented his religion as fully as the most elaborate creed can represent the religion of 

 persons who profess it. Indeed, as compared with the faith of those who refuse to "believe" 

 unless they have miraculous evidence of another world where future reward is to be given for the 

 encouragement of present righteousness, he, in unconditionally accepting the duty of right 

 living as a part of the natural order of this world, had the greater faith. 



• Amer. Oeol., ui, 1898, 1-11. 



