272 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice, but they could 

 not." 



It is unfortunate that in the past most organized religions have 

 magnified their differences, thus tending to obscure their basic 

 unity in God. Much blood has been shed over unimportant dif- 

 ferences of opinion or ritual, to the exclusion of the common 

 belief that God is the Father of us all. But religions are slowly 

 changing. Thus Jonathan Edwards saw hell paved with the vic- 

 tims of the Calvinistic doctrine of infant damnation; but the 

 somewhat more humane Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) in 

 his poem on the Last Judgment ("The Day of Doom" 11 ), had God 

 grant as a boon to unbaptized infants "the easiest room in Hell." 

 Not until 1902 was this doctrine of infant damnation removed by 

 vote from the creed of one of our prominent churches, whereupon 

 a modernist member of the convocation moved that the vote be 

 made retroactive! 



Though much has been written and said about the supposed 

 conflict between religion and science, such a conflict never really 

 existed. The eternal verities of both religion and science tower 

 unconcerned above the storms of creed and dogma, glowing in the 

 light of ever-advancing scientific knowledge and true religious 

 understanding. For many years scientific development was ob- 

 structed by the fear that demonstrable facts would render unten- 

 able the dicta of theologians, as witness the treatment accorded to 

 Galileo, for example. Astrology, the ancient art of divining the 

 future by observations of the heavenly bodies, goes back to the 

 earliest Babylonian history (about 3,000 B.C.); but this pseudo- 

 science of the early priests and magi did not begin to slough away 

 from real astronomy until about the time of Isadore of Seville 

 (died, 636 A.D.), and it was utterly discredited by the scientific 

 revelations of the great natural philosophers, Copernicus and 

 Newton. 



Science, too, has had to struggle for its advances. Thus Prout's 

 hypothesis as to the basic origin of the elements from hydrogen, 

 was supposed to have been completely disproved by the meticulous 

 atomic weight determinations of Stas; but discoveries in this cen- 

 tury by Curie, Rutherford, and others show that Prout was quite 

 near the truth. 



Mind and Matter 



Although philosophy, which coordinates and appraises all 

 knowledge, indicates that both material and psychic ultimates 



