THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



the will to the dictates of a single and infallible 

 Church; the protestant having declared his right to 

 decide for himself in religious questions could no 

 longer forbid inquiry into hitherto closed fields of 

 scientific knowledge. Galileo could withstand the 

 personal contumely of Luther and Melancthon with 

 impunity ; but, in the end, he was forced to bend his 

 proud will to the Pope, backed by a Church fortified 

 with both temporal and spiritual power. 



The physical sciences quickly developed into true 

 modern sciences in the fields of both theory and ex- 

 perimentation, but the extension of the inductive 

 method to biology and geology was slow and hesitat- 

 ing. Geology does, indeed, deal solely with inorganic 

 phenomena and its phenomena are due solely to phys- 

 ical forces, but there still remained two great ob- 

 stacles in the way of its advance. The first was the 

 question of the age of the earth; the changes of the 

 earth's surface, if they were brought about solely by 

 physical force, would undoubtedly require an enor- 

 mous lapse of time, and this idea was unreservedly 

 opposed by the Church. The Reformation afforded 

 no relief as the Protestants were, if anything, more 

 rigid in holding to the literal interpretation of the 

 Bible than were the Catholics. They accepted the 

 chronology of Bishop Ussher which assigned the year 

 4004 B.C. as the exact date of creation and permitted 

 only the one break of the Deluge, in the year 2348 

 B.C., in the continuity of history as set forth by the 



