496 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Tyndall, bearing upon this subject, late- 

 ly appeared in the London Times : 



" A learned French friend has favored me 

 with a copy of a letter recently published in 

 France, and bearing the following title : 

 ' Letter of Monsignor the Bishop of Mont- 

 pellier to the Deans and Professors of the 

 Faculties at Montpellier.' Its date is the 

 8th of this month of December, 1875. One 

 or two extracts from it may not be witli- 

 out their value for the people of England 

 and of America, to whom, in our day, has 

 fallen the problem of education in relation 

 to the claims of Kome. 



" The bishop writes to the deans and pro- 

 fessors aforesaid : 



" 'Now, gentlemen, the holy Church holds 

 herself to be invested with the absolute right 

 to teach mankind ; she holds herself to be 

 the depositary of the truth not a fragmen- 

 tary truth, incomplete, a mixture of certain- 

 ty and hesitation, but the total truth, com- 

 plete, from a religious point of view. Much 

 more, she is so sure of the infallibility con- 

 ferred on her by her Divine Founder, as the 

 magnificent dowry of their indissoluble al- 

 liance, that even in the natural order of 

 tilings, scientific or philosophical, moral or 

 political, she will not admit that a system 

 can be adopted and sustained by Christians, 

 if it contradict definite dogmas. She con- 

 siders that the voluntary and obstinate de- 

 nial of a single point of her doctrine in- 

 volves the crime of heresy, and she holds 

 that all formal heresy, if it be not coura- 

 geously rejected prior to appearing before 

 God, carries with it the certain loss of grace 

 and of eternity. 



" ' As defined by Pope Leo X. , at the Sixth 

 Council of the Lateran, " Truth cannot con- 

 tradict itself; consequently, every assertion 

 contrary to a revealed verity of faith is nec- 

 essarily and absolutely false." It follows 

 from this, without entering into the examina- 

 tion of this or that question of physiology, 

 but solely by the certitude of our dogmas, 

 we are able to pronounce judgment on any 

 hypothesis which is an anti-Christian engine 

 of war rather than a serious conquest over 

 the secrets and mysteries of nature.' 



" Liberty is a fine word, tyranny a hate- 

 ful one, and both have been eloquently em- 

 ployed of late in reference to the dealings 

 of the secular arm with the pretensions of 

 the Vatican. But ' liberty ' has two mu- 

 tually exclusive meanings the liberty of 

 Kome to teach mankind, and the liberty of 

 the human race. Neither reconcilement nor 

 compromise is possible here. One liberty 

 or the other must go down. This, in our 

 day, is the 'conflict' so impressively de- 

 scribed by Draper, in which every thought- 

 ful man must take a part. There is no dim- 

 ness in the eyes of Rome as regards her own 

 aims ; she sees with a clearness unap- 



proached by others that the school will be 

 either her stay or her ruin. Hence the su- 

 preme effort she is now making to obtain 

 the control of education ; hence the asser- 

 tion by the Bishop of Montpellier of her 

 ' absolute right to teach mankind.' She 

 has, moreover, already tasted the fruits of 

 this control in Bavaria, where the very lib- 

 erality of an enlightened king led to the 

 fatal mistake of confiding the schools of the 

 kingdom to the ' doctors of Eome.' 



" Your obedient servant, 



" John Tyndall. 

 " Athenaeum, December 16, 1875.'" 



The University of Montpellier, to 

 the deans and faculties of which the 

 above notification is addressed, is one 

 of the oldest and most honored univer- 

 sities of Europe. It was founded in the 

 twelfth century, its medical faculty by 

 the Spanish Arabs. Situated in what 

 was formerly called Languedoc, one of 

 the southern portions of France, it 

 has a botanical garden, the first that 

 was established in Christendom. Its 

 Observatory has for ages been in re- 

 pute, its Museums of Natural History 

 and Fine Art have long been celebrated. 

 It has made its city one of the intellect- 

 ual centres of France. 



In this university was first trans- 

 lated into Latin Ptolemy's great Greek 

 work, the "Alma Gest." One of the 

 regents was the first European to make 

 tables of the moon, and to determine 

 the obliquity of the ecliptic. He is 

 honorably mentioned by Copernicus. 

 In literature it is distinguished by being 

 the seat of the earliest cultivation of a 

 modern language. From the romance 

 literature of Langue d'Oc, Petrarch and 

 Dante took their inspirations. 



But in another respect it has a mem- 

 orable celebrity. Here the Inquisition 

 was first organized, and Languedoc was 

 the seat of the most dreadful persecu- 

 tions that the world has ever witnessed. 

 Thousands of persons were put to death, 

 whole cities were burnt. The French 

 Protestantism of the middle ages was 

 extinguished by fire and sword. The 

 professors and doctors of the universi- 

 ty were expelled from the country. 



