3 o2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the immaculate conception ; so have Protestant colleges in Amer- 

 ica frequently rejected excellent candidates on account of "un- 

 safe " views regarding the apostolic succession, or the incarnation, 

 or baptism, or the perseverance of the saints. 



And how has all this system resulted? In the older nations, 

 by natural reaction, these colleges, under strict ecclesiastical con- 

 trol, have sent forth the most bitter enemies the Christian Church 

 has ever known — of whom Voltaire and Renan and Saint-Beuve 

 are types ; and there are many signs that the same causes are to 

 produce the same results in our own country. 



I might allude to other battle-fields in our own land and time. 

 I might show how, twenty years ago, attempts to meet the want 

 in a great American State of an institution providing higher sci- 

 entific instruction, were met with loud outcries from many excel- 

 lent men, who feared injury thereby to religion ; and how in 

 various other States, at various times since, the same feeling has 

 been shown. Happily, leading men at the centers of Christian 

 thought in many countries are now taking a larger and better 

 view: but I again point to the recent driving out of the Dar- 

 winian professors from the American college at Beirut, under the 

 direction of American Protestants, as an evidence that the old 

 spirit still exists ; no longer, indeed, seriously injurious to science, 

 but deeply injurious to religion.* 



It was the purpose of Prof. Max Muller's inaugural address as President of 

 the International Oriental Congress to show that the break that now appears 

 in the continuity of thought between the East and West did not exist from the 

 beginning, and that in prehistoric times language really formed a bond of union 

 between the ancestors of many of the Eastern and Western nations; and that 

 more recent discoveries have proved that, in historic times also, language, which 

 seemed to separate the great nations of antiquity, never so completely sepa- 

 rated the most important among them as to make intellectual commerce and 

 exchange among them impossible. To have established these two facts, Prof. 

 Mtlller claims, constitutes one of the greatest achievements and highest glories of 

 Oriental scholarship. 



* It is an interesting fact that one of the men thus driven out of the American college 

 at Beirut, for supposed adhesion to the doctrines of Darwin, has since become one of the 

 most influential editors at Cairo, carrying on a daily journal and two periodicals, and exer- 

 cising a far greater and wider influence upon thought in the East than ever before. What- 

 ever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by President McCosh at Prince- 

 ton, every thinking man must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke away 

 from the traditions of that center of thought ; prevented, so far as he was able, persecution 

 of scholars for holding to the Darwinian view ; and paved the way for the highest researches 

 in physical science in that university. For a most eloquent statement of the opposition of 

 modern physical science to mediaeval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir 'Isaac 

 Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery, London, 1878, 

 p. 247. 



