C H A P TE R IV 



WAECKEL AND THE MONISTIC CREED 



WHEN Julian the Apostate, bent upon 

 the destruction of the Church, forbade 

 her to teach the sciences, St. Gregory 

 of Nazianzen exclaimed: "Who could have put it 

 in your mind to forbid us the sciences ? There is 

 nothing I hold dearer after the interests of heaven 

 and the hopes of eternity. ... It is right I 

 should defend them with all my power of words 

 and the fire of my heart." 1 Such today, such 

 always, is the attitude of the Church towards sci- 

 ence. 



There is but one thing the Church fears, and 

 that is ignorance. "More light," was Goethe's 

 last word. It is the word ever upon the lips of 

 the Church as she looks with compassion upon the 

 darkness that encompasses the earth. She wel- 

 comes every discovery. She encourages every 

 legitimate research. She rejoices in every fact 

 and every truth, whether gathered from the long- 

 sealed pages of the earth's great volume, from the 

 profundities of the mind of man, or from the 

 Sphinx-like silences of nature. "Religion has no 



*"Disc. IV contra Jul." 



38 



