UNIVERSITIES vs. SCIENCE ; 



Or, Shall Science be Excommunicated ? * 



In the good old times when the Church had her own way, if 

 any one proved refractory, he was threatened with excommunica- 

 tion, and he immediately came to his orthodoxy. This is what 

 made old Galileo get down on his knees and renounce his heresies, 

 and it kept back many a book of premature science from seeing 

 the light of the early centuries. But after the great Protestant 

 Reformation, and the loss of the hold which the Church had on 

 the literature of the times, Christendom was inundated with 

 books of men's wisdom, and strange doctrines which served only 

 to unsettle the minds of the faithful. 



It may be too late now to arraign science in this highly 

 satisfactory manner, but we can at least show up some of the 

 mischief it is working, and, for educational purposes, confine it 

 to expurgated and approved editions of school books. With 

 this view, I propose to follow up some of the most recent 

 advances of scientific thought, as it is called, and to let all see 

 where they inevitably land us. 



Ever since the time of Luther and Calvin, the advocates of 

 Christianity have been constantly engaged in contesting, and 

 finally conceding, the claims of scientific investigators. The 

 common-sense interpretation of those sublime verses in Genesis 

 which tell the simple story of Creation, has had to be, in repeated 

 instances, distorted and stultified to accommodate itself to the 

 slow and toilsome processes of evolution. 



* 'Written a few years since, on the occasion of the removal of Prof. Win- 

 chell from the Lectureship of Vanderbilt University, on account of scientific 

 heterodox opinions. 



