A Text-Book of Freedom 247 



run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid 

 down. Assuredly the Bible talks no trash about the rights 

 of man ; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty 

 to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat differ- 

 ent from struggling for ' rights ' ; on the fraternity of taking 

 thought for one's neighbour as for oneself." 



It was not against the Bible but against the appHcations 

 made of it and implications read into it that he strove. 



" In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern phy- 

 sical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is 

 the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the or- 

 thodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers 

 after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have 

 been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken 

 zeal of Bibliolators ? Who shall count the host of weaker men 

 whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to har- 

 monise impossibilities — whose life has been wasted in the at- 

 tempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old 

 bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong 

 party.-* It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause 

 has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about 

 the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that 

 of Hercules ; and history records that whenever science and 

 orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced 

 to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated ; 

 scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the 

 world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget ; and 

 •though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as will- 

 ing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains 

 the beginning and the end of sound science ; and to visit, with 

 such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, 

 those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive 

 Judaism." 



These words were written in i860 and events have 

 moved rapidly since Huxley wrote them. There is 

 now practically no religious body containing a propor- 

 tion of educated persons which does not allow within it 



