SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 561 



White's interesting pages we are made to feel the strength of the theological 

 case as it presented itself to the minds of churchmen and devout believers. 

 The Scriptures were divinely inspired : that was the first postulate. The 

 Scriptures stated so and so in express terms, and had been understood and 

 accepted in their plain sense by the greatest doctors and saints of the past, 

 men whose dicta had an authority only less than that of Scripture itself. 

 That was the second half of the argument. Was the authority of Scripture 

 to be impugned and discredited because a few men of no authority, as au- 

 thority was reckoned in those days, professed to have made this or that dis- 

 covery in one region or another of physical observation ? To let Scripture 

 go was to let everything go, to destroy the whole basis of church authority, 

 the whole foundation of social and moral order; and how to twist Scripture 

 into seeming agreement with the alleged discoveries they had not yet 

 learned. How the intellectual life of Europe was crushed for centuries 

 under the weight of scriptural authority, how the scientific impulse, though 

 a thousand times slain, a thousand times revived, how little by little true 

 views of Nature forced themselves upon a priest-led world, and how in 

 the end Science too gathered to herself authority and made for herself the 

 dominant position which she enjoys to-day all this, most graphically and 

 sympathetically related, is the burden of the two handsome volumes be- 

 fore us. 



There is one point upon which Dr. White has especially labored to be fair. 

 He has not laid, as some writers have been more than half disposed to do, 

 the whole reproach of obstructing and persecuting science upon the Roman 

 Catholic Church. He makes it plain that science, so to speak, had to be 

 persecuted by any body of men who were in the toils of such a theology as 

 that which the early Christian Church formed for itself and bequeathed to 

 later ages ; and he shows how the several Protestant churches just in so 

 far as, and so long as, they held to that theology were no less hostile to 

 rising science than the old Church had been. It would indeed almost seem 

 as if, within the last generation, the Catholic Church had more frankly 

 made its peace with the methods and conclusions of science than the sev- 

 eral Protestant churches have done; certainly the most recent examples of 

 opposition to science which are quoted in these volumes are drawn from the 

 proceedings and utterances of Protestant authorities, not of Catholic ones. 



It is only right, however, that we should give a more adequate indica- 

 tion than we have yet done of the scope of the present work. The first 

 chapter, which is entitled From Creation to Evolution, deals with the his- 

 tory of opinion on the subject of the origin and development of the phys- 

 ical universe. The crude ideas of ancient times are well represented, the 

 author tells us, by a design which appears in one of the stained-glass win- 

 dows of the cathedral at Ulm in Wurtemberg, where the Almighty appears 

 as busily engaged in the creation of animals, and has just turned off his 

 hands an elephant fully accoutered with armor, harness, and housings, 

 ready for war. In like manner we may still see in the Egyptian temples 

 at Philae and Denderah representations of the Nile gods modeling 

 lumps of clay into men. " So literal," says our author, '* was the whole 

 conception of the work of creation that in these days it can scarcely 

 be imagined. The Almighty was represented in theological literature, in 

 the pictured Bibles, and in works of art generally, as a sort of enlarged and 

 venerable Nuremberg toy maker." The slightest statement of Scripture in 

 vol. xjlix. 45 



