120 RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY. 



was nothing new in this covert attack upon a man of 

 philosophic character; the practice is as common as 

 the rising of the sun. Keligious bigotry has ever 

 shown a fear or jealousy of scientific research question- 

 ing divine rights and ecclesiastical prestige. The know- 

 ledge of common things, or the devices for acquiring 

 money-hoards, no matter how, can pass current as un- 

 exceptionably Christian ; but the science that looks to 

 the heavens above, or to the earth beneath, or the 

 arcana of life in its myriad forms around, has too often 

 had hard lines assigned its culture, or rather its cul- 

 tivators. To appease the Gods, Socrates had to seek his 

 quietus in the poisoned cup ; to avoid the thunderbolts 

 of the " Infallible Church," Galileo had to recant his 

 belief in nature's unalterable physics ; and so the world 

 has gone on from the man-God exactions of Miotic 

 Thebes to the evangelical persecutions of these latter 

 days. It was not enough for Goodsir to prove his 

 philosophy and morals ; he must show a clean bill of 

 orthodoxy, or go to the lazar-house of a perpetual 

 quarantine. Tests not truth, Westminster Confessions 

 and not scientific capacities, ruled the patrons of the 

 University, even in the appointment to a strictly sci- 

 entific professorship ; and they, as a Town-Council, 

 were but the reflex of a Scottish feeling of disquietude 

 as to philosophy in its relations to revealed religion. 

 " The Institutes of Medicine " chair — closely allied to 

 the anatomical one — had been contended for in Edin- 

 burgh only a few years previously by men of undoubted 

 eminence ; but the Unitarian physiologist, now vice- 



