AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHURCH's PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE 1 63 



revision. Every true scientist takes for granted that succeeding 

 generations will know more than he and will make over his ideas. Is 

 it common-sense then to ascribe inerrancy to any document of the 

 fourth century or of the sixteenth ? 



Is it not in the highest degree pernicious ? Has not the church's 

 insistence on the inerrancy of her creeds been the chief barrier in the 

 path of the onward march of thought? What else interrupted the 

 progress of discovery during the thousand years of the Middle Age ? 

 The outburst of scientific discovery which characterizes modern times 

 dates from the overthrow of the principle of authority by the men of 

 the Renaissance. Fortunately the church's attempt to hold thought 

 still cannot permanently succeed. For truth is mightier than the 

 church. The course of human thought is strewn with the wrecks of 

 once-accepted ideas, theological as well as scientific. But if experience 

 is unable to convert the church from her futile opposition to all 

 intellectual change, ought not reverence itself to teach her that 



Our little systems have their day, 



They have their day and cease to be; 



They are but broken types of Thee, 

 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 



To all of which the church is apt to reply that the scientist is con- 

 fusing two entirely distinct things. There is a wide difference between 

 the Nicene Creed, for instance, and other documents which have come 

 down to us from ancient times. The works of the ancients which the 

 scientist cites are human production; whereas the Nicene Creed is not, 

 in the last analysis, a human product at all. It is the embodiment of a 

 divine revelation and as such should be impHcitly accepted. Reduced 

 to a syllogism, the church's argument for the inerrancy of the Nicene 

 Creed is as follows : 



Error inheres in the products of the human mind. 



But the Nicene Creed is not the product of the human mind. 



Therefore the Nicene Creed is inerrant. 



(The attitude of any church toward any of its authoritative formularies 

 may be reduced to a similar syllogism.) It is not too much to say that 

 not a single member of this syllogism, its major premise, its minor 



