AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHURCH'S PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE l8l 



For instance, they expressed their faith and conceived their faith in 

 terms of Jewish astronomy. The persistence of their faith through 

 the ages has not been a persistence of their conceptions but of their 

 practical convictions. The continuity at bottom has not been one of 

 ideas but of life. It has been, in a word, the continuity characteristic 

 of a working hypothesis. 



The church's misunderstanding of the essential nature of her faith 

 and of its finality has been the very taproot of her mistaken resistance 

 to advancing thought. It must be admitted that, on her premises, 

 her resistance has been scientifically justifiable. If the assertion that 

 God "sitteth upon the circle of the earth and the inhabitants thereof 

 are as grasshoppers" be an accurate statement of a divine idea, any 

 idea of the solar system which does not harmonize with that statement 

 must be false. The Copernican astronomy must be a mistake. It 

 becomes scientifically untenable, for it is out of accord with a known 

 truth. 



But the church's opposition to ideas which threaten to subvert 

 those in which her faith is enshrined has been due to a deeper reason 

 than the fact that on her mistaken premises those ideas must be false. 

 She has opposed them because they seemed to her to be pernicious; 

 to undermine faith and therefore character. 



It is easy for the historian to prove that the church's struggle 

 against the tide of truth has always been in the long run unavailing; 

 that the church's battle with science has been one long series of igno- 

 minious retreats. Nor is it difficult for the historian to prove that the 

 church's dread of scientific discoveries has been groundless; that each 

 new view of truth has only resulted in a refining of the Christian doc- 

 trine and in restatements of it in ever clearer and spiritually more 

 efficient forms. These "lessons of history" are as obvious as they are 

 important; but we must address ourselves to the harder task of trying 

 to discover why the church has so persistently fallen into the mis- 

 apprehension which has been the cause of her disastrous mistakes. 



The explanation is, in the first place, that the Christian faith and 

 the ideas in which it is embodied are intimately coimected as soul and 

 body. After all, men can think only thoughts; can hold a faith only 



