184 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



The historian cannot be expected to share the church's fondness 

 for intellectual immobility. He is a student of progress and in conse- 

 quence an inevitable believer in progress. But he should understand 

 and sympathize with the church's attitude, even though he caimot 

 share it; and even though he sees its evil results. 



The church's effort to restrain thought has probably resulted in 

 more evil than good. Not merely has mother church often stunted 

 the intellectual growth of her children in her eagerness to preserve in 

 them their childhood's faith, only to find nature too strong for her 

 and to suffer the ignominy of defeat and incur her children's hate. 

 She has imperiled and often lost sight of her real work. In the effort 

 to defend the faith, which is after all a means, she has forgotten her 

 end. She has often spent all her energy in defending obsolete ideas 

 which once were useful to her, and neglected her proper interest of 

 developing character and fostering the things of the spirit. She 

 has degenerated, in a word, into a teacher of bad science and a 

 deviser of fallacies. She has valued ignorance above virtue and 

 allied herself with the powers of darkness rather than with forces 

 which make for righteousness. She has appraised orthodox opinion 

 above goodness, adherence to the ecclesiastical institution above 

 purity of character. 



Her efforts have seldom proved worth while. She has often suc- 

 ceeded for a time in preventing her members from casting aside the 

 old ideas. But old ideas, separated from the body of ideas of which 

 they originally formed a part, are mere disjecta membra, lifeless and 

 incapable of performing their old function. The doctrine of the 

 resurrection of the flesh, for example, in the second century expressed 

 an inspiring hope. It was a valuable protest against the exclusive 

 regard for intellectual joys which characterized Greek philosophy and 

 the dreary outlook which the popular conception of the future Hfe 

 presented. Severed from its original content and grafted into our 

 modern thought-world, it loses all its meaning. It becomes simply 

 an absurdity. Instead of a support to life, it becomes a burden. It 

 can be accepted only by wrenching truth. A putrifying member of 

 a dead body of conceptions, it fails to function. Its only effect is to 



