AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHURCH's PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE 1 85 



spread intellectual disease; for no man can entertain it and be honest 

 in his thought. 



Yet the historian, if he is to account for and accurately record 

 the church's mistakes, must feel her temptation. The historian 

 above all things must be fair; albeit fairness to all institutions and 

 all sides of our humanity is an almost superhuman demand to make 

 of any man. 



2. It is hard for the scientist, however, to be fair to the church. 

 He and his kin have suffered too much at her hand. The mere scien- 

 tist can never understand the church. For his whole devotion is 

 given to a different quest, the sacred quest for truth. "A fact is as 

 sacred to him as a moral principle,'" and a fearless following out of 

 logical conclusions a moral principle itself. He cannot but be impa- 

 tient with the church's obscurantism and special pleading. He is 

 impatient with men who beheve what suits them instead of 

 investigating the facts and either discovering the truth or leaving the 

 question open, if the truth is not apparent. The contempt and active 

 hostility which many scientists display toward rehgion is therefore 

 readily understandable. 



The church's unsympathetic attitude toward science is from her 

 point of view equally understandable. The facts the scientist accu- 

 mulates and the problems he studies often seem to her trivial in com- 

 parison with the great themes which her teaching treats and the vital 

 human interests on which her eye is fixed. "It is not through igno- 

 rance of the things which excite their interest," remarks an early 

 church father of the scientists of his day, "but through contempt of 

 their useless labor, that we think little of these matters, turning our 

 souls to better things." The scientist's recklessness as to the effect 

 his teachings may have upon souls seems to the churchman monstrous. 

 What has he to offer in place of the precious faith which he weakens 

 or destroys ? Moreover, his novelties are not certainties. His 

 theories are confessedly transitory things. Yet the scientist de- 

 nounces as fools those who do not impHcitly accept them. The 

 bigotry of the church is nothing to the pride of science ; the church's 



■ As Agassiz is said to have remarked. 



