i88o.] 
The Martyrdom of Science. 165 
chief persecutors of science, we shall find the conventional 
answers too narrow. Many persons have laid the chief 
blame upon Roman Catholicism. It is very questionable, 
however, whether other churches, if they had been as widely 
spread, and had possessed as great civil power and authority, 
might not have equalled or even exceeded Rome. The 
religious bodies of Britain, established or dissenting, have 
certainly been unsurpassed in the virulence of their attacks 
upon geology and upon the New Natural History. We 
strongly suspeCt that the Church of Rome will be the first 
religious body to admit that the doctrines of evolution and 
of the high antiquity of the human race are not necessarily 
opposed to the teachings of the Scriptures. So-called 
infidels of various grades of opinion have contended that 
Christianity in any and every form is the persecutor of 
science. We would submit, on the contrary, that discovery 
was persecuted in heathen and democratic Athens, where 
all the influence of Pericles barely sufficed to save his friend 
the philosopher Anaxagoras from a worse fate than banish- 
ment. Nay, we may even venture to predict that modern 
“ freethought ” will before long appear as the adversary of 
science, and if sufficiently powerful, as her persecutor. 
The jealousy of the industrial classes we have already 
glanced at. 
Lest we should feel tempted to ridicule the suicidal folly 
of the working-classes in thus seeking to repress improve- 
ment, let us remember that science is sometimes her own 
persecutor. Men who have gained a high official position 
in universities and academies are often actuated by a jealousy 
very similar to that which we have traced among ecclesi- 
astics. They establish a certain scientific orthodoxy, based 
often to a great extent on mere conjecture and assertion, 
and seek to frown down and to silence the unknown outsider 
who calls in question one of their dogmas, or who discovers 
a truth which they have overlooked. That any region of 
research should be officially tabooed is a humiliating cir- 
cumstance. The dread of truth, the jealousy of discovery, 
is not confined to the Holy Inquisition, and no disestablish- 
ment of Churches, no secularisation of schools and colleges, 
not even the suppression of every religion — were such a step 
possible — would put an end to its adtion. 
