Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/749

Rh not yet ended. The bitterness of the Abbé Hamard in France has been carried to similar and even greater extremes among sundry Protestant bodies in Europe and America. The simple truth of history makes it a necessity, unpleasant though it be, to chronicle two typical examples in our own land and time.

In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise created at the capital of a Southern State a university which bore his name. It was given into the hands of one of the religious sects most powerful in that region, and a Bishop of that sect became its President. To its chair of Geology was called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already won eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor greatly beloved and respected in the two universities with which he had been connected, and a member of the sect which the institution of learning above referred to represented.

But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to be brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were learned, attractive, and stimulating even his enemies were forced to admit; but he was soon found to believe that there had been men earlier than the period assigned to Adam, and even that all the human race are not descended from Adam. His effort in this was to reconcile science and Scripture, and he was now treated by a Methodist Episcopal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two centuries before, La Peyrère had been treated for a similar effort by a Roman Catholic Vicar-General in Belgium. The publication of a series of articles on the subject, contributed by the professor to a Northern religious newspaper at its own request, brought matters to a climax, for, the articles having fallen under the notice of the leading Southwestern organ of the denomination controlling the Vanderbilt University, the result was a most bitter denunciation of Prof. Winchell and of his views. Shortly afterward the professor was told by Bishop McTyeire that "our people are of the opinion that such views are contrary to the plan of redemption," and was requested by the bishop to quietly resign his chair. To this the professor made the fitting reply: "If the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause, and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it; no power on earth could persuade me to decline."

"We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratuitous suggestiveness, "to treat you as the Inquisition treated Galileo."

"But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. Winchell. "It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion which must be settled by scientific evidence."

Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that his chair had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, added to those of a colleague; the public were given to understand that