Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/750

730 the reasons were purely economic; the banished scholar was heaped with official compliments, evidently in hope that he would keep silence.

Such was not Dr. Winchell's view. In a frank letter to the leading journal of the university town he stated the whole matter. The intolerance-hating press of the country, religious and secular, did not hold its peace. In vain the authorities of the university waited for the storm to blow over. It was evident, at last, that a defense must be made, and a local organ of the sect, which, under the editorship of a fellow-professor, had always treated Dr. Winchell's views with the luminous inaccuracy which usually characterizes a professor's ideas of a rival's teachings, assumed the task. In the articles which followed, the usual scientific hypotheses as to the creation were declared to be "absurd," "vague and unintelligible," "preposterous and gratuitous." This new champion stated that "the objections drawn from fossiliferous strata and the like are met by reference to the analogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of adults when they were but a day old, and by the flood of Noah and other cataclysms, which, with the constant change of nature, are sufficient to account for the phenomena in question"!

Under inspiration of this sort, the Tennessee Conference of the religious body in control of the university had already in October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsanctified science as follows: "This is an age in which scientific atheism, having divested itself of the habiliments that most adorn and dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denudation. The arrogant and impertinent claims of this science, 'falsely so called' have been so boisterous and persistent, that the unthinking mass have been sadly deluded; but our university alone has had the courage to lay its young but vigorous hand upon the mane of untamed Speculation and say, 'We will have no more of this'"

It is a consolation to know how the result, thus devoutly sought, has been achieved, for in the "ode" sung at the laying of the corner-stone of a new theological building of the same university, in May, 1880, we read:

 Science and Revelation here In perfect harmony appear, Guiding young feet along the road Through grace and nature up to God.

It is also pleasing to know that while an institution calling itself a university thus violated the fundamental principles on which any institution worthy of the name must be based, another institution which has the glory of being the first in the entire North to-begin something like a university organization—the State University of Michigan—recalled Dr. Winchell at once to