Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/316

300. Heavy missiles were hurled—such phrases as "sapping the foundations," etc., "breaking down the bulwarks," etc., and, withal, a new missile was used with much effect—the epithet "materialist."

The results can be easily guessed: crowds came to the lecture-rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of Prof. See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation.

A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent by the cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having heard one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party; he brought a terrible statement—one that seemed enough to overwhelm Sée, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of public instruction in France—the statement that Sée had denied the existence of the human soul.

Good Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon. Rising in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent invective against the Minister of State who could protect such a fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine; and, as a climax, he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of the day before, that so long as he had the honor to hold his professorship he would combat the false idea of the existence of the soul. The weapon seemed resistless, and the wound fatal; but M. Duruy rose and asked to be heard.

His statement was simply that he held in his hand documentary proofs that Prof. Sée never made such a declaration. He held the notes used by Prof. Sée in his lecture. Prof. Sée, it appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated certain ideas regarding medicine as an art. The inflamed imagination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the lecture notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for "áme" and to exhibit Prof. Sée as treating a theological when he was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence of the soul the professor had said nothing.

The forces of the enemy were immediately turned; they retreated in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a quiet, dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors by Wurtz, Dean of the Faculty, completed their discomfiture. Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in bringing ridicule on religion, and thrusting still deeper into the minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken ideas—the conviction that religion and science are enemies.