Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/318

302 the immaculate conception; so have Protestant colleges in America frequently rejected excellent candidates on account of "unsafe" views regarding the apostolic succession, or the incarnation, or baptism, or the perseverance of the saints.

And how has all this system resulted? In the older nations, by natural reaction, these colleges, under strict ecclesiastical control, have sent forth the most bitter enemies the Christian Church has ever known—of whom Voltaire and Renan and Saint-Beuve are types; and there are many signs that the same causes are to produce the same results in our own country.

I might allude to other battle-fields in our own land and time. I might show how, twenty years ago, attempts to meet the want in a great American State of an institution providing higher scientific instruction, were met with loud outcries from many excellent men, who feared injury thereby to religion; and how in various other States, at various times since, the same feeling has been shown. Happily, leading men at the centers of Christian thought in many countries are now taking a larger and better view: but I again point to the recent driving out of the Darwinian professors from the American college at Beirut, under the direction of American Protestants, as an evidence that the old spirit still exists; no longer, indeed, seriously injurious to science, but deeply injurious to religion.

was the purpose of Prof. Max Müller's inaugural address as President of the International Oriental Congress to show that the break that now appears in the continuity of thought between the East and West did not exist from the beginning, and that in prehistoric times language really formed a bond of union between the ancestors of many of the Eastern and Western nations; and that more recent discoveries have proved that, in historic times also, language, which seemed to separate the great nations of antiquity, never so completely separated the most important among them as to make intellectual commerce and exchange among them impossible. To have established these two facts, Prof. Müller claims, constitutes one of the greatest achievements and highest glories of Oriental scholarship.