Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/53

Rh Science finds, we are told, mankind holding "beliefs which she asserts have no foundation in reason; and Science has not done the right thing in the premises. What on earth, then, should Science have done? Should Science have refrained from criticising the errors in regard to plain matters of fact which she found incorporated with popular religious creeds? So far as we can judge, Mr. Kidd himself seems to have benefited from such criticisms. In regard to the doctrine of evolution, he is a stalwart of the stalwarts. His faith, anticipating proof, has even taken hold of the extreme theory of Weismann and pressed it into the service of his sociological speculations. But the doctrine of evolution is precisely the one to which the religious world found it most difficult to reconcile itself, and one which, indeed, it is impossible to hold without at least a tacit criticism of views formerly considered as essential to religious faith. Did Mr. Kidd win his present position for himself without antagonizing the religious instincts and convictions of the mass of his fellow-men? If he did, it must have been because other men prepared the way for him; for certainly, not without much tribulation, has Science established its claim to judge freely and according to evidence of things within its ken. The world, we are informed, no longer takes the interest it once would have done in such attacks as Prof. Huxley has lately been making on certain orthodox beliefs. Well, if so, we must regard it as a good sign; for it can only mean that the world—that is to say, the thinking world—looks upon Prof. Huxley's labors as a little superfluous. Still, it is well to remember that even to-day the energetic professor's attack on the miracle of the Gadarene swine has been warmly repelled by eminent ecclesiastical authorities.

It would really be interesting to know Mr. Kidd's precise views as to the etiquette to be observed by "science" in its relations with religious systems which take under their patronage and vouch for gross scientific or historical errors. If science does not criticise such things, who or what is going to do it? If no one does it, what chance is there that religion will ever shake itself free from such accretions? Will the several priesthoods of the world see to it that the faiths they represent are progressively purified from error? In the last two centuries of the Roman Republic and the first two of the Empire, the question how to treat foreign cults, which were seeking a foothold in Rome itself, was a serious one for the state. Mr. Kidd was not present to caution the Roman Senate against rash action, or to point out that the great question was not whether these cults did or did not involve material errors, but what bearing religious systems in general had on the development of society; consequently the Senate had simply to follow its own best lights. "These Bacchic rites," says