Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/598

556 more than one book to younger scholars—as, for example, the excellent study of Mr. Lewis Rosenthal on America and France. The Manual of Historical Literature which Mr. White had proposed as a joint task to his pupil and successor. Prof. Charles Kendall Adams, had finally to be worked out alone by the latter. It is, indeed, as an inspirer of books that his activity has been greatest. Yet he has remained himself a wide reader and a tireless student; and not alone the addresses and magazine articles in which he has brought to bear so tellingly upon a host of present-day problems the fruits of a ripe historical scholarship, but at least one book of serious proportions will attest the quality of his work.

This book, so many of whose chapters are familiar to the readers of the Popular Science Monthly, is his Warfare of Science, or, to give it its full title, his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It was in the troublous early days of Cornell, when the nonsectarian character of the university was bringing it from its rivals on every side the charge of godlessness, and when Mr. Cornell and Mr. White himself were rewarded for their labors by such epithets as infidel and atheist and by the suspicion of good Christian people everywhere, that it first occurred to him to find comfort and assurance in the study of this stage in the history of all the great intellectual movements through which civilization has been won. From its earliest form, as a mere lecture in 1875, it has grown through twenty years to the two stately volumes now about to be published. In the gathering of its materials, scattered over almost the whole territory of human knowledge, Mr. White has known how to use the aid from time to time of sundry helpers; but even in this preliminary labor his own immediate share has far outweighed all others, and in the digestion and interpretation of his materials no other hand was ever given a part. Clear as is his statement of its thesis, few books have suffered such misjudgment from careless or unkindly critics. What interested him was never the opinions, normal or abnormal, of forgotten theologians; but their interferences, in the mistaken interest of religion, with that freedom of thought and research out of which alone science can grow. Nor was he actuated by any hostility to religion. A man of profoundly religious nature, impatient of irreverence of any kind, and deeply attached to the Christian communion in which he was reared, he seeks only to lift the timid faith which dares not trust the God of the universe to deal truly with the human mind he has made to the loftier conviction that—in his own noble words—"there is a God in this universe wise enough to make all truth-seeking safe, and good enough to make all truth-telling useful."