Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/78

68 men this feeling of contempt for learning is concealed; they will profess to admire scholarship and erudition, speaking of it as a graceful accomplishment; and it is only in unguarded moments that they betray their conviction that it is nothing more; others proclaim it loudly, and some even wish to bring public opinion to bear upon the matter, so as to prevent as an immorality the acquiring of useless knowledge.

Thus, the old religious school, and that new school whose convictions we see now gradually acquiring the character of a religion, agree in combining a passionate love for what they believe true knowledge, with a contempt for so-called learning and philosophy. The common enemy of both is what the one school calls, and the other might well call, "the wisdom of the world." But though agreeing so far, these two schools hate their common enemy much less than they hate each other. For each regards the "true wisdom" of the other as worse and more mischievous than the wisdom of the world which each rejects. To the scientific school the Christian γνῷσις is a mystical superstition, compared with which "learning and philosophy" are science itself. To the Christian, modern science is a darkness compared with which the science that St. Paul rejected might almost be called Christianity.

Nothing is so terrible as this clashing of opposite religions. Differences on important subjects are always painful, but the direct shock of contrary enthusiasms has something appalling about it. That one man's highest truth should be another man's deadliest falsehood; that one man should be ready to die in disinterested self-devotion for a cause which another man is equally ready to oppose at the sacrifice of his life; this is a horror which is none the less horrible because it has often been witnessed on this perplexed planet. But often it has been seen, long after the conflict was over, that there had been misapprehension; that the difference of opinion was not really any thing like so complete as it seemed. Nay, it has often happened that a later generation has seen the difference to be very small indeed, and has wondered that so much could have been made of it. In such cases the mind is relieved of that fancy of a radical discord in human nature. We see that self-devotions have not really clashed in such fell antagonism. We see that with self-devotion there may mix less noble feelings, and that the immitigable hostility of religious strife may be caused by a mixture of ardent conviction with some impulses less noble, with some that are blamable and some that are even ludicrous, with mere pugnacity, with the passion of gratifying self-importance, with the half-noble pleasure that there is in fighting, and the ignoble pleasure that there is in giving pain.

It would certainly be hard enough to show that the present strife between Christianity and science is one in which insignificant differences are magnified by the imagination of the combatants. The