Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/142

130 questions regarding creation—the six-day period of divine activity, the destruction of the world by a flood, the building of an ark, the placing of creatures in it by pairs, and the descent from this ancestry of all living things, "men and women, birds and beasts." He asks his friend, "Do you, without any mental reservation, believe these things?" "If you do," he continues, "then I can only say that the accumulated and accepted knowledge of mankind, including the entire sciences of astronomy, geology, philology, and history, are [as far as you are concerned] naught and mistaken. If you do not believe those events to have so happened, or do so with some mental reservation, which destroys the whole sense and meaning of the narrative, why do you not say so from your pulpits?"

The friend merely parries and evades the question. According to Mr. Martineau, the clergy speak very differently indeed from their pulpits. After showing how the Mosaic picture of the genetic order of things has been not only altered but inverted by scientific research, he says: "Notwithstanding the deplorable condition to which the picture has been reduced, it is exhibited fresh every week to millions taught to believe it as divine." It cannot be said that error here does no practical harm, or that it does not act to the detriment of honest men. It was for openly avowing doubts which, it is said, others discreetly entertain, that the Bishop of Natal suffered persecution; it was for his public fidelity to scientific truth, as far as his lights extended, that he was branded, even during his recent visit to this country, as an "excommunicated heretic." The courage of Dean Stanley and of the Master of Balliol, in reference to this question, disarmed indignation, and caused the public to overlook a wrong which might not otherwise have been endured.

The liberal and intelligent portion of Christendom must, I take it, differentiate itself more and more, in word and act, from the fanatical, foolish, and more purely sacerdotal portion. Enlightened Roman Catholics are more specially bound to take action here; for the travesty of heaven and earth is grosser, and the attempt to impose it on the world is more serious, in their community than elsewhere. That they are more or less alive to this state of things, and that they show an increasing courage and independence in their demands for education, will be plain to the reader of the "Apology for the Belfast Address." The "Memorial" there referred to was the impatient protest of barristers, physicians, surgeons, solicitors, and scholars, among the Catholics themselves. They must not relax their pressure nor relinquish their demands. For their spiritual guides live so exclusively in the prescientific past, that even the really strong intellects among them are reduced to atrophy as regards scientific truth. Eyes they have, and see not; ears they have, and hear not; for both eyes and ears are taken possession of by the sights and sounds of another age. In relation to science, the ultramontane brain, through lack of