Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/402

386 at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life ebbed forth millions of years ago.

This being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable, that the search of each of these kinds of truth must be followed out on its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference from investigators on other lines, or by other methods. And it would also seem logical to work on in absolute confidence that whatever, at any moment, may seem to be the relative positions of the two different bands of workers, they must at last come together, for Truth is one.

But logic is not history. History is full of interferences which have cost the earth dear. Strangest of all, some of the direst of them have been made by the best of men, actuated by the purest motives, and seeking the noblest results. These interferences, and the struggle against them, make up the warfare of science.

One statement more, to clear the ground. You will not understand me at all to say that religion has done nothing for science. It has done much for it. The work of Christianity, despite the clamps which men have riveted about it, has been mighty indeed. Through these two thousand years, it has undermined servitude, mitigated tyranny, given hope to the hopeless, comfort to the afflicted, light to the blind, bread to the starving, joy to the dying, and this work continues. And its work for science, too, has been great. It has fostered science often. Nay, it has nourished that feeling of self-sacrifice for human good, which has nerved some of the bravest men for these battles.

Unfortunately, some good men started centuries ago with the idea that purely scientific investigation is unsafe—that theology must intervene. So began this great modern war.

The first typical battle-field to which I would refer is that of Geography—the simplest elementary doctrine of the earth's shape and surface.

Among the legacies of thought left by the ancient world to the modern, were certain ideas of the rotundity of the earth. These ideas were vague; they were mixed with absurdities; but they were germ ideas, and, after the barbarian storm which ushered in the modern world had begun to clear away, these germ ideas began to bud and bloom in the minds of a few thinking men, and these men hazarded the suggestion that the earth is round—is a globe.

The greatest and most earnest men of the time took fright at once. To them, the idea of the earth's rotundity seemed fraught with