Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/453

Rh to criticise any man while he is doing. Let him do what he will do; then criticise the deed. The artist has laid one pigment on his palette, and he is criticised before it is known what others he intends to mix with it, to procure what shade, to produce what effect. Wait until all the paint is on the canvas, and the artist has washed his brushes and drawn the curtain from his picture; then criticise the picture.

This impatient and weak criticism on the part of religious men is injurious to scientific progress, as well as to the progress of religion. For the latter, it makes the reputation of unfairness; for the former, it does one of two bad things: it obstructs free discussion among students of science, or pushes them into a foolish defiance of religion. Men must co-work with those of their own sphere of intellectual labors. They must publish guesses, conjectures, hypotheses, theories. Whatever comes into any mind must be examined by many minds. It may be true, it may be false; there must be no prejudgment. Now if, because our scientific men are discussing a new view, our religious men fly among them and disturb them by crying "Heresy!" "Infidelity!" "Atheism!" those students must take time to repel the charges, and thus their work be hurt. If let alone, they may soon abandon their false theory. Certainly, if a proposition in science be false, the students of science are the men likeliest to detect the falsehood, however unlikely they may be to discover the truth that is in religion. Nothing more quickly destroys an error than to attempt to establish it scientifically.

The premature cries of the religious against the scientific have also the effect of keeping a scientific error longer alive. Through sheer obstinacy the assailed will often hold a bad position, which, if not attacked, had been long ago abandoned. And we must have noticed that Nature seems quite as able to make scientific men obstinate as grace to do this same work for the saints.

No man should be charged with being an atheist who does not, in distinct terms, announce himself to be such; and in that case the world will believe him to be too pitiful a person to be worth assailing with hard words. But as you may drive a man away from you by representing him as your enemy, so a scientific man may be driven from the Christian faith, if convinced that the Christian faith stands in the way of free investigation and free discussion; or, he may hold on to the faith because he has brains enough to see that one may be most highly scientific and most humbly devout at the same time; but by persecution he may be compelled to withdraw from open communion with "those who profess and call themselves Christians." Then both parties lose—what neither can well afford to lose—the respect and help which each could give the other. When the son of a religious teacher turns to the works of a man whom he has heard that father denounce, and finds in any one page of those books more high religious thought than in a hundred of his father's commonplace