Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/462

446 a line parallel to the meridian at a distance of 1.5708. We can show that the rotating line can cross the stationary line by making it do so as on a watch-dial, and yet we can demonstrate that if it be extended indefinitely it can never touch the stationary line, nor come at the end even as near as eighteen inches to it.

Here are two of the simplest human conceptions, between which we know that there is no contradiction, rendered absolutely irreconcilable to the human intellect by the introduction of the infinite. There is no religion here. And yet there is no mystery in either theology or religion more mysterious than the mystery of the infinite, which we may encounter whenever we attempt to set our watches to the right time if they have run more than an hour wrong.

Another error has been the occasion of this cry of "conflict." It is the confounding of "the Church" with "religion." This confusion has led many an honest soul astray, and is the fallacy wherewith shrewd sophists have been able to overthrow the faith of the ignorant. If the Church—and, in all my treatment of this topic, I must be understood as using "the Church," not as signifying "the holy Church universal," but simply in the sense in which antagonistic scientists employ it—if the Church and religion be the same, the whole argument must be given up, and it must be admitted that there is a conflict between religion and science, and that religion is in the wrong. Churchmen are guilty of helping to strengthen, if indeed they are not responsible for creating, this error. It has at length been presented plumply to the world in the book of Prof. J. W. Draper, entitled a "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science." The title assumes that there is such a conflict. See how it will read with synonyms substituted: "History of the Conflict between Loving Obedience to God's Word and Intelligent Study of God's Works." Does Dr. Draper believe there is such a conflict? It is not to be supposed that he does. How, then, did he come to give his book such a title? From a confusion of terms, as will be observed by the perusal of three successive sentences in his preface; "The papacy represents the ideas and aspirations of two-thirds of the population of Europe. It insists on a political supremacy, . . . . loudly declaring that it will accept no reconciliation with modern civilization. The antagonism we thus witness between religion and science," etc. Now, if "the papacy" and "religion" be synonymous terms, representing equivalent ideas, Dr. Draper's book shows that all good men should do what they can to extirpate religion from the world; but if they are not—and they are not—then the book is founded on a most hurtful fallacy, and must be widely mischievous. Their share of the responsibility for the harm done must fall to churchmen.

No, these are not synonymous terms. "The Church" is not religion, and religion is not "the Church." There may be a church and no religion; there may be religion and no church, as there may be an