Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/463

Rh aqueduct without water, and there be water without an aqueduct. God makes water, and men make aqueducts. Water was before aqueducts, and religion before churches. God makes religion, and men make churches. There are irreligious men in every church, and there are very religious men in no church. Any visible, organized church is a mere human institution. It is useful for the purpose of propagating religion so long as it confines itself to that function and abstains from all other things. The moment it transcends that limit, it is an injurious institution. In either case it is merely human, and we wrong both religion and the Church when we claim for the latter that it is not a human institution. The Church of England is as much a human institution as the Royal Society; and the same may be said of the Church of Rome and the Royal Florentine Academy. A church is as much an authority in matters of religion as a society is in matters of science, and no more. "The Church" has often been opposed to science, and so it has to religion; but "the society" has often been opposed to religion, and so it has to science. "The Church," both before and since the days of Christ, has stood in opposition to the Bible, the text-book of Jewish and Christian religionists, quite as often as it has to science. But "the society," or "the academy," has stood in opposition to science quite as often as it has to religion. Sometimes the sin of one has been laid upon the other, and sometimes the property of one has been scheduled as the assets of the other. It is time to protest, in the interests of the truth of God, and in the name of the God of truth, that religion no longer be saddled with all the faults of the churchmen, all the follies of the scientists, and all the crimes of the politicians. It was not religion which brought Galileo to his humiliating retraction, about which we hear so much declamation; it was "the Church."

But why should writers of the history of science so frequently conceal the fact that "the Church" was instigated thereunto not by religious people, but scientific men—by Galileo's collaborateurs? It was the jealousy of the scientists which made use of the bigotry of the churchmen to degrade a rival in science. They began their attacks not on the ground that religion was in danger, but on such scientific grounds as these, stated by a professor in the University of Padua—namely, that as there were only seven metals, and seven days in the week, and seven apertures in man's head, there could be only seven planets! And that was some time before these gentlemen of science had instigated the sarcastic Dominican monk to attempt to preach Galileo down under the text, Viri Galilœi, quid statis adspicientes in cœlum?

In like manner, politicians have used "the Church" to overthrow their rivals. "The Church" is the engine which has been turned against freedom, against science, against religion. It would be as logical and as fair to lay all "the Church's" outrages against human