Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/585

Rh have sent forth the most bitter enemies the Christian Church has ever known—of whom Voltaire and Renan and St. Beuve are types; and there are many signs that the same causes are producing the same result in our own country.

I might allude to another battle-field in our own land and time. I might show how an attempt to meet the great want, in the State of New York, of an institution providing scientific instruction, has been met with loud outcries from many excellent men, who fear injury thereby to religion. I might picture to you the strategy which has been used to keep earnest young men from an institution, which, it is declared, cannot be Christian because it is not sectarian. I might lay before you wonderful lines of argument which have been made, to show the dangerous tendencies of a plan which gives to scientific studies the same weight as to classical studies, and which lays no less stress on modern history and literature than on ancient history and literature.

I might show how it has been denounced by the friends and agents of denominational colleges and in many sectarian journals, how the most preposterous charges have been made and believed by good men, how the epithets of "godless," "infidel," "irreligious," "unreligious," "atheistic," have been hurled against a body of Christian trustees, professors, and students, and with little practical result save arousing a suspicion in the minds of large bodies of thoughtful young men, that the churches dread scientific studies untrammeled by sectarianism.

You have now gone over the greater struggles in the long war between Ecclesiasticism and Science, and have glanced at the lesser fields. You have seen the conflicts in Physical Geography, as to the form of the earth; in Astronomy, as to the place of the earth in the universe; in Chemistry and Physics; in Anatomy and Medicine; in Geology; in Meteorology: in Cartography; in the Industrial and Agricultural Sciences; in Political Economy and Social Science; and in Scientific Instruction.

In every case, whether the war has been long or short, forcible or feeble, you have seen this same result—Science has at last gained the victory.

In every case too, you have seen that while this ecclesiastical war, during its continuance, has tended to drive multitudes of thoughtful men away from religion, the triumph of science has been a blessing to religion—ennobling its conceptions and bettering its methods.

May we not, then, hope that the greatest and best men in the Church, the men standing at centres of thought, will insist with power, more and more, that religion be no longer tied to so injurious a policy as that which this warfare reveals; that searchers for truth, whether in theology or natural science, work on as friends, sure that,