Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/550

546 Again, we must turn to human knowledge, and ask whether it can lead us to the truth or near to it. Here we find the picture reversed. Whereas, the religious conceptions claiming the truth for their own, separate in course of time further and further from one another (witness the splitting of the christian church into three great branches, catholic, Roman catholic and protestant, and the further schism into innumerable sects) so, on the other side, the laws and concepts which science accepts as true come, in course of time, ever closer together. The rotation of the earth about the sun, stigmatized as false by the dominant religion, was not on that account abandoned by science as a truth. Historically speaking, science has always maintained its stand, while it has ever been the church which yielded to the decision of science, sometimes after long waiting. The most orthodox priest would not now venture to deny the Copernican theory, and would not be seriously taken by his followers if he did.

It can not be otherwise than that science should gradually supersede the religions, when it comes to investigating the truth, for it lies in the nature of the influence exerted by science on the aspect of life. The religions must drop their old concepts in proportion to the measure in which the spirit of science permeates the people.

When man made his first attempt at comprehension of the chaos of the world, the sum of such thoughts, constituting the germs of that which we now call poetry, science, religion, technology, was all put in one basket. The early bearers of the torch of culture were priests, doctors, rulers, judges, all in one. That was quite possible, since the sum total of intellectual possessions was not very great and might find commodious lodgment in a single head. With growing specialization, some of these functions were of necessity delegated to certain classes. The position of first comer and the prestige of tradition long enabled the priesthood to still reserve to itself the functions of government.

The source of the conflict between science and religion lies in the fact that science takes part in the development of the human speciea and is, herself, the most distinctive and purest expression of this development, while the religions seek to remain as unchanged as possible, although in doing so they condemn themselves to destruction. In consequence of the illusion which always located the golden age in the past, the priesthood never surmised that their attitude was equivalent to suicide, and emphasized just that which must ultimately make their position untenable. When the contrast between the old, cherished by the priesthood, and the new, which life brings, becomes too obvious, the phenomenon known as a "Reformation" follows, as, for example, the reformation of Judaism by Jesus and of Christendom by Luther and Calvin. The only reason why no similar reformation has occured in protestantism is that science has gained such an influence, even within