Religion and Science," he would have disarmed criticism, and saved himself from a great deal of theological abuse; but he preferred to credit people who profess religion with having it and being influenced by it, in their treatment of science. There is, indeed, no ground for impeaching the general sincerity of religious people who are alarmed at the advancement of science, and denounce it as subversive of faith. Their difficulty is simply that of narrowness and ignorance, inspired by a fanatical earnestness. Atheism has now come to be a familiar and stereotyped charge against men of science, both on the part of the pulpit and the religious press. Not that they accuse all scientific men of atheism, but they allege this to be the tendency of scientific thought, and the outcome of scientific philosophy. It matters nothing that this imputation is denied; it matters nothing that scientific men claim that their studies lead them to higher and more worthy conceptions of the Divine power, manifested through the order of Nature, than the conceptions offered by theology. It is enough that they disagree with current notions upon this subject, and any difference of view is here held as atheism.
In this, as we have said, the theologians may be honest, but they are narrow and bigoted; and it is surprising that they cannot see that, in arraigning scientific thinkers for atheism, they are simply doing what stupid fanatics the world over are always doing when ideas of the Deity different from their own are maintained. And it is the more surprising that Christian teachers should indulge in this intolerant practice, when it is remembered that their own faith was blackened with this opprobrium at its first promulgation. In a very able article by Prof. Zeller, of Berlin, on "The Contest of Heathenism with Christianity," reprinted in The Popular Science Supplement, No. II., this interesting subject is taken up, and the writer remarks upon it as follows:
"To the heathen nations, the Christians were in the first place atheists; for in every age this name has been given to those who did not agree with the prevailing conceptions of the Deity; not only when they denied his existence, but when they sought to instill a more just and worthy idea of God. 'Down with the atheists!' this was the war-cry of the heathen mob against the Christians. It was with this cry, for example, that in a. d. 156 the venerable Bishop Polycarp was received on the race-course at Smyrna. The only gods the people knew anything about, whose temples they frequented, whose statues they worshiped, to whom they offered sacrifices and prayers, were denied by the Christians; they were declared to be the inventions of man's superstition, and sometimes to be evil spirits, devils. Can we wonder that the people who were still devoted to these gods felt the attack upon them to be an attack upon themselves, their most sacred and cherished possessions; that they were the more deeply incensed at it the more seriously they feared by toleration of it to lose the favor of the gods on whom their welfare depended? The reproach of atheism was therefore the most dangerous that could be brought against the Christians. In that 'Down with the atheists!' with which the yells of the mob greeted Polycarp at Smyrna, was included the sentence of death, which they at once proceeded to execute by preparing the stake. And the cry was followed in numberless cases by the same results. If any public misfortune, any alarming event occurred, which seemed to indicate the displeasure of the gods—a pestilence, a dearth, a flood, an eclipse, an earthquake—superstition was always ready to make the Christians responsible for it, as enemies of the gods; the exclamation was sure to be heard, 'The Christians to the lions!' Both the educated and uneducated have always attributed every other wickedness to the enemies of the gods, and so it was with the Christians. Being atheists, they were also criminals, and all manner of horrible stories were told of them. It was not enough that they were said to worship a god with the head of an ass, which we see represented to this day in a caricature of that period, the well-known mock crucifix in the Kircher Museum at Rome; it was said, also, that in their secret assemblies they practised all sorts of
