birth as "vitiating the primal curse against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in America, the use of manuals in which the Inquisition is declared to be a purely civil tribunal, or the Puritans tolerant.
So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts, abroad we have during centuries the fettering of professors at English and Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to articles and catechisms without number. In our own country we have had in a vast multitude of denominational colleges, as the first qualification for a professorship, not ability in the subject to be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of the denomination controlling the college or university.
Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat themselves. The supposed victim is generally made a man of mark by persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider sphere of usefulness. As regards withstanding the march of scientific truth, any opposing Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam plow.
The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than that done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread, especially among open-minded young men, that the accepted Christian system demands a concealment of truth, with the persecution of honest investigators, and therefore must be false. Well was it said in substance by President McCosh, of Princeton, that no more sure way of making unbelievers in Christianity among young men could be devised than preaching that the doctrines arrived at by the great scientific thinkers of this period are opposed to religion.
Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is evolved out of this past history of oppression a better spirit which is making itself manifest with power in the leading religious bodies of the world. In the Church of Rome we have to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mivart, declaring that the Church must not attempt to interfere with science; that the Almighty in the Galileo case gave her a distinct warning that the priesthood of science must remain with the men of science. In the Anglican Church and its American daughter we have the acts and utterances of such men as Archbishop Tait, Dean Stanley, and many others, proving that the deepest religious thought is more and more tending to peace rather than warfare with science; and in the other churches, especially in America, while there is yet much to be desired, the welcome extended in many of them to Alexander Winchell, and the freedom given to views like his, augur well for a better state of things in the future.
