the immaculate conception; so have Protestant colleges in America frequently rejected excellent candidates on account of "unsafe" views regarding the apostolic succession, or the incarnation, or baptism, or the perseverance of the saints.
And how has all this system resulted? In the older nations, by natural reaction, these colleges, under strict ecclesiastical control, have sent forth the most bitter enemies the Christian Church has ever known—of whom Voltaire and Renan and Saint-Beuve are types; and there are many signs that the same causes are to produce the same results in our own country.
I might allude to other battle-fields in our own land and time. I might show how, twenty years ago, attempts to meet the want in a great American State of an institution providing higher scientific instruction, were met with loud outcries from many excellent men, who feared injury thereby to religion; and how in various other States, at various times since, the same feeling has been shown. Happily, leading men at the centers of Christian thought in many countries are now taking a larger and better view: but I again point to the recent driving out of the Darwinian professors from the American college at Beirut, under the direction of American Protestants, as an evidence that the old spirit still exists; no longer, indeed, seriously injurious to science, but deeply injurious to religion.[1]
- ↑ It is an interesting fact that one of the men thus driven out of the American college at Beirut, for supposed adhesion to the doctrines of Darwin, has since become one of the most influential editors at Cairo, carrying on a daily journal and two periodicals, and exercising a far greater and wider influence upon thought in the East than ever before. Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man must honor him for the large way in which he, at least, broke away from the traditions of that center of thought; prevented, so far as he was able, persecution of scholars for holding to the Darwinian view; and paved the way for the highest researches in physical science in that university. For a most eloquent statement of the opposition of modern physical science to mediæval theological views, as shown in the case of Sir Isaac Newton, see Dr. Thomas Chalmers, cited in Gore, Art of Scientific Discovery, London, 1878, p. 247.
