On the scientific side the inaccuracy and carelessness are just as great, but the field is too vast for consideration here. The conflict in regard to evolution has produced an extraordinary literature on the clerical side, and, to the amusement of students of science, it still flows from the religious press and refreshes suburban faith. Men who have never devoted a month to the study of science engage in conflict with the most authoritative masters of biology, and thrill their ignorant followers with the vigour and dexterity of their fencing. These Jesuit and other writers have, of course, set up a lay-figure for their valiant attacks. They misrepresent the views and motives of the man they oppose, give garbled quotations from his works, and support their own antiquated positions by quotations from scientific men who lived in the earlier phases of the controversy. No trick is more common in this class of literature than to justify obsolete statements by quoting “authorities” who died long ago, and leaving the inexpert reader to suppose that they are modern men of science; while clerics who could not distinguish a palaeolithic from a civilised skull write pompous essays on such subjects as the evolution of man. Works of this kind circulate by the hundred in the churches even to-day, literally deluding millions of people, while the works of more expert writers are denounced as “against religion” and unfit to read.
Still more flagrant is the clerical behaviour in
