I purpose to present an outline of the great, sacred struggle for
the liberty of science--a struggle which has lasted for so many
centuries, and which yet continues. A hard contest it has been; a war
waged longer, with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with
strategy more shrewd than in any of the comparatively transient warfare
of Cæsar or Napoleon or Moltke.
I shall ask you to go with me through some of the most protracted
sieges, and over some of the hardest-fought battle-fields of this
war. We will look well at the combatants; we will listen to the
battle-cries; we will note the strategy of leaders, the cut and thrust
of champions, the weight of missiles, the temper of weapons; we will
look also at the truces and treaties, and note the delusive impotency
of all compromises in which the warriors for scientific truth have
consented to receive direction or bias from the best of men uninspired
by the scientific spirit, or unfamiliar with scientific methods.
My thesis, which, by an historical study of this warfare, I expect
to develop, is the following: _In all modern history, interference
with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how
conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the
direst evils both to religion and to science--and invariably. And, on
the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how
dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed, for the time,
to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and of
science._ I say "invariably." I mean exactly that. It is a rule to
which history shows not one exception.
It would seem, logically, that this statement cannot be gainsaid.
God's truths must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the
soul, or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart
to-day, in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real
variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life ebbed
forth millions of years ago.
This being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable, that the search
for each of these kinds of truth must be followed out on its own lines,
by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference from
investigators on other lines, or by other methods. And it would also
seem logical to work on in absolute confidence that whatever, at any
moment, may seem to be the relative positions of the two different
bands of workers, they must at last come together, for Truth is one.
But logic is not history. History is full of interferences which have
cost the earth dear. Strangest of all, some of the direst of them have
been made by the best of men, actuated by the purest motives, and
seeking the noblest results. These interferences, and the struggle
against them, make up the warfare of science.
One statement more, to clear the ground. You will not understand me at
all to say that religion has done nothing for science. It has done much
for it. The work of Christianity has been mighty indeed. Through these
two thousand years, despite the waste of its energies on all the things
its Blessed Founder most earnestly condemned--on fetich and subtlety
and war and pomp--it has undermined servitude, mitigated tyranny, given
hope to the hopeless, comfort to the afflicted, light to the blind,
bread to the starving, joy to the dying, and this work continues. And
its work for science, too, has been great. It has fostered science
often. Nay, it has nourished that feeling of self-sacrifice for human
good, which has nerved some of the bravest men for these battles.
Unfortunately, a devoted army of good men started centuries ago with
the idea that independent scientific investigation is unsafe--that
theology must intervene to superintend its methods, and the Biblical
record, as an historical compendium and scientific treatise, be taken
as a standard to determine its results. So began this great modern war.