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. In withstanding the march of scientific truth, any Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam plough.
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 to them 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 evolving 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, Bishop Temple, Dean Stanley, Dean Farrar, 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.
From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance religion rather than to promote any particular system of theology; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more and more that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from the period when he had little, if any, idea of a great power above him, through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism, and idolatry, toward better forms of belief, making him more and more accessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences show, too, within the historic period, the same tendency, and especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above all, through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth.
Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this evolution, "between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender mercies are over all his works; between the God of the Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, between the God of the Old Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool of the day, and the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath seen nor can see; between the God of Leviticus, who was so particular about the sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; between the God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who will have all men to be saved; between the God of Exodus, who is merciful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ—the heavenly Father—who is kind unto the unthankful and the evil."
However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology, History, and their kindred sciences may, in the interest of simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of "the Fall"; however completely they may fossilize various dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation" and "schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the great minds of the theological period: science, so far from making inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian development of it, will strengthen all that is essential in it, giving new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations. For the one great, legitimate, scientific conclusion of anthropology is, that, more and more, a better civilization of the world, despite all its survivals of savagery and barbarism, is developing men and women on whom the declarations of the nobler Psalms, of Isaiah, of Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first great commandment, and the second, which is like unto it, St. Paul's praise of charity and St. James's definition of "pure religion and undefiled," can take stronger hold for the more effective and more rapid uplifting of our race.(198)
(198) For the resolution of the Presbyterian Synod of Mississippi in
1857, see Prof. Woodrow's speech before the Synod of South Carolina,
October 27 and 28, 1884, p. 6. As to the action of the Board of
Directors of the Theological Seminary of Columbia, see ibid. As to the
minority report in the Synod of South Carolina, see ibid., p. 24. For
the pithy sentences regarding the conduct of the majority in the synods
toward Dr. Woodrow, see the Rev. Mr. Flynn's article in the Southern
Presbyterian Review for April, 1885, p. 272, and elsewhere. For the
restrictions regarding the teaching of the Copernican theory and the
true doctrine of comets in German universities, see various histories of
astronomy, especially Madler. For the immaculate oath (Immaculaten-Eid)
as enforced upon the Austrian professors, see Luftkandl, Die
Josephinischen Ideen. For the effort of the Church in France, after the
restoration of the Bourbons, to teach a history of that country from
which the name of Napoleon should be left out, see Father Loriquet's
famous Histoire de France a l'Usage de la Jeunesse, Lyon, 1820, vol.
ii, see especially table of contents at the end. The book bears on its
title-page the well known initials of the Jesuit motto, A. M. D. G. (Ad
Majorem Dei Gloriam). For examples in England and Scotland, see various
English histories, and especially Buckle's chapters on Scotland. For a
longer collection of examples showing the suppression of anything like
unfettered thought upon scientific subjects in American universities,
see Inaugural Address at the Opening of Cornell University, by the
author of these chapters. For the citation regarding the evolution of
better and nobler ideas of God, see Church and Creed: Sermons preached
in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital, London, by A. W. Momerie,
M. A., LL. D., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in King's College,
London, 1890. For a very vigorous utterance on the other side, see a
recent charge of the Bishop of Gloucester.