The Warfare of Science

by Andrew Dickson White

There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. The prohibition of this, one of the most simple and beneficial principles in political and economical science, was affirmed not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of the Church (six of them general councils), and by seventeen popes, to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law. [145]

But about the middle of the eighteenth century the evil could be endured no longer—a way of escape must be found. The army opposed to the Church had become so formidable, that the Roman authorities saw that a concession must be made. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; in it were concentrated twenty years' study and thought of a great thinker on the necessities of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions, and it was translated into every civilized language; this work attacked, among other abuses, the position of the Church regarding interest for money.

The Church authorities had already taken the alarm. Benedict XIV. saw that the best thing for him—nay, the only thing—was a surrender under form of a compromise. In a brief he declared substantially that the law of the Church was opposed to the taking of interest on loans; and then, after sundry non-committal and ambiguous statements, he hinted that there were possible exceptions to the rule.

Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for "convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church, this casuistry of Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Adam Smith, Bentham, and their disciples, pressed on, and science won for mankind another great victory.

Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of scientific truth appeared among some over-zealous religionists. When the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself with sundry new casuistries against those who held to its earlier decisions, provincial doctors in theology protested indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers, saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. And even as late as 1830, when the Roman court, though declining to commit itself on the doctrine involved, decreed that confessors should no longer disquiet lenders of money at legal interest, the old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbé Laborde, Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbé Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbé Dennavit declared that he refused absolution to those who took interest, and to priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient. [146]

But the peace on this question is too profound to be disturbed by such outcries. The Torlonia family at Rome, to-day, with its palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favor, all won by lending money at interest, and by devotion to the Roman See, is a growth on ramparts long since surrendered and deserted.

INDUSTRIAL SCIENCES.

Did time permit, we might go over other battle-fields no less instructive than those we have seen. We might go over the battle-fields of Agricultural Progress, and note how, by a most curious perversion of a text of Scripture, many of the peasantry of Russia were prevented from raising and eating potatoes, and how in Scotland at the beginning of this century the use of fanning-mills for winnowing grain was denounced as contrary to the text "the wind bloweth where it listeth," etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is "prince of the powers of the air," and as sufficient cause for excommunication from the Scotch Church. [147]

We might go over the battle-fields of Civil Engineering, and note how the introduction of railways into France was declared, by an Archbishop, to be an evidence of the divine displeasure against country innkeepers who set meat before their guests on fast-days, and now were punished by seeing travelers carried by their doors; and how railroad and telegraph were denounced from noted pulpits as "heralds of Anti-christ." And then we might pass to Protestant England and recall the sermon of the Curate of Rotherhithe at the breaking in of the Thames Tunnel, so destructive to life and property, declaring that "it was but a just judgment upon the presumptuous aspirations of mortal man." [148]