[6]. It was long before Science acquired her natural voice. For more than a thousand years she submitted servilely to Aristotle and his interpreters. But the Science of the Dark Ages was only a branch of learning of which a Picus of Mirandola or an Admirable Crichton could master the whole, along with the classics and mathematics of the period. The genuine Scientific Spirit was not yet born; and when it woke at last in Galileo and Kepler, and down to our own day, the Religious spirit was still paramount over the Scientific. It is only in the present generation that we witness at once the evolution of the true scientific spirit and of scientific arrogance.
[7]. While I am writing these pages, the Globe informs us that there reigns at present in Paris a mania for medical curiosities and surgical operations. “It has become the right thing to get up early and hurry off to witness some special piece of dexterity with the scalpel. The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a thoroughly realistic manner on the stage.”
[8]. In the very noteworthy paper by Mr. Myers in the Nineteenth Century for May on the “Disenchantment of France,” there occurs this remark: “In that country where the pure dicta of Science reign in the intellectual classes with less interference from custom, sentiment, or tradition, than even in Germany itself, we should find that Science, at her present point, is a depressing disintegrating energy” (p. 663). Elsewhere he says that France “makes M. Pasteur her national hero”!
[9]. I have heard a pitiful example of this kind of prejudice. An orphan boy and his ugly mongrel dog were the objects of universal dislike and ridicule in the house of his uncle, a Scotch farmer. The lad always sat of an evening far back from the circle by the fireside, with his crouching dog under his stool lest it should be kicked. One day the little son of the house, of whom the farmer and his wife were dotingly fond, went out with the boy and dog, and, a snow-storm coming on, they were all lost on the hills. Next morning the dog returned to the farm, making wild signs that the farmer should follow him, which he and his wife did at once, in great anxiety. At last, the dog brought them to a spot where they found the boy stiff and cold, but their child still alive. The boy had taken off his own coat and wrapped it round the child, whom he laid on his breast, and then, lying under him on the snow, had died. Let us hope that at least the dog reaped some tardy fruits of the farmer’s repentance.
[10]. I will cite an example from my own experience, which may help to make parents realize the subtle peril of which I speak. Twenty-five years ago I was engaged in an effort to help Mary Carpenter in the care of the Red Lodge Reformatory for girl-thieves at Bristol. Our poor little charges had all been convicted of larceny, or some kindred offence, but they were not technically “fallen” girls: another establishment received young women of this “unfortunate” class. Twice, however, it happened, during my residence with Miss Carpenter, that girls who had been on the streets were by mistake sent to us when convicted of theft, and were of course received and placed with the others, all being under the most careful surveillance both in the school-rooms, playgrounds, and dormitory. Nevertheless, in each case, before the “unfortunate” had been three days in the Lodge, by some inexplicable contagion the whole school of fifty girls were demoralized so completely that the aspect of the children and change in their behavior gave warning to their experienced janitress to trace the history of the new-comer more exactly, and, as the result proved, to detect where the infection had come in.
[11]. In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came into.”—Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”
[12]. Readers of that singular book, “St. Bernard’s” (Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., 1887, new edition 1888), and its sequel, “Dying Scientifically,” may possibly entertain doubts on this subject.
[13]. “C’est pourquoi, seul dans mon siècle, j’ai sû comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise.”—M. Renan.
[14]. The heads of this party in England are the venerable Rabbi Nathan Adler and his son and colleague, Rev. Herman Adler, who hold a kind of Patriarchate over all English Orthodox Jews. The principal synagogue of this party (to which the Rothschild family hereditarily belongs, also the Cohens, Sir G. Jessel, etc.) is in Great Portland Street. The Eglise mère is in the City, and there are many other synagogues belonging to it scattered over London and England. The Portuguese branch of the Orthodox party (the most rigidly Orthodox of all), to which Sir Moses Montefiore belonged, has its chief synagogue in Bevis Marks. The late distinguished Rabbi Artom, brother of Cavour’s private secretary, was minister of this synagogue.
[15]. The Reformed Jews, among whom Sir Julian Goldsmid and Mr. F. D. Mocatta hold distinguished places, have only one synagogue in London, that in Berkeley Street. The minister of this wealthy and important congregation is the Rev. D. Marks. A special liturgy, differing chiefly from the Orthodox by omissions of Talmudic passages, is in use in this synagogue.