Professor Morse was freely ridiculed by the clergy for his attempt to construct a telegraph.
Roger Bacon, who invented spectacles and improved the telescope, was accused of having “sold himself to the devil.”
It is scarcely necessary to recall the persecutions of Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo on account of their discoveries in astronomy.
At Eaton, in Shelly’s time, “Chemistry was a forbidden thing.”
We read in the life of Locke that “there was a meeting of the heads of the houses of Oxford, where it was proposed to censure and discourage the reading of this essay (On the Human Understanding) and after various debates, it was concluded that without any public censure each head of a house should endeavor to prevent its being read in his own college.” (Spencer’s “Social Statics,” p. 375.)
“With respect to the last, the grandest of all human undertakings (that is the circumnavigation of the earth) it is to be remembered that Catholicism had irrevocably committed itself to the dogma of a flat earth, with the sky as a floor of heaven, and hell in the under world.” (Draper’s “Conflict,” p. 294.)
The clergy for years have ridiculed Darwinism, and scouted the philosophy of evolution, even after the best minds of Europe had accepted it. But after all their ridicule of Darwinism, when Darwin had passed away the great heart of England did not fail to show the esteem in which the people at large held him, but lovingly laid his remains to rest in Westminster abbey with the dust of her noblest dead.
It is in the very nature of Christianity to persecute. It cannot live on terms of equality with anything on earth. It must rule. It must be supreme, and all institutions and all individuals must obey its mandates. It has in all of its vocabulary no such word as liberty. Every knee must bow to it, every tongue confess its authority, and every pocket—pay it tithes. And so gigantic has been its power that obedience in every age has been almost universal. Millions have professed to obey the despot who have had no idea of what they were professing, and hence had not so much even an a dream of liberty. Poor man has been trampled in the dust, and sometimes used as food for cannon, to satisfy the ambition of pope or king, and when not serviceable in that way, he was forced to worship God and serve the priests.
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.” ([Rom. 13 : 1].) That is, the higher powers are the priests. The commandments of these higher powers are expressed in such words as “submit,” “obey,” “serve,” “pay tithes,” “believe,”—and to heed them is to lose the higher opportunities of manhood.