there is no necessity of even the shadow of an attempt to reconcile any differences which, by a stretch of fancy, might be conceived to exist between two sciences that travel along the same plane. All along, since this controversy was begun, it has been understood that the sole possible cause of conflict between science and religion arose out of the fact that they claimed each for itself more solid ground on which to stand. Reason and revelation were always supposed to be the party words of both, and every collision between them so far has resulted from the apparent irreconcilableness of these two. Mr. Bixby, in endeavoring to shift the ground of argument, should have confined himself to just that effort, and omitted those portions of his work tending to disprove all antagonism between science and religion, since, in the estimation of most men, a religion which asserts no claim to the supernatural is no religion at all. His attempted abatement of the claims of science, though well presented and sustained, works not an iota for Mr. Bixby’s point; for in all he says he is arguing for supernatural religion, which he virtually rejects, against the untenable assumptions of science.
As if in more strenuous advocacy of this idea, he elsewhere adds: “It [religion] is not all falsehood and masquerade; nevertheless, there is much popularly set down as religion which is no more religion than it is science. Now it has been bound up with one system, now with another. When Christianity first raised its head, it was told that polytheism alone was religion.” Continuing in this strain, he condemns every system of religion which stands opposed to another, and infers from the fact of
such opposition the necessary falsity of them all. He even goes to the extent of affirming that the doctrines of the Catholic Church changed age by age, according to the tone of the prevailing philosophy. He says:
“In Augustine’s day Christianity was made inseparable from the doctrines of predestination and fatalism. In Abelard’s time it was bound up with the metaphysics of realism; in Roger Bacon’s time, with the philosophy of Aristotle; in the days of Vesalius, with the medical treatises of Galen; in the lifetime of Galileo, with the astronomy of Ptolemy. To-day it is the orthodoxy of the Council of Trent or the Westminster Catechism that is cemented to religion, and any attack on the one is assumed to be undermining the very foundations of faith and morals.”
This passage is recklessly false. Any one acquainted with church history, with the rise and progress of Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, understands perfectly that in St. Augustine’s time no more stringent or rigorous views concerning original sin and predestination were held than tradition and the Scriptures sanctioned and ratified. And the patient reader of the history of philosophy will also condemn the assertion that the church proper had anything to do with the long-drawn disputes between the Nominalists and the Realists. The church left those wordy disputants severely alone, though the controversy was revived by the school of the Neo-Platonists for the very purpose of embroiling the church in the quarrel. We say the controversy was revived; for in reality the dispute is as old as Plato and Aristotle.
Still more absurd is what Mr. Bixby says with reference to Vesalius and Galen. Not a single authoritative passage from father, council, or historian can be adduced
to prove that the church ever committed herself to the adoption of any views concerning the structure, functions, and disorders of the human body. Indeed, Vesalius, who led the way in the great revolution which medical science underwent from the errors of Galen, was a pious Catholic, and the popular painting of the first dissection of modern times represents him with eyes piously upturned to the crucifix before entering on one of the most important steps of modern scientific inquiry in the teeth of wide-spread and violent prejudice—viz., the first dissection of the human cadaver that has led to any valuable results.
But in order to be thoroughly careful that he should allow no element of what is entitled positive religion to enter into the conception of his emotional nonentity, he discards all the known and accepted grounds of religious evidence. He says there can be no infallible authority in religious matters, since the only one which fostered the pretence has been repeatedly detected in error. His words are:
“In its unflattering mirror the oracle of Rome is exhibited as convicted of error in scientific matters again and again; compelled to retreat from position to position; forced to correct and recorrect its interpretations. It is shown vacillating to and fro in regard to the most important ecclesiastical questions, possessed of no clear or well-defined principles concerning many essential theological issues, etc., etc.”
All this rodomontade is in the nature of a negative assertion, inasmuch as it would require a full review of the history of the church to refute it. It is the author’s favorite style of logic, however, and may go for what it is worth. He next rejects the authority of the Bible on the most frivolous grounds, and coming