In its earlier abridged form this address was given as a Phi Beta Kappa oration at Brown University, and, as a lecture, at New York, Boston, New Haven, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere. In that form, substantially, it was published in The Popular Science Monthly . I have now given it careful revision, correcting some errors, and extending it largely by presenting new facts and developing various points of interest in the general discussion. Among the subjects added or rewrought are: in Astronomy, the st

The first typical battle-field to which I would refer is that of Geography—the simplest elementary doctrine of the earth's shape and surface. Among the legacies of thought left by the ancient world to the modern, were certain ideas of the rotundity of the earth. These ideas were vague; they were mixed with absurdities; but they were germ ideas , and, after the barbarian storm which ushered in the modern world had begun to clear away, these germ ideas began to bud and bloom in the minds of a few

The next great battle was fought on a question relating to the position of the earth among the heavenly bodies . On one side, the great body of conscientious religious men planted themselves firmly on the geocentric doctrine—the doctrine that the earth is the centre, and that the sun and planets revolve about it. The doctrine was old, and of the highest respectability. [18] The very name, Ptolemaic theory, carried weight. It had been elaborated until it accounted well for the phenomena. Exact te

The great series of battles to which I next turn with you were fought on those fields occupied by such sciences as Chemistry and Natural Philosophy. Even before these sciences were out of their childhood, while yet they were tottering mainly toward childish objects and by childish steps, the champions of that same old mistaken conception of rigid Scriptural interpretation began the war. The catalogue of chemists and physicists persecuted or thwarted would fill volumes. The first entrance of thes

I pass, now, to fields of more immediate importance to us—to anatomy and medicine. It might be supposed that the votaries of sciences like these would be suffered to escape attack; unfortunately, they have had to stand in the thickest of the battle. The Church, even in its earliest centuries, seems to have developed a distrust of them. Tertullian, in his "Treatise upon the Soul," stigmatizes the surgeon Herophilus as a "butcher," and evidently on account of his skill in his profession rather tha

I now ask you to look at another part of the great warfare, and I select it because it shows more clearly than any other how Protestant nations, and in our own time, have suffered themselves to be led into the same errors that have wrought injury to religion and science in other times. We will look very briefly at the battle-fields of Geology. From the first lispings of this science there was war. The prevailing doctrine of the Church was, that "in the beginning God made the heavens and the eart

From the many questions on which the supporters of right reason in Political and Social Science have only conquered conscientious opposition after centuries of war, I select the taking of interest on loans; in hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the Bible as a scientific text-book been more prolonged or injurious. [132] Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be that it has been believed in the Church "always, everywhere, and by all," then on no point may a Christia

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 w

We might go over the battle-fields of Ethnology and note how, a few years since, an honored American investigator, proposing in a learned society the discussion of the question between the origin of the human race from a single pair and from many pairs, was called to order and silenced as atheistic, by a Protestant divine whose memory is justly dear to thousands of us. [149] Interesting would it be to look over the field of Meteorology—beginning with the conception, supposed to be scriptural, of

But an outline of this kind would be too meagre without some sketch of the warfare on instruction in science. Not without profit would it be to note more at length how instruction in the Copernican theory was kept out of the Church universities in every great Catholic country of Europe; how they concealed the discovery of the spots on the sun; how many of them excluded the Newtonian demonstrations; how, down to the present time, the two great universities of Protestant England and nearly all her

You have now gone over the greater struggles in the long war between Ecclesiasticism and Science, and have glanced at the lesser fields. You have seen the conflicts in Physical Geography, as to the form of the earth; in Astronomy, as to the place of the earth in the universe, and the evolution of stellar systems in accordance with law; in Chemistry and Physics; in Anatomy and Medicine; in Geology; in Meteorology; in Cartography; in the Industrial and Agricultural Sciences; in Political Economy a