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                         CHAPTER XXVIII

          The Truth About Galileo and Medieval Science

     Science and Christianity -- Roger Bacon and His Age --
      Copernicus and Galileo -- The Reformation and Science

                    SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY

     SCIENCE is simply the Latin word for knowledge. A good deal of
ingenuity has been expended in making definitions of science which
represent it as knowledge acquired by special methods. It is not.
Science is just a knowledge of things that really exist; and, since
there can be no knowledge of things which do not exist, science is
just knowledge. Every other branch of knowledge or supposed
knowledge now recognizes this by anxiously claiming that it is "a
science."

     Theology is, for all its industry, not a science. There is no
theology, but there are fifty theologies. They are so many groups
of entirely contradictory speculations as to the meaning of words
very doubtfully attributed to men of the past who may never have
existed: and the words refer to what no one can prove to be
realities. There is no science of God, because God is a name for
fifty different and contradictory conceptions. Of any ten masters
of the art of thinking, in science or in philosophy, at least five
say that the existence of any God is unproven, and the other five
flatly contradict each other about the nature of the being they
claim to exist.

     There is no science of the soul, for since psychology (the
"science of the soul") began to acquire knowledge in the only way
which leads to agreed and verifiable results -- by direct
observation of realities or by strictly logical inferences from
observed realities -- it has abandoned the idea of a soul. It is
now the knowledge of mental acts or states or behavior. Philosophy
is not a science, but a contradictory series of collections of
contradictory speculations which cannot be called knowledge.
History is now, and claims to be, a science. It is knowledge of
past events acquired by inference from observed phenomena: written
statements and ancient remains. "Exact science" is an absurdity.
There is no inexact science or inexact knowledge.

     So stupendous a mass of real knowledge has been acquired
during the last hundred years by what was called the scientific
method, and so much that was called knowledge has been by the same
method discredited, that the word "scientific" is now as eagerly
claimed as was once "royal" or "religious." Charlatans call their
frauds Christian Science or Psychic Science. Biblical critics claim
to have a science. Businessmen, and even politicians and gamblers,
claim to be scientific. Literary and artistic critics say that they
are scientific.

     The reasons for the popularity of the word are well known.
First, somehow the use of what was called the scientific method led
to the attainment of an immense volume of knowledge on which all
trained thinkers could agree. They had never agreed before, in
theology or philosophy, except in so far as authority compelled
them. Secondly, this new knowledge at once flowered in myriads of
inventions which made the world immeasurably better to live in than

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it had ever been before. As we have amply seen, religion had given
men neither the solid truth nor the moral power it pretended to
give. Science at once gave men an immense mass of solid undisputed
truths and a power which is rapidly transforming the face of the
earth and will in time transform man himself.

     So the world ignores the petty groups of mystics and anti-
vivisectionists who sneer at science, and the philosophers and
theologians who claim to be superior to it. Science is knowledge.
The mind of man has almost suddenly become a mighty instrument for
acquiring knowledge. Our much-libeled generation, which some myopic
or fantastic writers represent as the ragged remains of a once fine
race, shivering round the dying fires of civilization, has
knowledge and power inconceivably greater than any generation ever
had before. The past has bequeathed us only works of art, which we
treasure, works of philosophy, which we admire at a distance, and
works of theology, which we ignore.

     It was inevitable that this new or real knowledge should begin
with what is called material nature: stars, animals, plants, rocks,
and so on. The eye, which (aided or unaided) is the chief implement
of knowledge, looks outward, not inward. The mind had to gain
practice and confidence in the easiest things first. It began with
astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, botany, and zoology. This
led people to say that science dealt with material things and left
"spiritual things" to philosophy and religion. Today science is
knowledge, and "spiritual things" are not embraced in a "science"
only because no one can prove that they exist. Science is
knowledge, and knowledge is power, and the salvation of the race
from its remaining miseries and stupidities depends upon it.
Science is the true Messiah, the only Redeemer, the Light and Hope
of the World.

     Hence the question of the relation of Christianity to the
development of science is of an importance that cannot be
exaggerated. The claim is still eloquently made in every pulpit,
and is hastily admitted at times by people who ought to know
better, that Christianity promoted civilization. If by Christianity
we mean the supposed teaching of Christ, it has no good influence
on civilization beyond urging men to be just and temperate and
kindly -- which every creed and moralist superfluously does, for
life itself teaches the lesson every day -- and it has, or would
have if even Christians accepted it, a profoundly evil influence by
its disdain of visible human things and the mirage of an eternal
world which it puts in the heavens. If we mean the structure of
doctrine weirdly built upon the words of Christ, it has no relation
to civilization except to distract attention from the proper work
of life and inspire fierce sectarian hatred. If we mean the
Churches ... Well, here we do and must mean the Churches, and,
since the Protestant Church only begins at the very end of the
Middle Ages, we mean mainly the Catholic Church; but Protestantism
was at first equally guilty.

     Let us sift the relevant from the irrelevant facts. The day
has gone by in which it was possible to despise science. That
pastime is now left to very imperfectly educated Fundamentalist
preachers and politicians, addressing people who are, so to say,


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away from the irrigation channels of modern culture. Wherever there
are good libraries, and people are free to consult them, the power
and value of science are admitted. The apologist, who is the finest
contortionist in the world, turned half about and claimed that the
Church never had impeded the development of science. He has now
turned full face and claims that the Church promoted science.

     Catholic readers of writers like Father Zahm, etc., at least
those Catholic readers who humbly bow to the Church's command that
they must not read any criticism of its writers, really believe
that these "professors" have proved that the Church promoted
science. We shall examine these fraudulent works presently. Here I
desire only to state principles.

     What do we mean by the Church? The Popes? The whole hierarchy?
Or the hierarchy and laity together? It will be found that these
writers make great profit by juggling with these different
conceptions. The Catholic Church in the third sense was practically
the whole of Europe for a thousand years, and it has meant about
one-half of the civilized world since then. Any person, therefore,
who professes a naive pride when be is told that lots of scientific
men have been Catholics, is behaving foolishly. The serious
questions are: whether the teaching of Christ and the official
action of the Church are responsible, and to what extent, for the
suspension of the development of science in the world for a
thousand years; whether the revival of science in the thirteenth
century (in Roger Bacon and his contemporaries) was not a pagan
intrusion in Christendom, and was not stifled by the Church;
whether it is true that the Church seriously hampered the two
sciences, astronomy and medicine, which tried to advance in the
later Middle Ages; and whether the beginning of the modern progress
of science got any help or hindrance from the Churches. Also, since
there were bad Popes and good Popes, worldly priests and really
religious priests, it is material to notice whether any Popes and
priests who are favorably mentioned belonged to the first or second
class. If they belonged to the first, the credit cannot be claimed
for their religion, but must be accorded to their sinful humanity.

     The outstanding and ghastly feature of that very long period
is that there was not only not the least development of science,
but what science had been previously acquired by the race was
almost entirely lost to Christendom. The growth of science is
necessarily very slow until it reaches a certain stage. It reached
that stage, or was approaching it, amongst the ancient Greeks.
Babylonia and Egypt had occupied what we might call the incubating
period. Practical needs had driven them to make a beginning of
science -- in agriculture, irrigation, mechanics, decimal system,
etc. -- and speculative interest had been kindled in a fair study
of astronomy and a lot of conjectures about the origin of things.

     It was, however, rather a poor crop which the older
civilizations handed on to the Greeks. The earliest Greeks to be
civilized were those who crossed the sea from Greece to Asia Minor,
where they met the Persians, and they at once began to cultivate a
very real interest in science. The Greek mind was young and
vigorous, and it mainly turned to speculations on the meaning of
nature. Evolution at once occurred to it, and matter was declared


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to consist of atoms. The main thing was, however, that these Greeks
insisted on the careful observation of nature itself; and they thus
created the scientific spirit: or rather, enlarged it, for the
Babylonian priests, studying the heavens unhampered by dogmas, were
real scientists.

     Greece might have inaugurated the kingdom of science on the
earth but for the religion of the mass of the people and the
"spirituality" of its philosophers. Scholars of the scientific type
were driven from Athens by the mob. Philosophers like Socrates and
Plato disdained and discouraged scientific investigation of nature.
Religion always tends that way. The affairs of the "spirit" are so
important.

     Yet, as any modern manual of the history of science will tell
you, the Greeks, nevertheless, made a famous beginning. Aristotle's
"Physics" and other works contain a mass of information (amongst
much nonsense) in astronomy, zoology, embryology, etc. The science
of medicine was very greatly advanced by men like Galen and
Hippocrates. The electric quality of amber (electron) and the
magnetic quality of certain irons were perceived, and this might in
time have led to a great development. The central position of the
sun, and the approximate sizes and distances of sun and moon, were
known. In Alexandria, where the last phase of Greek science, and
the most industrious and promising of all, occurred, mathematics
and mechanics, the invaluable instruments of science, were
wonderfully developed. All this was known to, but not further
developed by, the Romans, whose empire-work and practical work for
the improvement of civilization absorbed them.

     Five hundred years after the Emperor Constantine made the
fatal mistake of adopting Christianity, instead of Stoicism or
Epicureanism (as Roman gentlemen did), nearly the whole of this
knowledge had perished. Yes, I know, you have been reading the
glowing words of some modern apologist about the marvelous works of
Marticinus Capella, about Cassiodorus and the busy monks, about the
encyclopedic lore of Isidore of Seville, and Rhabanus Maurus, and
Vincent of Beauvais. It is a pity that some pious Catholic does not
translate one of them. Selections from their pages would make
excellent humorous readings. The most "scientific" and the latest
of them, Vincent of Beauvais, justified the long ages ascribed to
the patriarchs in the Old Testament on the ground that those
ancient sages were familiar with "the philosopher's stone." In
short, all the most puerile superstitions that were still current
in rural districts a hundred years ago were the wisdom of these
men. Not one in a thousand in Europe could read, and of the few who
could read only a small minority cared about the weird mixture of
adulterated Greek ideas and fantastic statements that were found in
these works.

     The reader who wishes to use me simply as a guide and to do
the thinking for himself -- and I hope that means the great
majority of my readers who have access to a good library -- will
easily verify this first statement, that science perished in Europe
from the fourth to the twelfth century (with an exception which we
examine presently), by glancing at any modern history of science.
It will have interesting and promising chapters on what the Greeks


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did, especially in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics; then a
short paragraph on the scientific sterility and utter ignorance
that followed the enforcement of Christianity; then a description
of how the Mohammedans taught Christendom science, but the Church
hampered its development.

     For those who may not easily have access to a history of
science I will briefly quote from a recent series in my library.
Dr. Hillier in his "Medical and Surgical Science" speaks of the
"somber picture" and "partial paralysis of intelligence" to the end
of the fourteenth century; yet medicine was the least neglected of
the sciences in that time. Professor Forbes, an orthodox Christian,
finds in his "History of Astronomy" that from the time when the
Christians put an end to the pagan schools of Alexandria "all
interest in astronomy seemed to sink to a low ebb," and "the Arabs
became the leaders of science and philosophy"; he can find no
Christian to mention until the fifteenth century. Sir Edward Thorpe
in his "History of Chemistry" has a complete blank between the
Greeks and the Arabs, and shows that the Christian beginning in the
thirteenth century was due to the Arabs. Professor Woodward in his
"History of Geology" leaves the Christian period a complete blank,
except for the Arabs and Persians, down to the fifteenth century.
Professor Miall in his "History of Biology" disdainfully says that
there was "a temporary extinction of civilization," and the only
natural history read (by the one in a thousand who could read) was
in manuals which told "how the crocodile weeps when it has eaten a
man," and so on -- stories taken from the learned encyclopedias I
have mentioned. Every history of every branch of science will tell
you the same thing.

     This temporary extinction of civilization we have already
studied, and the discussion of the causes of it which I give in
other chapters applies particularly to science. It is almost
scandalous to find our historians shirking half, or more than half,
the explanation, Christianity, and allowing the whole burden to
fall upon "the barbarians." The barbarians did not burn the works
of the pagans, as Christians did. The barbarians did not overrun
Greek Christendom, yet not one single Greek Christian figures in
the annals of science. The barbarians, as I have shown by several
historical instances or parallels, could be civilized in a century
by any real civilizing force.

     Christian religion, precisely in its pure and strict form, was
responsible. Christ and Paul had not the slenderest acquaintance
with Greek culture, and were supremely indifferent to the issues it
raised. The Fathers of the Church repeatedly expressed their
indifference to those issues. The most learned and influential of
them, Augustine, went out of his way to express his disdain of
astronomical research. Gregory the Great sternly forbade all
secular culture, and is said to have burned the libraries that
still lingered in Rome. The advent of the barbarians alone would
not mean more than a century or two of suspension of culture. It
was the union of barbarism and the intense other-worldliness of the
new religion that caused the suspension to last nearly a thousand
years.




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                     ROGER BACON AND HIS AGE

     Apologists who fear that the modern reader is not quite so
docile as his fathers were, who dread these damnable public
libraries and low-priced books of our materialistic age, try to
relieve this stark ignorance of the eight or nine centuries after
the triumph of the cross. There was, says Father Zahm, an Egyptian
monk of the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who was a marvel
of geographical knowledge. He was. If you want a good laugh at any
time, read his description of the earth and its inhabitants. There
were Bede and Isidore of Seville and other learned men: but I have
already recommended these to any reader who likes a smile.

     There was a Bishop Virgilius of Salzburg, in the eighth
century, who, contrary to general belief, held that there were
people at the antipodes; and he remained a bishop and was much
honored by the Popes. Yes -- when he had recanted, as he was
compelled to do. In any case, this was not science, not an
ascertained fact. Virgilius contributed nothing to science.

     Then there was actually a Pope, Gerbert, or Silvester II, who
is named in every manual of science as one of the great pioneers in
physics. What do I mean by talking of a blank from the fourth to
the thirteenth century when precisely the most learned physicist of
the time was a Pope? It sounds very naughty or very ignorant, if
all that you know about Gerbert has been learned from religious
writers. He was, for his time, a remarkably good mathematician and
physicist. But, pray read a little about his life. He was educated
in Spain, and he knew Greek, if not Arabic; and, while the favor of
worldly princes got promotion for him, the clergy gave him, even as
Pope, such a time that be speedily sought relief in heaven. In
plain English, poor Gerbert tried to get his fellow-Christians to
adopt a little of the learning of the Mohammedans, and they hounded
him off the planet, buried his learning with his bones, and
purified Rome with holy water and curses when the "magician" had
gone to hell.

     Here, in fact, we insert at once one of those undisputed
historical facts which apologists find it prudent to suppress.
Recent students of Gerbert say that his works do not show traces of
Arabic, but rather of Greek, borrowing. That matters little. The
Saracens of southern Italy, who had the same Arabian scientific
culture as the Moors of Spain, were translated into Greek. No one
questions that Gerbert learned his mathematical and physical
knowledge from the Mohammedans; and to the same source every single
scholar now turns for the explanation of the scientific learning of
Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, and every other early scholar or
writer who shows some knowledge of science.

     "Catholic Science and Catholic Scientists," by Father Zahm,
professor of physics at the "University of Notre Dame," is, I
understand, the gem of American apologetic work in this connection.

     Zahm's work makes one wonder what standard (if any) of
scholarship or sincerity is applied to professors at this doubtless
distinguished University. Most of the book is argument, not fact,
and one is not inclined to linger over it when one reads that there
are three kinds of evolution -- atheistic, agnostic, and theistic

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-- and that the first class embraces only three men (who were not
atheists but agnostics) and the third class includes Owen (who was
Huxley's worst opponent) and Sir John Herschel. The American reader
will be even more astonished to learn that eccentric old Orestes A.
Brownson was "the first scholar of the age" and "one of the
greatest philosophers that our age or any age had produced" -- poor
Plato! -- and that the French priest Moigno was "the Albertus
Magnus of the nineteenth century."

     Other pleasantries of the book are the statement that
gunpowder was invented by a German monk, and the mariner's compass
by another Christian; both inventions, of course, being due to the
Arabs. We read of Galileo as the bosom friend and spoiled darling
of the clergy of Rome, but not a word about his charming relations
with the Inquisition. We are told that it is wrong to credit Harvey
with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and that
"botany, zoology, geology, and mineralogy seem always to have
exerted a peculiar fascination over the minds of the children of
Holy Church"; in proof of which bewildering statement we are
referred to St. Francis of Assisi, who probably could not have
distinguished a cock from a hen. The first botanical garden is put
at Pisa in 1543 -- several centuries after the Moors had had far
finer botanical gardens; the first museums and libraries are put in
Italy -- whereas the Moors had had in the Dark Ages libraries ten
times as large as the finest in Italy during the Renaissance; the
science of arithmetic "owes its origin in Europe to the learned
Gerbert," who merely borrowed it; and, with a sublime effrontery or
incomprehensible ignorance, even chemistry and alchemy are ascribed
to Christian originators.

     Some may wonder why I should trouble to consider a book of
this kind, and they will be astonished to learn that this work of
Father Zahm is regarded by American Catholics as one of their
finest apologies. You wish to know what the other side says, to
know why millions of Catholics seem quite undisturbed by the
terrible record of their Church? The answer is found in a number of
trashy works of which this is held to be the "most learned."

     The radical and gravest fault of the book is that it conceals
from the reader entirely the brilliant science of the Moors and
Saracens, and the fact that all Christian science in the early
Middle Ages was borrowed from them. To talk of the science of
Gerbert and Roger Bacon, Schwarz and Albert the Great, and say not
a word about their Moorish teachers -- to boast of all the science
that there was in Christendom and give the reader the impression
that it originated there, and that the Church actually encouraged
science is as gross a deception of one's readers as can be
imagined. I do not say deliberate deception. A man may innocently
deceive from ignorance, and, apparently, the standard of culture of
professors in the "University of Notre Dame" is not exacting. But
the Catholic reader ought to know what it is that is purveyed to
him under shelter of the Church's stern prohibition to read
critical books like this. Zahm either knew or did not know that all
the science he finds in Christendom for a thousand years after
Europe became Christian was Mohammedan science, confined to a very
few men, and stifled by the Church.



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     I have described the brilliant civilization of the Moors and
devoted a section to their revival and development of Greek
science. Medicine, astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics were
especially cultivated; optics (or physics generally) and botany
received a good deal of attention; and some of the Khalifs and
scholars were zealous for botany. Distinguished men of science were
the most honored in the kingdom, a vast literature circulated,
libraries ran up to collections of five hundred thousand books, and
there was a zeal for learning in every class of society.

     This Moorish civilization was only the western wing of a great
Mohammedan, or Arab-Persian, civilization. A smaller, but hardly
less brilliant, group of "Saracens" flourished in southern Italy.
In the motherland (Arabia, Persia, and Egypt) there was just the
same zeal for science as for letters, and most valuable discoveries
were made. Within two centuries a splendid civilization had been
evolved by the grafting of semi-barbaric tribes on an old and
decaying culture -- while you are asked to believe that "the great
civilizing force" of Christianity could not do this in less than a
thousand years in Europe -- and its most splendid hour was just the
darkest hour of Christendom, the ninth and tenth centuries.
Mohammed came six hundred years after Christ, yet the Mohammedan
world was, in every sense of the word (art, letters, science,
philosophy, general education, humanity, philanthropy, prosperity,
health, and efficiency), more highly civilized by the tenth century
than Europe would be at the beginning of the nineteenth. I do not
think that a single historian will question that comparison.

     This culture of the Moors (or Arabs generally) was conveyed
over Europe by Jewish merchants and scholars and by Christians who
went to study in Spain. There was a corresponding stream of culture
from the Saracen kingdom, as long as it lasted, in southern Italy.
The only question about Gerbert's lore is whether be acquired more
from his early years in Spain or his later years in Italy. Dante is
much more interesting as a witness to a scholarly and skeptical
group in Florence than to Christian faith. I have before me my
well-fingered copy of Carlyle's "Dante," in English and Italian,
and the notes show what the poet owes to pagan and Mohammedan
sources. The Emperor Frederick II encouraged with all his power the
importation of Saracen science into Italy.

     The Jews were the chief intermediaries, and the earliest
medical schools, which Zahm claims for Christianity, were due to
them. But the tolerant Moors of Spain raised no barriers against
Christian visitors, and these learned Arabic and translated
hundreds of Moorish works into Latin.

     This phase of the evolution of European culture has,
fortunately, received the attention of an able American scholar in
the last few years. In his "Studies in the History of Medieval
Science" (1924) Professor C.H. Haskins, of Harvard, has very
thoroughly elaborated a theme on which I lectured at Columbia
University ten years ago. With remarkable industry of research he
has traced the movements and translations from the Arabic of a
number of Christian scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. He shows us how, whereas Europe had hitherto had only



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the wretched compilations of ancient lore and Christian fantasy to
which I have already referred, large numbers of scientific and
philosophical treatises were now introduced into it by these pupils
of the Moors.

     No one but a scholar knows these men today. Their names and
labors are found in no encyclopedia. Hence writers of fragmentary
knowledge like Zahm see only the figures of Roger Bacon and Albert
the Great rising on the horizon of the thirteenth century and seem
to be strangely ignorant of the meaning of their rise. They have
never even heard of Adelard of Bath, or the early part of the
thirteenth century, who absorbed and disseminated in England the
whole scientific lore of the Arabs; was, in fact, a Roger Bacon
just before Bacon. They have never heard of Robert of Chester,
Roger of Hereford, Daniel of Morley, and other Englishmen who
brought to England, France, Germany what the Catholic admires as a
miracle in Roger Bacon and Albert the Great.

     They ignore, or are ignorant of all these things, and they
convey to their innocent readers impressive pictures of a monk in
his pious monastery and a bishop in his episcopal mansion, both
under the fostering care of Mother Church, suddenly, by Christian
genius, developing a, for the time, surprising command of physical
science: and they conveniently forget to tell the readers, or to
stimulate them to inquire, why Bacon and Albert had no successors,
and why their wonderful knowledge seemed to perish as miraculously
as it had appeared.

     But the historical facts are now so well known to properly
informed people that the writer of the article on Roger Bacon in
the "Catholic Encyclopedia" takes up a new attitude. "It would," he
says, "be difficult to find any other scholar who shows such a
profound knowledge of the Arabic philosophers as Bacon does." When
you know that these "Arabic philosophers" were masters of precisely
those branches of science on which Bacon writes -- chemistry,
optics, mechanics, and mathematics, as well as astronomy and
medicine -- the miracle disappears very abruptly. Bacon's chief
aim, this writer says, was "to make Christian philosophers
acquainted with the Arabic philosophers"; and the works, I may add,
were already translated from the Arabic for him. You rub your eyes
at this Catholic belittlement of the genius of Roger, until it
dawns upon you that the writer is going to have to confess that the
Church extinguished him and his science. Bacon was, he says, "not
always very correct in doctrine." What could you expect from a man
who turned from the lore of the Christians to the lore of the
Mohammedans? Well, the Church had to ...

     Even this writer does not truthfully tell the story of the
extinction of Bacon, but let us first be quite clear about his
position in the history of science.

     The meaning of Bacon is now well known. He found Oxford
already in possession of Moorish science, and he learned it. Being
an exceptionally intelligent man, he saw at once that it was far
superior to the verbiage of the Scholastic philosophers and
theologians, and, being a blunt, outspoken man, he started a
crusade against what was really Catholic learning, the teaching of


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the Schoolmen. He urged men to learn Arabic and Greek as well as
Latin. The Franciscan school at Oxford was at the time under the
influence of men like Grossetests and Adam Marsh, who also were
fond of the new learning; until Grosseteste was smothered with a
bishop's maitre and Adam relegated to obscurity. For a time Bacon
had considerable freedom, and be experimented, as the Moors did.

     What exactly he personally achieved, and to what extent, if
any, he surpassed his Moorish teachers, we cannot say. "Careful
research," says the "English Dictionary of National Biography," the
best authority, "has shown that very little can with accuracy be
ascribed to him." He did not discover gunpowder, any more than Dr.
Zahm's German monk Schwarz, for the Arabs had it long before. His
best work on perspective is very plainly an echo of Alhazen. There
is now no reason to suppose that he made a telescope. And so on.

     Yet Roger was a man of great scientific capabilities, and, if
the world had been free, he and Albert and a few others would
certainly have inaugurated a scientific age. As to Thomas Aquinas,
whom Catholic writers put amongst the "great scientists," the claim
is simply ludicrous. Sir T.C. Allbutt, a great admirer of the
Middle Ages, doubts whether Albert the Great was a genius, but he
refuses to admit that Aquinas was "a man of the highest
intellectual power and attainments." To mention him in connection
with science is, in any case, like mentioning Francis of Assisi in
connection with zoology.

     Albert the Great (1193-1280) was a noble (Count of Bollstadt)
who learned Arabian science in Italy and France, and some-how
became a Dominican monk. He was so great an admirer of Aristotle
(whom he knew through the Moors) that his critics called him "the
ape of Aristotle"; and he knew so little about Greek thought
generally that this "universal genius" of the age thought that
Plato was a Stoic! He was certainly a man of very great ability and
a master of most of the scientific lore of his time. But when you
ask how Albert combined Catholic piety with this, you are warned
even by so very pro-clerical a writer as the author of the articles
on Albert in the "Catholic Encyclopedia" that he was "prudent." I
will translate a sentence of Albert's which this writer prudently
leaves in the Latin: "I have set forth the sayings of the
Peripatetics [Aristotelians] as well as I could; but no one can
tell from my work what I myself think about natural philosophy." So
the noble Albert was never persecuted by the Church. It chose,
rather, the wiser alternative of taking him from the cloister where
he studied Aristotle and Averroes and giving him episcopal work
which kept him out of mischief. There had been ugly rumors of
"sorcery." In short, Albert's knowledge of science consisted of the
teaching of the Arabs and Moors, and the enthusiasm of Zahm and
other writers like him, who seem to be totally ignorant of this, is
very much misplaced.

     Roger Bacon and Albert, therefore, are precisely the best
evidence that the Church did not encourage, but did discourage,
science. Albert was snuffed out under the golden extinguisher of
ecclesiastical promotion. He left no successor to carry on the




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work, and monks were presently forbidden to dabble in science. But
Bacon was not prudent. He scorned the futile verbiage which the
academic clerics of the time called learning as much as he scorned
the monastic and clerical corruption.

     There is no serious dispute about what happened to Roger
Bacon. Zahm simply omits the facts altogether, and the "Catholic
Encyclopedia" omits the least pleasant of them. In 1257 Friar
Roger, then thirty-three years old and of great repute at Oxford,
was ordered by the higher authorities of his Franciscan Order (in
Rome) to leave England (where he had freedom to cultivate science)
and go to a monastery of his body in Paris. He remained there ten
years in "close confinement," as the "Dictionary of National
Biography" says. I am not particular whether you call this "prison"
or not; when the "Catholic Encyclopedia" says that his superiors
merely applied a general rule to him and "forbade him to publish
any work out of the Order without special permission," it is
untruthful. Roger was deprived of all books about science, all
instruments, and pen and parchment. The "Encyclopedia" itself has
to admit that a distinguished cardinal could not get into
communication with him for years and that, when this cardinal
became Pope and ordered Roger to write a book, the monk pleaded
that he was not allowed writing material, even for a Pope.

     The ten years of confinement and isolation, which kept one who
may have been a scientific genius away from the laboratory, are
uneasily evaded by the apologists who want us to see how the Church
encouraged science. But the next step suits them. Guy de Foulques,
Papal Legate and cardinal and in 1264 Pope Clement IV, clearly
patronized science and urged Bacon to write. It was for him, for
the ruling Pope, that the friar wrote his "Opus Majus" and other
works.

     It sounds very well, like the "triumph of Christianity" and
other matters, until you examine the details. Clement was no
pietist of the type of Innocent III. We know little about him
personally, but we do know that within thirty years of his death
the Roman See was at the depth of one of its periodical
degradations. Many a cardinal of that time was willing to learn
something about the "magic" with which Bacon was credited. However,
the Pope died before the books reached him, and it is a mere
conjecture that it was he who got for the friar permission to
return to England. Ten years of freedom and research followed, then
the friar was again ordered to Paris and "imprisoned" (the
"Catholic Encyclopedia" admits the word this time) for a further
number of years which cannot accurately be determined. Most writers
say fourteen.

     Such was the Church's encouragement of science in the persons
of its only great representatives in the glorious thirteenth
century. Friar Bacon was harshly persecuted for about twenty years
by the proper Church authorities over him, and Friar Albert the
Prudent was side-tracked into a bishopric. The learning of both was
Mohammedan in origin, and it exposed both of them to much obloquy
and suspicion of heresy. And this undisputed account of the
Church's patronage of science must be completed by a glance at the
only two men who can be said to have followed in their footsteps in
the attempt to popularize Arab science.

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     Albert died in 1280, Roger in 1294. By that time Cecco
d'Ascoli, a professor at Bologna University, had taken up the
mission, and was imploring men to turn from the sawdust of
Scholasticism to the study of nature. On a faked charge he was
handed over to the Inquisition and, in 1327, burned alive. Hardly
less encyclopedic in his knowledge of and zeal for science was
Peter of Abano, one of the most generous and most skillful
physicians of the time. He was, just like Albert and Roger, a
master of Arab science, and eager to see Christendom adopt and
develop it. He also was, on a faked charge, denounced to the
Inquisition and condemned; and, when the Inquisitors heard that he
had meantime died and was buried, they ordered that his body should
be dug up and burned. Nicholas of Cusa came a century and a half
later, and will be considered presently.

     Again there is no dispute about the fact; and I need not add
that not a word is said about them by those Catholic writers who
are informing America how the real history of medieval science has
been rescued from naughty Rationalist libels. The truth about this
first phase of European science will now be quite clear to the
reader; and I repeat that there is no dispute about it. It is only
by omitting uncontroverted facts and by throwing together the names
of men who lived centuries apart that a false idea is conveyed.

     The science which appears in Grosseteste, Bacon and Albert in
the thirteenth century is Arabian or Moorish science. The brilliant
culture of the Moors had shamed Christendom at last, and a few men
had the courage to learn the lesson. But the Church effectually
stifled the movement, and men of the same type who appeared in the
following century were handed over to the Inquisition.

                     COPERNICUS AND GALILEO

     I am trying to let my readers know what these recent
apologists offer us in opposition to the traditional Rationalist
indictment. If it be true that the light which arose in the
thirteenth century was merely, as Sir T.C. Allbutt says, "a phantom
of a dawn," the world falling again rapidly in medieval darkness,
and that the Church was responsible for its failure, and not in the
least responsible for its origin, the sober case of humanity
against the Church is more serious than ever.

     Rationalist writers make mistakes in detail like all other
writers. What I am showing is that disputes about small details do
not matter. The broad historical truth is deadly. The science of
the thirteenth century was Arab science. Every historian of science
will tell you that. It was never encouraged by the Church, and
after a short time it was extinguished by the Church. In the
thirteenth century its chief representatives were imprisoned or
diverted. In the fourteenth century they were, dead or alive,
burned.

     Apart from the development of medical and surgical science,
the next branch of science that interests us from our present point
of view is astronomy. Bear these three points in mind when you
approach this question of astronomy and the Church: First, the
Alexandrian Greeks, working upon the material bequeathed by the


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Chaldeans and using mathematics, had made a very fair beginning of
the science. Secondly, it was a very innocent branch of science
until modern times (when it certainly makes for atheism), because
it dealt with material things. Thirdly, it was supposed in the
Middle Ages to be quite a valuable science because it was the basis
of astrology, and everybody who could afford it had his astrologer.

     Yet there is no dispute about the fact that from the fourth to
the thirteenth century Christendom had completely forgotten all
that the race had already learned about the stars. Men gazed at the
stars as sheep or cattle did. There was no curiosity. In the
eleventh and twelfth centuries the learning of the Moors, who were
very keen astronomers, began to circulate. Abelard gave the name
Astrolabe to his love-child by Heloise. The Church neither
encouraged nor discouraged, except in the very important sense that
it decidedly taught men that its own kind of learning was
infinitely superior. However, a man here and there got one of the
beautifully made instruments of the Moors and poked them at the
stars at night. Fat abbots and comfortable Popes and bishops, when
they did not happen to want horoscopes, merely thought them fools,
until at last the astronomers fell foul of the Bible.

     It is strange how apologists talk so much about Copernicus,
and so little about Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). He was a greater
scholar than Albert "the Great," and he realized the error of the
Ptolemaic system long before Copernicus did. He was a thinker; and
his thinking, as a priest, led him to see that the Papal power was
based upon the atrocious fraud of the Forged Decretals, that
General Councils were higher than Popes and must reform the Church,
and that the Christian philosophy of God and the Universe was
puerile. You never heard of this heretic? No, he swung around and
became a most zealous champion of the Papacy, a Papal Legate and a
cardinal. He no longer insisted on trifles like the position of the
sun; he reckoned that, while it was true that reason taught him
some very awkward things, "intuition" put a man right with the
Church; and he left it to a more courageous man, Giordano Bruno, to
go to the stake for his philosophy of God and the universe.

     So we pass on to the other Nicholas, Koppernigk or Copernicus
(1473-1543). You know his story, of course, This devout son of the
Church made himself immortal in science by discovering the real
nature of the solar system, yet remained an ecclesiastical
dignitary and actually dedicated to the Pope the book in which he
set forth his discovery. How dare any man say that the Church
impeded the advance of science?

     Well, let us go slowly -- and we need not be long about this
matter. I have mentioned a "History of Astronomy" by Professor
Forbes, a Christian teacher who somehow got his book published by
the Rationalist Press Association of England, and maintained in
circulation after I had pointed out its anti-Rationalistic errors.
I stress that the writer is an orthodox Christian, because the book
makes a special study of Copernicus and purports to correct
everybody else. In short, Forbes belittles Copernicus. His name, he
says, ought not to be immortalized in the phrase "Copernican
System." His book is a tissue of errors. In fact, according to



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Forbes, it is Rationalists who have manufactured the fame of
Copernicus, "to put the Church in the wrong"! The paths which
Copernicus gives to the planets and moons are hopelessly wrong.

     I recommend that to the apologists and writers on "great
Catholic scientists." Seriously, Copernicus discovered nothing. The
revival of Greek astronomy by the Moors had recalled the fact that
Pythagoras and others had, ages ago, held that the sun was the
center of the solar system. In Martianus Capella, Copernicus
further read that the Egyptians had insisted that Venus and Mercury
revolved around the sun. He spined, against the received opinion,
that these ideas were correct, just as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa
had done a few decades earlier. Copernicus first announced his
belief, but did not insist on it as a fact, in 1500, when he was
teaching in Rome. As the ruling Pope Alexander VI, the Holy Father
of six children, was then under the charm of the orbs of his pretty
mistress, Giulia Farnese, and most of the cardinals were wrapped up
in other ladies, the Church did not persecute Copernicus.

     The historic controversy is about his book, "De Orbium
Coelestium Revolutionibus" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Orbs"). Rather, there is no serious controversy about anything in
connection with Copernicus, but apologists wriggle in order to show
that the Church did not cramp, impede, or in any way injure
science. Here are the undisputed facts:

     Copernicus finished the writing of his book in 1530, and he
kept it in manuscript for twelve years. I have not yet encountered
the apologist who ventures to attribute this to modesty. Copernicus
was afraid to publish the book. One of his pupils told Pope Clement
VII about his system, and the Pope did not seem to be outraged. I
can believe it. Clement VII was a noble of the Medici family, of
liberal views about life. Still Copernicus dare not publish his
book in Rome or anywhere else. Friends got the manuscript from him,
and one of them at last hit upon the idea of saying in a preface
that the author did not insist that this theory was the truth. He
(Osiander) wrote this preface, to which Copernicus must have
consented, and gave the manuscript to the press, in Nuremberg.
Forbes is quite wrong in saying that Copernicus wrote the preface,
and so Catholic apologists also are quite wrong in saying that he
published his view "only as a hypothesis." These things were
settled long ago. The book appeared, dedicated to Pope Paul III, in
1543, and a copy was put into the hands of Copernicus as he was
dying. He died a few hours later.

     It will at once be seen that the attempt to exonerate the
Church is futile. Dread of the Church alone kept Copernicus for
thirteen years from pressing the truth upon the world. The
dedication to the Pope sounds quite nice and confiding until you
look up (no one does) who the Pope was. That is why I urge the
reader, when he hears a Pope or bishop praised in connection with
science, to look up his record. Paul III had been flagrantly
corrupt as a cardinal, and had attained that spiritual dignity only
because his younger sister was in the arms of Pope Alexander VI. He
had four children, and he was not in the least likely to lose a
night's sleep over the question whether the sun did or did not
stand still at the command of Joshua.


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     You do not read these little details in either academic or
apologetic works on these subjects, but I hope you see how much
they matter. When Copernicus' book reached the Vatican in 1543,
Rome was still, and had been for half a century, semi-pagan: much
more interested in Apollo and Aphrodite than in Moses and Joshua.
The Popes had their own astrologers.

     What, in any case, could the Church do? Copernicus was beyond
the reach of the Inquisition, and his book was artfully protected
by the preface in which Osiander said that it was merely a
suggestion, not a statement of fact. It was left to that intrepid
thinker, Giordano Bruno, to claim that the theory was a fact -- and
for this and other heresies Rome promptly butchered him (1600) --
and to the man who has next to occupy us, Galileo Galilei. And
remember that the ecclesiastical murder of Bruno was only a few
years old when Galileo took up the theory.

     There is no need here to go over the familiar ground. Galileo,
a great physicist as well as astronomer, perfected the telescope,
and soon found positive evidence that Copernicus was right.
Philosophers hurled Aristotle at him, it is true, but the truth is
only obscured by dragging in the prejudices of these gentlemen. The
question of the statements in the Old Testament which decidedly
make the sun go around the earth, was raised, and Galileo still
maintained his position and said that the texts could be explained.
The "hounds of the Lord," the Dominican friars, the most despicable
religious body in Europe, denounced him to the Roman Inquisition.
The Archbishop of Pisa was secretly instructed to get hold of
certain private letters of Galileo, which were said to compromise
him. Galileo, confident of his case, went voluntarily to Rome -- it
is a mistake to say that he was summoned by the Inquisition to Rome
in 1615 -- and seemed to be getting the better of his bitter
monkish and clerical enemies, when a grim summons from the
Inquisition reached him.

     So far there is no controversy; and there is a dispute only
about one point in what follows. Fortunately, the main point for us
is clear. It is not whether the polite Inquisitors supplied the
aged Galileo with Oxo and pneumatic cushions, or something of that
sort, at his second trial, or whether Galileo was dogmatic or
conceited or anything else. It is whether the Inquisition condemned
the belief that the earth revolves around the sun as "heresy." That
is the sole point. If they did, it is ludicrous to say that they
did not interfere with science; for "heresy" was a sure pass to
their dungeons and torture-chambers.

     There is, again, no dispute whatever about the fact that they
did. Two propositions of Galileo's were submitted to the experts:

          1. The sun is the center of the world, therefore,
     immovable from its place.

          2. The earth is not the center of the world, and is not
     immovable, but it moves, and with a diumal motion.





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The documents containing the verdict have been reproduced in the
original, and I have read the Latin text. White is quite correct in
his "Warfare" when he says that (quite apart from philosophical
censures) the first proposition was declared "formally heretical,
inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture
in many passages," and the second proposition was declared at least
erroneous in faith."

     Writers like Zahm neatly surmount the difficulty created by
this branding of a great astronomical truth as "formal heresy" by
omitting the words altogether! Others humorously point out that it
was not the Pope, or the Church, but merely the Roman Inquisition,
which condemned science. That is the thinnest of all subterfuges.
The members of the tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome acted solely
on the authority of the Popes, and they represented the Church in
the most official sense. At the second condemnation of Galileo the
Pope followed and directed every step with great zeal, if not
vindictiveness.

     The only serious dispute is whether in 1615 Galileo was
ordered under all conditions to refrain from teaching his heresy,
and promised. He was summoned before Cardinal Bellarmine who, in
the name of the Inquisition, laid some such command upon him and
dismissed him. But the report of the actual words of Bellarmine
was, with suspicious convenience, only found at the time of
Galileo's second trial in 1633, and weighty authorities regard it
as falsified. The best, indeed the only sober and substantial life
of Galileo at present available to American readers, is J.J.
Fahie's excellent "Galileo: His Life and Work" (1903). A
pretentious little book (a few reprinted articles from the
"Scientific American") by Dr. C.S. Holden ("Galileo," 1905) shows
a complete lack of sense of proportion; and many of its points were
undone when, two years later, the famous expert on Galileo, Antonio
Favaro, published for the first time the full documents about the
trial of 1633 ("Galileo e l' Inquisizione"). Forbes' "History of
Astronomy" has merely one ridiculous and totally inaccurate
paragraph on Galileo. He puts the murder of Bruno after the
condemnation of Galileo!

     It must remain an open question whether Galileo was absolutely
and under all conditions forbidden to discuss the theory further.
All Copernican books were, at the direction of the Pope, put on the
Index, on the ground that the main idea was " entirely contrary to
Holy Scripture." It confirms what I said about the Church and
Copernicus that the work of Copernicus himself was merely put on
the black list "until it is corrected"; and a few immaterial
alterations enabled it to pass the censor. The Church could not
condemn Copernicus, because the preface which was written in his
name declared that he did not hold the Pythagorean idea to be true;
so it is futile to boast about the Church's liberality in regard to
Copernicus.

     If it were of vital importance to know whether Galileo broke
faith with the Church, we should have to settle the difficult
question about the actual terms of the order given him by Cardinal
Bellarmine. Holden and others obscure the issue by talking a great
deal about Galileo's breach of faith, obstinacy, etc. But the


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really vital issue is plain. It is: Did the Church condemn as
heresy the statement that the earth revolves around the sun? There
is no dispute about that. It did.

     The controversy, of course continued. The orthodox were
perfectly free to gird at Galileo, and in time -- I do not care a
cent whether or not this was a violation of his promise, and I
rather hope that it was -- Galileo hit back. And he hit hard. In
his "Dialogues" (1632) he made these people who denied the
existence of sun-spots, and refused to look at them through the
telescope, squirm. "Now," said a liberal prelate at Rome, sadly,
"the Jesuits will get him." The Lord had new hounds, black instead
of white, the dark-loving sons of St, Agnathous instead of the
bloody-robed sons of St. Dominic.

     But let not the apologist escape by pleading that even Jesuits
and Inquisition together do not represent the Church. The documents
reproduced in Fable and every other fully informed writer show that
the new Pope, Urban VIII, truculently egged on the Inquisitors and
is as responsible as any of them. Gialileo was, beyond question,
very ill, but the Inquisition harshly replied that his subterfuge
would not be tolerated. Writers who talk about the "consideration"
with which Galileo was treated ought to read the letters sent him
from Rome (in Favaro's work). In the harshest possible language he
is told that a commissary is to be sent to see if he is not lying
about his health, and, if he is found fit to travel, he is to be
sent "in custody, bound, and in irons," to Rome. All the
"consideration" the Pope -- who was in the lead -- showed was that,
when the seventy-year-old scientist was found to be really very
ill, he was graciously permitted to travel in comfort. But heaven
and earth could not restrain the Pope's vindictiveness. Men said
that Galileo had caricatured him in the "Dialogues."

     Galileo set out for Rome in January, 1633. He was kept in
suspense and anxiety for several months. Reasonable prelates
strained every nerve to restrain the Pope from punishing (and
probably killing) the most learned man in Europe, and from
condemning what was now a palpable scientific truth. Kepler had
long before this formulated the laws of the solar system. But
Jesuits and Dominicans and Pope were determined to avenge their
wounded vanity -- or to vindicate the faith -- and in the early
summer Galileo had to move to the palace of the Inquisition.

     What follows is airily waved aside by the apologists with an
assurance that these wicked Rationalists of long ago have been
proven to be quite wrong about "dungeons" and "tortures," and that
we now know that Galileo was "treated with every consideration,"
and the Pope himself directed that he be lodged in the most
comfortable rooms available.

     Yes -- Urban VIII directed every step. It is true that Galileo
was at first housed in comfortable rooms; a wonderful concession to
a man of seventy, in very bad health, and faced with the most
appalling of trials. But let us be just to the Rationalists as well
as to Jesuits. As Fahie shows, and any man may verify in the
documents. We do not know where Galileo was from June 21st to June
24th. The evidence is consistent with the view that he was put in
the dungeons.

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     As to torture, the phrase used in the documents is ambiguous,
and might mean torture or the threat of torture; but it certainly
meant at least the latter. Galileo was, in the usual way,
threatened with torture, but his willingness to recant most
probably -- I should say certainly -- saved him from it. The aged
scientist was compelled to go on his knees and swear that he did
not believe that the earth moved around the sun. The formula given
by White in his "Warfare" (which is quite accurate about Galileo)
is a fair abridgment of the long confession dictated to Galileo:

          I, Galitei, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner
     on my knees and before you Eminences, having before my eyes
     the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands. ... I abjure,
     curse and detest the said errors and heresies of the movement
     of the earth and the stationary sun, etc.

I have compared this with the original and find that each of these
phrases is in it.

     The story that Galileo -- his surname is Galilei, but even the
Italian Galileists call him Galileo -- rose from his knees
muttering, "It moves for all that," has no authority and is
improbable in the last degree. But be knew that it moved, and there
is something nauseous in the way in which the Priests now try to
clear the Church by calling attention to the "cowardice" of
Galileo. As it was, although he recanted, he was condemned to
confinement for life, at first in a strange house and place. And
these things are sneered at by men who, for a comfortable living,
keep the truth in their hearts and lies on their lips.

     The "Catholic Encyclopedia" article is a summary of all the
glib sophistry ever written from the Catholic side. Galileo did not
prove his case, and Galileo was irritating, and Galileo did not
appreciate Kepler, and Galileo meddled with theology, and -- in
short, a group of theologians (not the Church, of course) committed
the error of condemning him personally (not his idea, of course) as
"vehemently suspected of heresy."

     I need answer only on two points. First, it is absolutely
notorious in the history of the case that the Pope directed every
step at the second trial. Napoleon's troops, luckily, stole the
Galileo documents from the Vatican Archives, and France restored
them only on condition that they be published; and, although Rome
at first published a fraudulent version of them, all have now seen
the light. That Pope Urban does not put his name to the decree of
the Inquisition is, from the Catholic or any other point of view,
either quite irrelevant, since be directed the whole proceedings
and the tribunal acted entirely in his name, or it is worse. The
Church condemned Galileo and the Copernican theory with the utmost
official solemnity, through the proper and authoritative organ for
that purpose. the Holy Office.

     And, secondly, the Church condemned, not merely the person of
Galileo, as these writers mendaciously say, but the truth that the
earth moves around the sun. The decree of the Inquisition repeats
and embodies the earlier condemnation of this truth as "formally
heretical" because it contradicts the Bible. It goes on to say that


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Galileo is "vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy,
that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false
and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the
center of the world." This means, not that the Inquisitors suspect
astronomical doctrine of heresy, but that they suspect Galileo of
holding, or having held, what they categorically call a "heresy."
The formal declaration is that it is "heresy" to hold that the
earth moves around the sun. The words " 'seems' to be contrary to
Scripture," which are inserted by the writer in the "Catholic
Encyclopedia," are an invention of his own. The Inquisition was
categorical.

     And any Catholic who suggests that the Pope, who directed
every step, has no responsibility for that decree, has his tongue
in his cheek. Pope Urban was appealed to all his life against that
decree. Subsequent Popes were appealed to repeatedly to clear the
Church of its disgrace. But they maintained the condemnation of
Copernican works on the Index -- Pope Alexander VII formally lent
his name to it in 1664 -- until the whole civilized world laughed
at their stupidity and the days of Voltaire arrived. And long after
even that time Catholic universities in really Catholic lands
(Spain) were still teaching that, as Joshua commanded the sun to
stand still, Copernicus was wrong.

     Well, what do you think? Don't talk about the infallibility of
the Pope. That doctrine is not involved. Its formula was drawn up
with an eye on the case of Galileo. But did the Church promote
science? Or did the Church grievously hamper science? In the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it extinguished Bacon and
Albert, and murdered Cecco d'Ascoli and Peter of Abano. In the
seventeenth century, even after the Renaissance, it murdered
Giordano Bruno, and it let the scientific world know, in the person
of Galileo, that any man of science who said, and persisted in
saying, that the earth moved round the sun, would be burned at the
stake, It "heresy." Probably you itch ... But if you are a
Protestant, my good reader, wait until you hear what the Reformers
did.

                   THE REFORMATION AND SCIENCE

     The Protestant era coincides with the early scientific era. It
most decidedly did not inspire science, but, after its first few
years of fanaticism, and apart from certain localities (Puritan New
England or Scotland), the fact that it had removed the tyranny of
the Popes and the Inquisition greatly facilitated the progress of
science. We may not like to see so much blame put on the Catholic
Church and so little on the Protestant, but we must keep some sense
of history. Protestantism comes after the Renaissance; Catholicism
before it.

     The development of science from that time onward illustrates
this. England, for instance, has, for so small a country, a
remarkably high record in the development of science. Francis
Bacon, writing in the last years of the sixteenth and early years
of the seventeenth century, did splendid service in urging the
direct study of nature. It does not matter two pins that he opposed
Copernicus (whose general system is absurd and far removed from


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

true science), made no discoveries, and did not at once strike the
correct methods of research. The modern attempt of a few to
belittle him in comparison with Roger Bacon is silly. Patient
research has shown that we cannot be sure that Roger Bacon went
beyond what he found in the Arab works already translated for him.
But Lord Bacon gave a splendid call to scientific research, and
from his time onward England contributed mightily to the progress.

     With one exception, and it is important in connection with our
present subject, there was certainly no encouragement of science
during the Puritan reaction. No man can get away from the fact that
it was in the semi-pagan, semi-skeptical, loose-living -- in a
word, very far from Christian -- days of Elizabeth, and the
Stuarts, and Queen Anne, and the Georges that science made
progress: just as it did in Italy whenever the joyous pagan note
returned, as it did in France under the immoral Louises and the
Revolution, and so on. Genuine deep-felt religion has always acted
like a blight on it.

     Protestantism, in other words, insofar as it was a sincere
religious movement, dissociated from political or other secular
considerations, something more than a protest against Papal
usurpation and exploitation, means a return to primitive
Christianity; and this means a blight on art and science and
everything merely human. It always did. You may talk sentimental
rhetoric about the Christian legend and the hope of heaven lifting
up the hearts of the poor, and so on. You may say -- though it is
ridiculously false -- that I have no sentiment. But the plain
common-sense view is that unless the Christian promise is true, it
is a blight. Precisely insofar as it was sincerely believed, it has
suspended the development of civilization. It was not "bad Popes"
who did this, but good Popes.

     The Reformers notoriously scorned and hampered science. The
great scientific issue in their day was Copernicanism, and they
were as mischievous as the Inquisition. Luther and Melanchthon were
as fierce against Copernicus as Pope Urban VII was against Galileo.
The Copernican view was opposed to the Bible. The sun was not the
center of the system, so it was ridiculous to talk about
astronomical proof. The same attitude is so clearly reproduced in
the American Fundamentalists today, in regard to so solid a
scientific fact as evolution, that we need not linger over it.
Calvin was worse than Luther, as he was less sensual and nearer to
the asceticism of Christ. His ghastly crime in murdering Servetus
-- he did that as truly as a man who hires a gunman -- was inspired
very largely by the consciousness that the science of Servetus was
a deadly foe of his theology.

     No, Protestantism pure and sincere is a blight on science. But
the world was awakening when Protestantism appeared, and the narrow
fanaticism of the Reformers could not be sustained. Errors for
which men had fought truculently in the name of religion were now
proved beyond cavil to be errors. Races were actually found living
at the antipodes. Navigators sailed round the world, so it was not
flat. The advance of astronomy proved beyond question that the
earth revolved round the sun, and the universe was a vast affair.
Then science began to show its fruits, and, just as Popes had
encouraged anatomy when they realized that it enabled their
physicians to deal better with their gout or syphilis, so the whole
race now insisted on freedom to develop science.

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