Church will
only permit men of science to study and to teach as and while she
permits.

To give but one example of this attitude towards the Church, readers may
be reminded that Huxley[23] called the Catholic Church "the vigorous
enemy of the highest life of mankind," and rejoiced that evolution, "in
addition to its truth, has the great merit of being in a position of
irreconcilable antagonism to it." An utterly incorrect, even ignorant
statement, by the way--but let that pass. The same writer, in a number
of places, in season and out of season, as we may fairly say,[24]
proclaims his wholly erroneous view that there is "a necessary
antagonism between science and Roman Catholic doctrine." We need not
labour this point. It is sufficiently obvious, nor does it need any
catena of authorities to establish the fact, that outside the Church,
and even, as we have hinted above, amongst the less-instructed of her
own children, there is a prevalent idea that the allegation with which
this paper proposes to deal is a true bill.

Those who give credit to the allegation must of course ignore certain
very patent facts which are, it will be allowed, a little difficult to
get over. They must commence by ignoring the historical fact that the
greater number--almost all indeed--of the older Universities, places
specially intended to foster and increase knowledge and research, owe
their origin to Papal bulls. They must ignore the fact that vast numbers
of scientific researches, often of fundamental importance, especially
perhaps in the subjects of anatomy and physiology, emanated from learned
men attached to seats of learning in Rome, and this during the Middle
Ages, and that the learned men who were their authors quite frequently
held official positions in the Papal Court. They must finally ignore the
fact that a large number of the most distinguished scientific workers
and discoverers in the past were also devout children of the Catholic
Church. Stensen, "the Father of Geology" and a great anatomical
discoverer as well, was a bishop; Mendel, whose name is so often heard
nowadays in biological controversies, was an abbot. And what about
Galvani, Volta, Pasteur, Schwann (the originator of the Cell Theory),
van Beneden, Johannes Mueller, admitted by Huxley to be "the greatest
anatomist and physiologist among my contemporaries"?[25] What about
Kircher, Spallanzani, Secchi, de Lapparent, to take the names of persons
of different historical