e
the shaping of opinions among the students of scientific departments
of our colleges and universities during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. It does not seem too much to assume that most of
the maturer scientists who are now teaching in the university
scientific departments of this country, read Professor Draper's book
and were led by it to an almost unshakeable conviction that religion
and, above all, the Catholic Church, fearful lest science should take
men away from her influence, had been constantly opposed to all true
scientific progress, and what was more unpardonable, that religion as
represented by the Church had been for the same reason a bitter enemy
of any and every social progress that might lead to the real
development of mankind. For them under Draper's inspiration it seemed
that the deliberate Church policy was that if men were not happy here
they would look with all the more eagerness to happiness hereafter and
take all the means offered by the Church to secure it. That such a
conclusion impugned the motives of millions of men whom their own
generation had thoroughly respected and yielded to the most {503}
dangerous of human ideas, suspicion, made no difference. No good could
come out of the Nazareth of the Catholic Church.

It is quite certain that a great many of the younger teachers of
science of that time who are still alive, even when not entirely
conscious of the source of their opinions as to the relations of
science and religion and the Church and education, have at the back of
their minds certain prejudices, founded on the influence produced on
them during their plastic, formative state of mind by the reading of
Professor Draper's book. Indeed, so firm is the feeling in many of
these men, that this whole subject is settled for them beyond the
possibility of any modification, that they have insulated their minds
from any further currents of information.

Controversy is distasteful at best; to find out that one has been
cherishing a mistaken notion for years, is always disturbing as one
grows older, and so it is not surprising that many of these men
frequently use expressions with regard to the supposed relations of
Church and science that are quite incompatible with what is now very
generally known of the history of science. Their minds are made up,
and they simply refuse to bring for a second time any of these
subjects before the bar of judgment. Besides, though they would resent