ology,
regardless of human feelings, is used quite as ruthlessly and as
cruelly as in the olden days. There are tortures of spirit that are
worse than prison or even fire.

When we recall how few examples there are of opposition to science on
the part of ecclesiastics, and how most of these prove on careful
examination to be due to misunderstandings rather than to actual
desire to prevent the development of science, the stories of the way
in which discoveries in science were received in more modern times
become a striking lesson that makes us appreciate the broad-mindedness
and liberal policy of ecclesiastical educators in the olden time. They
were evidently much more ready to accept novel ideas, and much less
prone to set themselves up in opposition to them, than the educational
authorities of more modern times. This is the phase of the history of
education in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that
deserves the most careful study, and that should make modern educators
feel proud of their kinship with these old founders and patrons in
education, who at the same time furnish an example of liberality of
mind that it would be very beneficial to have in our modern supposedly
free universities.

For while we are prone to be proud of our academic freedom, we have
had more than one example in recent times of how dangerous it is for a
man, even though he may be recognized as an authority in his
department, {412} to treat certain economic questions from a
standpoint that is not favored by the rest of the faculty, or by the
Board of Governors, or, above all, by certain munificent patrons of
the particular educational institution. Much has been said about
religious educational institutions, about the middle of the nineteenth
century, so hampering the work of men in the physical sciences,
especially with regard to problems in geology and evolution, as to
nullify progress. Just this same thing, however, is true with regard
to many economic questions, because of the attitude of educational
interests with regard to free trade and protection, single tax, and
socialism and the like. No professor of science at a religious
institution ever felt himself more in the grip of old-fashioned
notions than do certain professors in departments of finance and
sociology with regard to problems that are now of the most profound
interest. Men have changed the reason for their conservatism, but the
conservatism itself remains, and