men.(286)

(286) De Morgan, Paradoxes, pp. 421-428; also Daubeny's Essays.

And in yet another Protestant country this same mistake was made. In
1868 several excellent churchmen in Prussia thought it their duty to
meet for the denunciation of "science falsely so called." Two results
followed: upon the great majority of these really self-sacrificing
men--whose first utterances showed complete ignorance of the theories
they attacked--there came quiet and widespread contempt; upon Pastor
Knak, who stood forth and proclaimed views of the universe which he
thought scriptural, but which most schoolboys knew to be childish,
came a burst of good-natured derision from every quarter of the German
nation.(287)

(287) See the Berlin newspapers for the summer of 1868, especially
Kladderdatsch.

But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind, after the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more and more futile.
While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less conscientious Protestant
clergymen in Europe and America continued to insist that advanced
education, not only in literature but in science, should be kept under
careful control in their own sectarian universities and colleges,
wretchedly one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while
Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all professors
holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and Italy all holding
unsafe views regarding the Immaculate Conception, and while Protestant
clerical authorities in Great Britain and America were keeping out
of professorships men holding unsatisfactory views regarding the
Incarnation, or Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or
Ordination by Elders, or the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both
Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly weeding
out of university faculties all who showed willingness to consider
fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly in progress destined
to take instruction, and especially instruction in the physical
and natural sciences, out of its old subordination to theology and
ecclesiasticism.(288)

(288) Whatever may be thought of the system of philosophy advocated by
President McCosh at Princeton, every thinking man must honor him for the
large way in which he, at least, broke away from the traditions of that
centre of thought; prevented, so far as he was able, persecution of
scholars for holding to the Da