I
cannot go into details to illustrate it. It has interfered with the
world's education. There is only one nation in Europe to-day where
education has not been wrenched out of the hands of the priesthood in
the interests of man, and that even by Catholics themselves; and that
country is Spain. It pronounced its ban on the study of the universe
under the name of science. It made it a sin for Galileo to discover the
moons of Jupiter. And Catholic and Protestant infallibility alike
denounced Newton, one of the noblest men and the grandest scientists
that the world has ever seen, because in proclaiming the law of
gravity, they said, he was taking the universe out of the hands of God
and establishing practical atheism.
So almost everything that has made the education, the political, the
industrial, the social growth of the world, this infallibility idea has
stood square in the way of, and done its best to hinder. Take, for
example, an illustration. When chloroform was discovered, the Church in
Scotland opposed its use in cases of childbirth, because it said it was
a wicked interference with the judgment God pronounced on Eve after the
fall.
So, in almost every direction, whatever has been for the benefit of the
world has been opposed in the interests of old-time ideas, until the
whole thing culminated at last in this: Here is this nineteenth century
of ours, which has done more for the advancement of man than the
preceding fifteen centuries all put together.
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