INTRODUCTION
MY book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this
preface my eye lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants
at work on the Neva under my windows. With pick and
shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun into the
great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays
and the old granite fortress where lie the bones of the
Romanoff Czars.
This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed,
in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is,
as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so
imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either
shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands
of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it;
wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one
knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may
resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching
even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing
desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the
subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a
fertile breeding-bed for the germs of disease.
But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The
barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring
by the scores of channels they are making, will break away
gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent and beautiful.
My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik
on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of
historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought
which attaches the modern world to mediaeval conceptions
of Christianity, and which still lingers among us—a most
serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the
whole normal evolution of society.
For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising
—the flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and
this barrier also, though honeycombed and in many places
thin, creates a danger—danger of a sudden breaking away,
distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not only
out worn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles
and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious
and moral foundations of the whole social and political fabric.
My hope is to aid—even if it be but a little—in the
gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of
unreason, that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled"
may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity.
And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.
It is something over a quarter of a century since I
labored with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which
bears his honored name.
Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York
an institution for advanced instruction and research, in
which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place
with literature; in which the study of literature, ancient
and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible
from pedantry; and which should be free from various
useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period
hampered many, if not most, of the American universities
and colleges.
We had especially determined that the institution should
be under the control of no political party and of no single
religious sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied
stringent provisions to this effect in the charter.
It had certainly never entered into the mind of either
of us that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or
unchristian. Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society
of Friends; he had from his fortune liberally aided
every form of Christian effort which he found going on about
him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library
which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen
of the town—Catholic and Protestant. As for myself,
I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a
trustee of one church college, and a professor in another;
those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious;
and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to
my self, my most cherished friendships were among deeply
religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment
were ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and
the more devout forms of poetry. So, far from wishing to
injure Christianity, we both hoped to promote it; but we
did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we saw in
the sectarian character of American colleges and universities
as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction
then given in so many of them.
It required no great acuteness to see that a system of
control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or
Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first
and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of
a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance the
moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind.
The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then,
so cogent that we expected the co-operation of all good
citizens, and anticipated no opposition from any source.
As I look back across the intervening years, I know not
whether to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity.
Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it
confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze
throughout the State—from the good Protestant bishop
who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders,
since to the Church alone was given the command, "Go,
teach all nations," to the zealous priest who published a
charge that Goldwin Smith—a profoundly Christian scholar
—had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the "infidelity
of the Westminster Review"; and from the eminent divine
who went from city to city, denouncing the "atheistic and
pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the
perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod
that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout
theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" in
the new institution.
As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were
introduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored
clergymen solemnly warned their flocks first against the
"atheism," then against the "infidelity," and finally against
the "indifferentism" of the university, as devoted pastors
endeavoured to dissuade young men from matriculation, I
took the defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from
pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to allay the
fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was fully tried.
There was established and endowed in the university perhaps
the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most
vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the
United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack.
The clause in the charter of the university forbidding
it to give predominance to the doctrines of any sect,
and above all the fact that much prominence was given to
instruction in various branches of science, seemed to prevent
all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on
the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that
there was borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty—
the antagonism between the theological and scientific view
of the universe and of education in relation to it; therefore
it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in
the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took
as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this
thesis which follows:
In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed
interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such
interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both
to religion and science, and invariably; and, on the other hand,
all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous
to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time
to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion
and science.
The lecture was next day published in the New York
Tribune at the request of Horace Greeley, its editor,
who was also one of the Cornell University trustees. As
a result of this widespread publication and of sundry attacks
which it elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis
before various university associations and literary clubs;
and I shall always remember with gratitude that among
those who stood by me and presented me on the lecture
platform with words of approval and cheer was my revered
instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight Woolsey, at
that time President of Yale College.
My lecture grew—first into a couple of magazine articles,
and then into a little book called The Warfare of Science,
for which, when republished in England, Prof. John Tyndall
wrote a preface.
Sundry translations of this little book were published,
but the most curious thing in its history is the fact that a
very friendly introduction to the Swedish translation was
written by a Lutheran bishop.
Meanwhile Prof. John W. Draper published his book on
The Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great
ability, which, as I then thought, ended the matter, so far
as my giving it further attention was concerned.
But two things led me to keep on developing my own
work in this field: First, I had become deeply interested
in it, and could not refrain from directing my observation
and study to it; secondly, much as I admired Draper's
treatment of the questions involved, his point of view and
mode of looking at history were different from mine.
He regarded the struggle as one between Science and
Religion. I believed then, and am convinced now, that it
was a struggle between Science and Dogmatic Theology.
More and more I saw that it was the conflict between
two epochs in the evolution of human thought—the
theological and the scientific.
So I kept on, and from time to time published New
Chapters in the Warfare of Science as magazine articles in
The Popular Science Monthly. This was done under many
difficulties. For twenty years, as President of Cornell
University and Professor of History in that institution, I was
immersed in the work of its early development. Besides this,
I could not hold myself entirely aloof from public affairs,
and was three times sent by the Government of the United
States to do public duty abroad: first as a commissioner
to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to Germany,
in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and
was also called upon by the State of New York to do
considerable labor in connection with international exhibitions
at Philadelphia and at Paris. I was also obliged from time
to time to throw off by travel the effects of overwork.
The variety of residence and occupation arising from
these causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this
book which might otherwise puzzle my reader.
While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials
over a very wide range—in the New World, from
Quebec to Santo Domingo and from Boston to Mexico,
San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from
Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo—
they have often obliged me to write under circumstances
not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic steamer,
sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my own library
at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich,
Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the
benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions
of the same authority in different chapters, but some
iterations which in the steady quiet of my own library would
not have been made.
It has been my constant endeavour to write for the general
reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as
possible and stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me.
That errors of omission and commission will be found
here and there is probable—nay, certain; but the substance
of the book will, I believe, be found fully true. I am
encouraged in this belief by the fact that, of the three bitter
attacks which this work in its earlier form has already
encountered, one was purely declamatory, objurgatory, and
hortatory, and the others based upon ignorance of facts easily
pointed out.
And here I must express my thanks to those who have
aided me. First and above all to my former student and
dear friend, Prof. George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University,
to whose contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and
cautions I am most deeply indebted; also to my friends
U. G. Weatherly, formerly Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and
now Assistant Professor in the University of Indiana,—Prof.
and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof. William H. Hudson, of Stanford
University,—and Prof. E. P. Evans, formerly of the
University of Michigan, but now of Munich, for extensive
aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated to them,
but which I could never have prosecuted without their
co-operation. In libraries at home and abroad they have
all worked for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful
to them.
This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift—a tribute
to Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century
of its existence, and probably my last tribute.
The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its
foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over
one hundred and, fifty; its students, numbering but little
short of two thousand; its noble buildings and equipment;
the munificent gifts, now amounting to millions of dollars,
which it has received from public-spirited men and women;
the evidences of public confidence on all sides; and, above
all, the adoption of its cardinal principles and main features
by various institutions of learning in other States, show this
abundantly. But there has been a triumph far greater and
wider. Everywhere among the leading modern nations the
same general tendency is seen. During the quarter-century
just past the control of public instruction, not only in America
but in the leading nations of Europe, has passed more
and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are the
presidents of the larger universities in the United States,
with but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing
is seen in the old European strongholds of metaphysical
theology. At my first visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty
years ago, they were entirely under ecclesiastical control.
Now, all this is changed. An eminent member of the present
British Government has recently said, "A candidate for
high university position is handicapped by holy orders." I
refer to this with not the slightest feeling of hostility
toward the clergy, for I have none; among them are many of
my dearest friends; no one honours their proper work more
than I; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the
continuance of that evolution which I have endeavoured to
describe in this series of monographs—an evolution, indeed,
in which the warfare of Theology against Science has been
one of the most active and powerful agents. My belief is
that in the field left to them—their proper field—the clergy
will more and more, as they cease to struggle against scientific
methods and conclusions, do work even nobler and more
beautiful than anything they have heretofore done. And
this is saying much. My conviction is that Science, though
it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on
biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in
hand with Religion; and that, although theological control
will continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition
of "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor,
will steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the
American institutions of learning but in the world at large.
Thus may the declaration of Micah as to the requirements
of Jehovah, the definition by St. James of "pure religion
and undefiled," and, above all, the precepts and ideals of the
blessed Founder of Christianity himself, be brought to bear
more and more effectively on mankind.
I close this preface some days after its first lines were
written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva;
the great river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the
mujiks are forgotten.
A. D. W.
LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES, ST. PETERSBURG,
April 14,1894.
P. S.—Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision
to some parts of my work, it has been withheld from the
press until the present date.
A. D. W.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y.,
August 15, 1895.