e various
theologico-scientific explanations, it was still held meritorious
to believe that all fossils were placed in the strata on one of the
creative days by the hand of the Almighty, and that this was done for
some mysterious purpose, probably for the trial of human faith.

Strange as it may at first seem, the theological war against a
scientific method in geology was waged more fiercely in Protestant
countries than in Catholic. The older Church had learned by her costly
mistakes, especially in the cases of Copernicus and Galileo, what
dangers to her claim of infallibility lay in meddling with a growing
science. In Italy, therefore, comparatively little opposition was made,
while England furnished the most bitter opponents to geology so long as
the controversy could be maintained, and the most active negotiators in
patching up a truce on the basis of a sham science afterward. The Church
of England did, indeed, produce some noble men, like Bishop Clayton
and John Mitchell, who stood firmly by the scientific method; but these
appear generally to have been overwhelmed by a chorus of churchmen and
dissenters, whose mixtures of theology and science, sometimes tragic in
their results and sometimes comic, are among the most instructive things
in modern history.(141)

(141) For a comparison between the conduct of Italian and English
ecclesiastics as regards geology, see Lyell, Principles of Geology,
tenth English edition, vol. i, p. 33. For a philosophical statement of
reasons why the struggle was more bitter and the attempt at deceptive
compromises more absurd in England than elsewhere, see Maury,
L'Ancienne Academie des Sciences, second edition, p. 152. For very
frank confessions of the reasons why the Catholic Church has become
more careful in her dealings with science, see Roberts, The Pontifical
Decrees against the Earth's Movement, London, 1885, especially pp. 94
and 132, 133, and St. George Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century
for July 1885. The first of these gentlemen, it must not be forgotten,
is a Roman Catholic clergyman and the second an eminent layman of the
same Church, and both admit that it was the Pope, speaking ex cathedra,
who erred in the Galileo case; but their explanation is that God allowed
the Pope and Church to fall into this grievous error, which has cost so
dear, in order to show once and for all that the Church has no right to
decide questions in Science.

We have already noted