erentism" 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. Joh