lity of a trial. Well did an eminent but
thoughtful divine of the Southern Presbyterian Church declare that "the
method of procedure to destroy evolution by the majority in the Church
is vicious and suicidal," and that "logical dynamite has been used to
put out a supposed fire in the upper stories of our house, and all the
family in the house at that." Wisely, too, did he refer to the majority
as "sowing in the fields of the Church the thorns of its errors, and
cumbering its path with the debris and ruin of its own folly."

To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy from
teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and his election to
a far more influential chair at Harvard University; the driving out from
the American College at Beyrout of the young professors who accepted
evolution as probable, and the rise of one of them, Mr. Nimr, to a far
more commanding position than that which he left--the control of three
leading journals at Cairo; the driving out of Robertson Smith from his
position at Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more important and
influential professorship at the English University of Cambridge; and
multitudes of similar cases. From the days when Henry Dunster, the first
President of Harvard College, was driven from his presidency, as Cotton
Mather said, for "falling into the briers of Antipedobaptism" until
now, the same spirit is shown in all such attempts. In each we have
generally, on one side, a body of older theologians, who since their
youth have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry professors
who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and a mass of unthinking
ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance save in making up a
retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical tribunal; on the other side
we have as generally the thinking, open-minded, devoted men who have
listened to the revelation of their own time as well as of times past,
and who are evidently thinking the future thought of the world.

Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by theology
which has cost the modern world so dear; the system which forced great
numbers of professors, under penalty of deprivation, to teach that the
sun and planets revolve about the earth; that comets are fire-balls
flung by an angry God at a wicked world; that insanity is diabolic
possession; that anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin
against the Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to so