rcery; that taking
interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must conform
to ancient Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in Austria the rule
of the "Immaculate Oath," under which university professors, long before
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined by the Church,
were obliged to swear to their belief in that dogma before they
were permitted to teach even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the
denunciation of inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests
against using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse
against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a historical
text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in America, the use
of Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is declared to have been a
purely civil tribunal, or Protestant manuals in which the Puritans are
shown to have been all that we could now wish they had been.

So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we have during
centuries the fettering of professors at English and Scotch universities
by test oaths, subscriptions to articles, and catechisms without number.
In our own country we have had in a vast multitude of denominational
colleges, as the first qualification for a professorship, not ability in
the subject to be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of
the denomination controlling the college or university.

Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat themselves. The
supposed victim is generally made a man of mark by persecution, and
advanced to a higher and wider sphere of usefulness. In withstanding
the march of scientific truth, any Conference, Synod, Board of
Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or Faculty, is but as a nest of
field-mice in the path of a steam plough.

The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than that
done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread, especially
among open-minded young men, that the accepted Christian system demands
a concealment of truth, with the persecution of honest investigators,
and therefore must be false. Well was it said in substance by President
McCosh, of Princeton, that no more sure way of making unbelievers in
Christianity among young men could be devised than preaching to them
that the doctrines arrived at by the great scientific thinkers of this
period are opposed to religion.

Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is evolving
out of t