that they have
already accepted. Why are not all educated men Unitarians? Why do not
scientific men accept demonstrated truth when it is first demonstrated
as truth? It puts them to too much trouble. It touches their pride.
They do not like to feel that they have thrown away half their lives
following an hypothesis that is not capable of being substantiated.

Then, in the third place, there are men, and educated men as the world
goes, who deliberately decline to study new truth; and they are men in
the scientific field and in the religious field. They purposely refuse
to look at anything which would tend to disturb their present accepted
belief. In my boyhood I used to hear Dr. John O. Fiske, a famous
preacher in Maine. He told a friend of mine, in his old age, that he
simply refused to read any book that would tend to disturb his beliefs.
Professor William G. T. Shedd, one of the most distinguished
theologians of this country, a leading Presbyterian divine, published
so I am not slandering him by saying it a statement that he did not
consider any book written since the seventeenth century worth his
reading. And yet we have a new world since the seventeenth century, a
new revelation of God and of man. To follow the teaching of the
seventeenth century would be to go wrong in almost every conceivable
direction. What is the use of paying any attention to the theological
or religious opinions of a man who avows an attitude like that?

Faraday, to come now to a scientific illustration, so that you will not
think I am too hard on theologians, Faraday belonged to one of the most
orthodox sects in England; and he used to say deliberately that he kept
his religion and his science apart. He says, "When I go into my closet,
I lock the door of my laboratory; and, when I go into my laboratory, I
lock the door of my closet." He did very wisely to keep them apart;
for, if they had got together, there would certainly have been an
explosion.

Another scientific illustration is Agassiz. Agassiz unconsciously
wrought out and developed some of the most wondrous and beautiful
proofs of evolution that the world has ever known; and yet he fought
evolution to the last day of his life, simply because he had accepted
the other theory. And he got it into his head that there was something
about evolution that tended to injure religion and degrade man, not a
rational objection, not a scientific objection, but a feeling, a
prejudice.

There is