patient and earnest seekers after truth,
from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been
embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of
Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense
of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise
impossibilities--whose life has been wasted in the attempt to
force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of
Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party? It is
true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been
amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of
every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules;
and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been
fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the
lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not
slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It
learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present,
bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist
that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the
end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts
as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade
Nature to the level of primitive Judaism."

These words were written in 1860 and events have moved rapidly since
Huxley wrote them. There is now practically no religious body
containing a proportion of educated persons which does not allow
within it a very wide range of opinion as to the inspiration of the
Scriptures, the Biblical account of the Creation, the miraculous
events of the Old Testament and the recorded miracles of the New.
Within the last few months, Dr. St. George Mivart, a distinguished
Catholic zooelogist and long an opponent of Huxley, has declared that
within the Catholic Church itself a number of educated persons are
prepared to accept most of Huxley's positions, as well as views more
extremely iconoclastic than any advanced by Huxley. Although Dr.
Mivart's outspoken words have called down on him the official thunders
of Rome, it is an open secret that many good Catholics think this
attempted exclusion of modern knowledge to be fraught with grave
danger to the Church. In these matters the Protestant churches have
advanced much farther.

It was very different when Huxley wrote. The first