stronomy was opposed by the Church because it unsettled old notions of
the earth being the centre of the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars
mere lights stuck in the solid firmament, and worked to and fro like
sliding panels. Did not the Bible say that General Joshua commanded the
sun to stand still, and how could this have happened unless it moved
round the earth? And was not the earth certainly flat, as millions of
flats believed it to be? The Catholic Inquisition forced Galileo to
recant, and Protestant Luther called Copernicus "an old fool."

Chemistry was opposed as an impious prying into the secrets of God. It
was put in the same class with sorcery and witchcraft, and punished
in the same way. The early chemists were considered as agents of the
Devil, and their successors are still regarded as "uncanny" in the more
ignorant parts of Christendom. Roger Bacon was persecuted by his brother
monks; his testing fire was thought to have come from the pit, and the
explosion of his gunpowder was the Devil vanishing in smoke and smell.
Even at the end of last century, the clergy-led mob of Birmingham who
wrecked Priestley's house and destroyed his apparatus, no doubt felt
that there was a close connexion between chemistry and infidelity.

Physiology and Medicine were opposed on similar grounds. We were all
fearfully and wonderfully made, and the less the mystery was looked into
the better. Disease was sent by God for his own wise ends, and to resist
it was as bad as blasphemy. Every discovery and every reform was decried
as impious. Men now living can remember how the champions of faith
denounced the use of anaesthetics in painful labor as an interference
with God's curse on the daughters of Eve.

Geology was opposed because it discredited Moses, as though that famous
old Jew had watched the deposit of every stratum of the earth's crust.
It was even said that fossils had been put underground by God to puzzle
the wiseacres, and that the Devil had carried shells to the hilltops for
the purpose of deluding men to infidelity and perdition. Geologists were
anathematised from the pulpits and railed at by tub-thumpers. They were
obliged to feel their way and go slowly. Sir Charles Lyell had to keep
back his strongest conclusions for at least a quarter of a century, and
could not say all he thought until his head was whitened by old age and
he looked into the face of Death.

Biology was opposed tooth and nail as the worst of a