Note 2 — Chapter III · POPULAR ACCEPTANCE

It is not only in religion and ethics that the influence of endowed and organized Christianity is thus intellectually baneful. Every science in turn, from the days of Galileo, has had to fight for its life against the sanctified ignorance of all the churches; and while the physical sciences, which can be taught without open reference to traditional error, have carried their point and received endowment in turn, happily without being tied down to any documents, the moral sciences are either kept in tutelage to theology in the universities of many countries, our own included, or forced to leave out of their scope the phenomena of religion itself, and in particular the sociological problem of Christian history. At the beginning of the present century there was not a single chair of sociology in a British university2; and even in the United States, where such chairs are common, they and the historical chairs alike are barred from any free treatment of religious evolution. Ethical teaching is similarly limited; and a science which on that side threatened to turn the flank of religious doctrine—to wit, phrenology—was at an early stage of its progress in the first half of the nineteenth century successfully ostracized, so that, lacking the expert handling without which no science can be kept sound, it has been relegated even for most naturalists to the limbo of exploded error, without ever having been scientifically developed or confuted.