Note 99 — Chapter IV · CHURCH AND THEOCRACY

In the Preface to Lothair he says:—“The sceptical efforts of the discoveries of science, and the uneasy feeling that they cannot co-exist with our old religious convictions, have their origin in the conviction that the general body who have suddenly become conscious of these physical truths are not so well acquainted as is desirable with the past history of man. Astonished by their unprepared emergence from ignorance to a certain degree of information, their amazed intelligence takes refuge in the theory of what is conveniently called Progress, and every step in scientific discovery seems further to remove them from the path of primæval inspiration. But there is no fallacy so flagrant as to suppose that the modern ages have the peculiar privilege of scientific discovery, or that they are distinguished as the epochs of the most illustrious inventions. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as language. What are the most brilliant of our chemical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals? It is a vulgar belief that our astronomical knowledge dates only from the recent century, when it was rescued from the monks who imprisoned Galileo. But Hipparchus, who lived before our Divine Master ... discovered the precession of the equinoxes; and Copernicus ... avows himself as only the champion of Pythagoras.... Even the most modish schemes of the day on the origin of things ... will be found mainly to rest on the atom of Epicurus and the monad of Thales. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man....” So, too, in a speech of 1861, dealing both with science and the higher criticism, “Epicurus was, I apprehend, as great a man as Hegel; but it was not Epicurus who subverted the religion of Olympus.”