The Popes and Science

Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science pursued alone,–as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof, but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science as ultimate truth and we are able to judge a little more dispassionately.

Professor Draper's prestige, and the fact that his book was published in the International Scientific Series, led a great many people to read it, and it found its way into many of the public libraries of the country, on whose shelves it may still be found. Many of its readers thought it could never be effectively answered. Scientists were affected by it, or at least those interested in science, and it represented one phase of that pronounced opposition to religion which characterized what has been so well called the "silly seventies."

And if the seriously educated were willing to accept the ignorant and prejudiced views of Professor Draper, what was to be expected of the general reader? What has helped the position of the Church in this country during the past generations is knowledge, and ever more knowledge. When those who are not of the fold know even a little of the history of the Church, know a reasonable amount of the other side of controversial problems, and, above all, when they have been brought into personal touch with the Church itself, her pastors and the hierarchy and religious men and women, prejudice disappears and understanding grows. We still have the monks and nuns of the olden time with us, but no one who knows them personally ever thinks for a moment of lazy monks and idle nuns. After a man has met scholarly Catholic clergymen, he has quite a different view of the relations of the Church to education. That is all that the Church has ever needed–to be known in order to be appreciated. Nothing emphasizes this so much as the change that has come over the opinions of those outside the Church as a result of growth in knowledge of the Church and her institutions during the generation that separates us from the writing of Professor Draper's book.