The Protestant Church,
though rarely able to be so severe, has been more blameworthy. The
persecution of Galileo and his compeers by the older Church was
mainly at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the
persecution of Robertson Smith, and Winchell, and Woodrow, and Toy,
and the young professors at Beyrout, by various Protestant
authorities, was near the end of the nineteenth century. Those
earlier persecutions by Catholicism were strictly in accordance
with principles held at that time by all religionists, Catholic and
Protestant, throughout the world; these later persecutions by
Protestants were in defiance of principles which all Protestants
to-day hold or pretend to hold, and none make louder claim to hold
them than the very sects which persecuted these eminent Christian
men of our day, men whose crime was that they were intelligent
enough to accept the science of their time, and honest enough to
acknowledge it.
Most unjustly, then, would Protestantism taunt Catholicism for
excluding knowledge of astronomical truths from European Catholic
universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while
real knowledge of geological and biological and anthropological
truth is denied or pitifully diluted in so many American Protestant
colleges and universities in the nineteenth century.
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