Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by
theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the system
which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of
deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the
earth; that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a
wicked world; that insanity is diabolic possession; that
anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin against the
Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to sorcery; that taking
interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must
conform to ancient Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in
Austria the rule of the "Immaculate Oath," under which
university professors, long before the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to
their belief in that dogma before they were permitted to teach
even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the denunciation of
inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against
using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse
against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a
historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in
America, the use of Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is
declared to have been a purely civil tribunal, or Protestant
manuals in which the Puritans are shown to have been all that we
could now wish they had been.
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