" Two results followed: upon the great majority of these
really self-sacrificing men--whose first utterances showed
complete ignorance of the theories they attacked--there came
quiet and widespread contempt; upon Pastor Knak, who stood forth
and proclaimed views of the universe which he thought
scriptural, but which most schoolboys knew to be childish, came
a burst of good-natured derision from every quarter of the
German nation.[411b]
But in all the greater modern nations warfare of this kind,
after the first quarter of the nineteenth century, became more
and more futile. While conscientious Roman bishops, and no less
conscientious Protestant clergymen in Europe and America
continued to insist that advanced education, not only in
literature but in science, should be kept under careful control
in their own sectarian universities and colleges, wretchedly
one-sided in organization and inadequate in equipment; while
Catholic clerical authorities in Spain were rejecting all
professors holding the Newtonian theory, and in Austria and
Italy all holding unsafe views regarding the Immaculate
Conception, and while Protestant clerical authorities in Great
Britain and America were keeping out of professorships men
holding unsatisfactory views regarding the Incarnation, or
Infant Baptism, or the Apostolic Succession, or Ordination by
Elders, or the Perseverance of the Saints; and while both
Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics were openly or secretly
weeding out of university faculties all who showed willingness
to consider fairly the ideas of Darwin, a movement was quietly
in progress destined to take instruction, and especially
instruction in the physical and natural sciences, out of its
old subordination to theology and ecclesiasticism.
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