



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM

By Andrew Dickson White


Two Volumes Combined


To the Memory of

EZRA CORNELL

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.



Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we

Breathe cheaply in the common air.--LOWELL


Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.--PUBLIUS SYRUS


Truth is the daughter of Time.--BACON


The Truth shall make you free.--ST. JOHN, viii, 32.




INTRODUCTION


My book is ready for the printer, and as I begin this preface my eye
lights upon the crowd of Russian peasants at work on the Neva under my
windows. With pick and shovel they are letting the rays of the April sun
into the great ice barrier which binds together the modern quays and the
old granite fortress where lie the bones of the Romanoff Czars.

This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places
thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so
crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into
crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from
thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage
and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield.
But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break
suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations,
bringing desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the
subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fertile
breeding-bed for the germs of disease.


But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier, exposed
more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of channels they are
making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent
and beautiful.

My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujik on the Neva. I
simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that
decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to
mediaeval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among
us--a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the
whole normal evolution of society.

For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising--the flood
of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier also, though
honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger--danger of a
sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not
only out worn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles
and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious and moral
foundations of the whole social and political fabric.

My hope is to aid--even if it be but a little--in the gradual and
healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of
"religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to
humanity.

And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.

It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with Ezra
Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored name.

Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an institution for
advanced instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied,
should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of
literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as
possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless
trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not
most, of the American universities and colleges.

We had especially determined that the institution should be under the
control of no political party and of no single religious sect, and with
Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent provisions to this effect in
the charter.

It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that in all
this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian. Mr. Cornell
was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had from his fortune
liberally aided every form of Christian effort which he found going on
about him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library
which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen of
the town--Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, I had been bred a
churchman, had recently been elected a trustee of one church college,
and a professor in another; those nearest and dearest to me were
devoutly religious; and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so
personal to my self, my most cherished friendships were among deeply
religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were
ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms
of poetry. So, far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to
promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we
saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities as
a