Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And WorkMitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Science
Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work
Mitchell, P. Chalmers (Peter Chalmers), Sir
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 1825-1895
These words were written in 1860 and events have moved rapidly since
Huxley wrote them. There is now practically no religious body
containing a proportion of educated persons which does not allow
within it a very wide range of opinion as to the inspiration of the
Scriptures, the Biblical account of the Creation, the miraculous
events of the Old Testament and the recorded miracles of the New.
Within the last few months, Dr. St. George Mivart, a distinguished
Catholic zoölogist and long an opponent of Huxley, has declared that
within the Catholic Church itself a number of educated persons are
prepared to accept most of Huxley's positions, as well as views more
extremely iconoclastic than any advanced by Huxley. Although Dr.
Mivart's outspoken words have called down on him the official thunders
of Rome, it is an open secret that many good Catholics think this
attempted exclusion of modern knowledge to be fraught with grave
danger to the Church. In these matters the Protestant churches have
advanced much farther.
It was very different when Huxley wrote. The first and gravest
difficulty placed in the way of science was the asserted infallibility
of the Scriptures. In Catholic theology, at least until late in this
century, the general tendency has been to regard the Bible rather as a
quarry for doctrine than as a direct means of grace. The theory of
religion rested on two pillars: the inspired Scriptures containing the
necessary information and the inspired Church to interpret the
Scriptures. Protestant theology had rejected the infallible
inspiration of the Church, and, in consequence, had thrown a greater
burden on the Scriptures. The Scriptures became the Word of God,
verbally and literally true; in its extreme form this doctrine
reverted almost to the ancient Rabbinical maxim that even the vowel
points and accents were of divine origin. In practice, if not in
theory, the halo was extended to cover even the marginal chronology,
then a familiar feature in the editions of the English Bible. The
present writer, even so lately as in 1888 was reproved with violence
by a clergyman of considerable education and position for expressing a
doubt as to the accuracy of these dates. Obviously there was no common
measure between a church holding such views and advancing science. War
was inevitable, until one side or the other should give way.
Huxley conducted the attack in a series of controversies extending
over many years, and in which his opponents were well-known laymen
such as Mr. Gladstone, Dr. St. George Mivart, the Duke of Argyll, and
many clerical dignitaries of different denominations. The most
important of his contributions to these controversies, as well as
several isolated essays and addresses, have been collected in two
volumes, _Science and the Hebrew Tradition_, and _Science and the
Christian Tradition_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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