#The Canonization of Incompetence#

The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.  Consider the power of the Church of England and its favorite daughter here in America; consider their prestige with the press and in politics, their hold upon literature and the arts, their control of education and the minds of children, of charity and the lives of the poor:  consider all this, and then say what it means to society that such a power must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction and falsehood.  “So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” runs the church’s formula; and this per se and a priori, of necessity and in the nature of the case.

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church’s opposition to every advance in every field of science, even the most remote from theological concern.  Here is the Reverend Edward Massey, preaching in 1772 on “The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation”; declaring that Job’s distemper was probably confluent small-pox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is “a diabolical operation”.  Here are the Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing the use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking “to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman”.  Here is Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin:  “The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God”; it “contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator”; it “is inconsistent with the fulness of His glory”; it is “a dishonoring view of nature”.  And the Bishop settled the matter by asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather.

Think what it means, friends of progress, that these ecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverence of the populace, and that every time mankind is to make an advance in power over Nature, the pioneers of thought have to come with crow-bars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way!  And you think that conditions are changed to-day?  But consider syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and can do almost nothing; consider birth-control, which we are sent to jail for so much as mentioning!  Consider the divorce reforms for which the world is crying—­and for which it must wait, because of St. Paul!  Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister!  That when the war broke upon England the whole nation was occupied with a squabble over the disestablishment of the church of Wales!  Only since 1888 has it been legally possible for an unbeliever to hold a