It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism.”

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 zooelogist 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.