RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

[From St. James's Budget of May 5.]

The indignation, and indeed the dismay, with which the inaugural address of M. Pasteur to the French Academy seems to have filled a great part of the French press can only be understood by those who discern that it is regarded as a severe blow to the principle on which the present French Republic is striving to found itself. The more rational French Republican were from the first anxious to find some basis of principle by which the new institutions could be distinguished from the Republic of the Irreconcilables no less than from all the forms of Monarchy. The Irreconcilable believes, or affects to believe, that the Republic is in itself divine, requiring no justification in respect of the objects which it attempts to secure. Thus viewed the Republic is the counterpart of the Monarchy of the Legitimists. But the Republic of the more moderate or of the less violent men—of M. Gambetts no less than of M. de Freycinet—was to have a justification in some policy peculiar to itself. After a number of efforts this peculiar policy appeared to have been discovered. The true mission of the new Republic was to be education of a new kind—secular, laical, and non-religious. And because this new education was non-religious, it was supposed to be scientific ; and the advancement of science was the motto to be woven on the new Republican banner. There was to be a certain relation between the objects of the former Constitutional Monarchy and the objects of the new Moderate Republic. The Legitimate Monarchy was wholly divine; the Constitutional Monarchy was religious; but it tolerated all forms of dissent from the orthodox symbols, and it professed to foster all kinds of science. There was a National Church ; the King went to mass, and the Prime Minister when not a Protestant; but France was understood to be proud of her science and philosophy, provided that their professors did not too openly attack the Church. In the present French Republic the objects of veneration or solicitude are to be reversal. The State is to be primarily scientific; and it is at most to tolerate religion, of which it is so far from being proud that it professes merely to maintain the institutions by which religion is kept in practical activity became it is bound by treaty with a foreign Power to maintain a certain minimum of religious organisation.
 In this pretty theory of the mission of the State and of its relations with the Church M. Pasteur has all of a sudden made a great breach. It has been conspicuously shown that all men of science are not non-religious, and still less anti-religious. M. Pasteur's scientific eminence is beyond all chance of dispute, and he has been one of those few fortunate enquirers who have seen their discoveries bear practical fruit in their own lifetime. Nor can it be denied that there is a certain congruity between his enthusiastic profession of faith and the scientific doctrines which he has gone far to establish; for though these doctrines prove nothing whatever as to the religious belief of the persons who now hold them, there is no doubt that at one time spontaneous generation was the badge of the convinced Materialist; and M. Pasteur has exploded spontaneous generation. Independently of this, however, an observer of this day must have but small knowledge of human nature, but small acquaintance with the opinions of living men of science and with the conditions of the problem which they, like all their fellow-men, most solve, to adopt this hasty but widespread French assumption that all scientific men are non-religious, and that there is irreconcilable opposition between science and religion. The experienced and well-informed observer, on the appearance of the Darwinian theory, would rather have set himself to speculate on what ground religious belief would hereafter rest than on the time and manner of its possible extinction. He would have seen that the theory profoundly altered the aspect of the religious problem; but that it did nothing to dispel the mystery before birth and the mystery after death, and the shortness of the time within which the mystery has to be penetrated. M. Renan's reply to M. Pasteur was in reality addressed to an irrelevant issue. He manifestly intended to oppose not the general contention of the new Academician, but the per suasion of many who applauded him that the exact dogmas taught by French priests in French Catholic churches, and partially imposed on French schools, depended on facts sustained by adequate historical evidence. This is a very different question from that question of the radical antagonism between science and religion on which the bulk of the French Republican party affect to have finally taken up a definite position. It is one thing to assert that the religious problem has been wrongly solved by a particular church or by a particular faith, and quite another to say that there is no problem whatever to be dealt with.
 The truth is that the special accentuation of the points of difference between religious men and scientific men which characterise our day—extending over a wide field in France and one much smaller in our country —is largely due to temporary causes. In England it is in a great measure attributable to the former religions exclusiveness and strictness of orthodox standard maintained in our older universities. It must be an astonishing reflection to the younger generation of Englishmen that the famous university men of fifty years ago whom they constantly hear praised had not the smallest tincture of science. The Oxford men —Newman, Manning, and Arnold—knew nothing of it. The Cambridge man, Darwin, when at a school which was a principal feeder of Cambridge, heard his pursuits described by the headmaster as the cultivation of "stinks"—which, indeed, became the popular university term for them. Thus arose a deep dislike of the universities, at all events of Oxford, by the few men with scientific tastes whom they reared and the larger scientific class outside. And, as the proscription or discouragement of all science except mathematics was brought about by clerical influence, a natural antagonism between the clergyman and the experimentalist came to be taken for granted. Nevertheless, if the ministers of religion really were the natural enemies of science, we should greatly doubt whether the clergy of the Established Church were likely in the future to be the bitterest of its foes. The Established Church has always professed to be an educated church ; and this goes far to explain the state of English opinion which the death and funeral of Mr. Darwin proved to exist. The proscription of science is far likelier to proceed from the small knots of dissenters rigidly controlling their clergy.
 The quarrel with religion in which a large part of the French nation has engaged is undoubtedly at root a quarrel with the Catholic clergy. The part in it taken by the French scientific men seems to have commenced low down in French society. Soon after the beginning of the second empire it was observable that in every village the doctor was the opponent of the priest and the champion of the schoolmaster, whom the priest was supposed to oppress ; and the doctor was almost invariably a Materialist in theory and a Republican in politics. Thus the dispute in France began rather from the bottom than from the top; and no doubt this is the reason why it was raised to such a heat by the establishment of the Republic. The unexpected fact which soon showed itself was the sympathy of the great bulk of the population with the doctor rather than with the priest: and it now appears to be perfectly clear that the yoke of the clergy had been far more galling to the rural population than even Frenchmen had supposed. In fact, the priest was himself the servant of a watchful and exacting master. Pope Pius IX. had openly broken, not only with science, about which he neither knew nor cared anything, but with history, with modern philosophy, and with modern politics. He allowed no departure from the ideas which had sprung up in his own brain; and these ideas were spread over the whole Catholic world by the legion of regular clergy of "unauthorised" orders, which penetrated to every part of it. The intellectual shoulders of the French peasantry are broad enough ; but there seems no question whatever that the burden of belief latterly put upon them was heavier than they could bear, and they have all but shaken it off. It is in their cottages and councils, rather than in the schools of Paris, that the fate of religious institutions will be decided for French men of the next generation.

South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1858 - 1889), Tuesday 20 June 1882, page 7