Science and the Church

Abstract

THE Editor of NATURE reminds me that in its first year of publication I was one of its contributors, and he asks me to write something for its jubilee issue. He goes on, further, to assign me a subject—“The General Attitude of the Church and the Religious Laity towards Science now compared with what it was fifty years ago”—and he limits me to “about a thousand words.” It is a sufficiently large subject for, say, ten or twenty thousand, and yet I am going to double that subject by adding the words “and that of the scientific world towards the Church.” I think there has been an equal change in both, and I take the latter half first.