#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