396 Livingstone
clude that “In the Papacy we are face to face with an autocracy of the most
satanic character. Judging it by what is written, we can easily understand
what it would be for this country to come under its domination.”^65 In-
deed, Whitla had himself already given voice to precisely this species of
politico- religious fear. The Catholic Church, he insisted, “never falters,
never wavers in her endeavour to establish supreme ascendancy in the
domains of both politics and religion in whatever part of the world on
which she obtains a foothold.” Such were the only “lessons to be read
in the conditions which at present exist in Spain, Portugal, the South
American Republics... our own Province of Quebec.”^66 Biblical exegesis,
religious history and contemporary geopolitics thus convened to confi rm
the legitimacy of Ulster Unionist alarm.
It was with sentiments such as these in the atmosphere that Whitla
introduced Newton to his Belfast hearers. The restaging of Newton’s anti-
Catholicism, which found unambiguous expression in his prophetic work,
is thus hardly insignifi cant. As Newton read the political landscape foretold
in the biblical documents, he was certain he could discern the ways in which
papal dominion had spread beyond the ecclesiastical sphere and into the
political realm. For Whitla, salvaging Newton’s text was a means of valo-
rizing the spiritual space Ulster Protestants occupied, even if their political
geography was altogether precarious. Moreover, by readvertising Newton’s
exegesis, speculating about the date on which “the Papacy became fi rst
established as a temporal power,” and hinting at the eventual “extinction
of Papal Rome,” his inclinations were far from ambiguous.^67 To oversee the
republication of Newton’s anti- Catholic reading of Daniel during the earli-
est days of the Northern Ireland state was hardly fortuitous at a time when
the mantra “Home Rule means Rome Rule”—an expression to be found
on Whitla’s own lips—was reverberating throughout the society.^68
At every stage in the cycle of scientifi c culture, place matters. Where
scientifi c work is conducted and where its wares are encountered make a
difference to both the production and consumption sides of the enter-
prise. This means that if we are to understand the place of science in our
culture we will need to attend more carefully to the places of scientifi c
culture and to how these spaces have historically come into being.NOTES
- Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–23.
- David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientifi c Tradi-