258 Roberts
promulgation of the “Syllabus of Errors” (1864) and the doctrine of papal
infallibility (1869), led Draper to throw down the gauntlet: “Roman Chris-
tianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being
absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the
other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.”^11
That the title of Draper’s volume was only tangentially related to its ac-
tual content suggests just how evocative the trope “religion and science”
had become by the 1870s. In 1876 James T. Bixby observed:The confl ict now going on between the physical discoveries and theories of
these latter days, and the forms of faith which have hitherto ruled the mind
of Christendom, is one of the most noticeable phenomena of the intellectual
movement of the times. The constant discussions from pulpit and platform,
the numerous essays, pamphlets, and books, in which these two opponents
are arrayed one against the other, and attack, defense, or effort at reconcili-
ation made, allow no intelligent man or woman to remain unaware of the
controversy.^12In the face of the growing tension between religion and science, Anglo
American opinion leaders who had no desire to dispense entirely with
either category developed a variety of strategies to harmonize the two
realms of human experience. At the institutional level, a number of col-
leges and universities established professorships dedicated to that task.
Efforts to establish appropriate lines of demarcation, however, extended
well beyond these institutional efforts. In fact, the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of what one commenta-
tor called “whole libraries” devoted to reconciling religion and science.
That estimate is confi rmed by the data contained in fi gures 10.1 and 10.2,
which reveal that what started as a trickle of books and articles addressing
“science and religion” before 1850 became a torrent in the 1870s.^13
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian
thinkers sympathetic to the scientifi c enterprise commonly emphasized
that “natural science is neither Christian nor anti- Christian, neither the-
istic nor atheistic, any more than the multiplication table.” They recog-
nized, however, that the work of scientists raised important interpretive
issues, such as the relationship between science and biblical testimony. In
dealing with that issue, most Christians who embraced the conclusions
of modern science shared the views of the Scottish clergyman James S.
Candlish, who suggested that “the general principle on which we must
ultimately fall back in all cases is, that the Bible contains a revelation of
religious truth and not of science at all, and in all its references to the