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Updated: July 19, 2025
It is a Jewish fact in the sense that it was Judaism which first introduced the theory of the absolute in religion, and laid down the principle that every innovator, even if he brings miracles to support his doctrine, ought to be stoned without trial. The pagan world has also had its religious violences. But if it had had this law, how would it have become Christian?
And, in so far as it is religious feeling which thus prompts resistance to scientific innovation, it may be said, with some appearance of truth, that there is a conflict between religion and science. But there must always be two parties to a quarrel, and our statement has to be modified as soon as we consider what the scientific innovator impugns.
The sanguine innovator sneered or pitied; the truculent despot scowled or menaced; to the one his authority was an impediment, to the other his reputation was a reproach. It was a public situation as full of conflict as man ever occupied, and we are not astonished, on a nearer view, that it led, after three years hoping against hope, to the despairing secession of 1797.
Her spirit is eminently conservative, nay, in the opinion of all Protestants, conservative to an unreasonable and pernicious extent. A man who has been taught from childhood to regard with horror all innovation in religion is surely less likely than another man to be a bold innovator in politics.
Socrates, the Athenian sage, is an illustrious instance of the punishment that was meted out to the bold innovator who attempted to insult the gods and to poison the minds of youth with the heresies of a philosophic religion.
Crucify him! The promulgator of a new doctrine, and the violator of old laws and customs, that did not, like ours, melt into darkness and ignorance, but rested on Divine authority, must have been a dangerous innovator in your eyes, particularly if you had not been informed that the Carpenter's Son was of the stock and lineage of David." But vituperation is not argument, and abuse proves nothing.
Not a solitary miracle was wrought; none dreamed a dream; nobody had a vision; the Holy Ghost was as silent as the grave; none of all the Christians in Palestine showed his face, when Paul, loaded with chains, was transported from Jerusalem to Cæsarea. This silence speaks volumes. They did not care much about the innovator.
He was an innovator in modern political thought, and his application of the historical method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement than Bacon's application of the inductive method to science.
At last, this great theologian, this daring innovator, is summoned by imperial, not papal, authority before the Diet of the empire at Worms, where the Emperor, the great Charles V., presides, amid bishops, princes, cardinals, legates, generals, and dignitaries. Thither Luther must go, yet under imperial safe conduct, and consummate his protests, and perhaps offer up his life.
So that even in cases where one recognizes the substantial merits of the case for which the innovator is spokesman as may easily happen if the evils which he seeks to remedy are sufficiently remote in point of time or space or personal contact still one cannot but be sensible of the fact that the innovator is a person with whom it is at least distasteful to be associated, and from whose social contact one must shrink.
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