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WHY I AM AN INFIDEL
29

in a chapel. Religion is a matter of feeling, and "feelings are all right if one does not get drunk on them." "Obsolete misleading theologies," he said, "bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education." But what will become of the children? If there was one thing Burbank was zealous about it was the training of children, and children are, he said, "the greatest sufferers from outgrown theologies."

No, there is not much to add to that. Luther II threw his ink-pot at the devil—the parson—with a vigor that surprises when one recalls the fleshy physique of the first Luther, and contrasts it with the gentleness and silver hair of the second. But he is as disgusted as I at the "timidity" of his brother scientists in America. I explain, almost apologetically, that I have entitled an article "The Cowardice of American Scientists."

"Quite right," he says. "And it is not only cowardice, but wrong tactics. What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, 'Certainly not with our religion.'"

Burbank uses the word religion, but it is never misleading. It is, he says, "justice, love, truth, peace and harmony, a serene unity with science and the laws of the universe." It is idealism, and there is not the slightest countenance of any sort of theology in Burbank's use of the word.

I remind him that Dr. David Starr Jordan is