Tyndall, bearing upon this subject, lately appeared in the London Times:
"A learned French friend has favored me with a copy of a letter recently published in France, and bearing the following title: 'Letter of Monsignor the Bishop of Montpellier to the Deans and Professors of the Faculties at Montpellier.' Its date is the 8th of this month of December, 1875. One or two extracts from it may not be without their value for the people of England and of America, to whom, in our day, has fallen the problem of education in relation to the claims of Rome.
"The bishop writes to the deans and professors aforesaid:
"'Now, gentlemen, the holy Church holds herself to be invested with the absolute right to teach mankind; she holds herself to be the depositary of the truth—not a fragmentary truth, incomplete, a mixture of certainty and hesitation, but the total truth, complete, from a religious point of view. Much more, she is so sure of the infallibility conferred on her by her Divine Founder, as the magnificent dowry of their indissoluble alliance, that even in the natural order of things, scientific or philosophical, moral or political, she will not admit that a system can be adopted and sustained by Christians, if it contradict definite dogmas. She considers that the voluntary and obstinate denial of a single point of her doctrine involves the crime of heresy, and she holds that all formal heresy, if it be not courageously rejected prior to appearing before God, carries with it the certain loss of grace and of eternity.
"'As defined by Pope Leo X., at the Sixth Council of the Lateran, "Truth cannot contradict itself; consequently, every assertion contrary to a revealed verity of faith is necessarily and absolutely false." It follows from this, without entering into the examination of this or that question of physiology, but solely by the certitude of our dogmas, we are able to pronounce judgment on any hypothesis which is an anti-Christian engine of war rather than a serious conquest over the secrets and mysteries of nature.'
"Liberty is a fine word, tyranny a hateful one, and both have been eloquently employed of late in reference to the dealings of the secular arm with the pretensions of the Vatican. But 'liberty' has two mutually exclusive meanings—the liberty of Rome to teach mankind, and the liberty of the human race. Neither reconcilement nor compromise is possible here. One liberty or the other must go down. This, in our day, is the 'conflict' so impressively described by Draper, in which every thoughtful man must take a part. There is no dimness in the eyes of Rome as regards her own aims; she sees with a clearness unapproached by others that the school will be either her stay or her ruin. Hence the supreme effort she is now making to obtain the control of education; hence the assertion by the Bishop of Montpellier of her 'absolute right to teach mankind.' She has, moreover, already tasted the fruits of this control in Bavaria, where the very liberality of an enlightened king led to the fatal mistake of confiding the schools of the kingdom to the 'doctors of Rome.'
| "Your obedient servant, |
| John Tyndall. |
| "Athenæum, December 16, 1875." |
The University of Montpellier, to the deans and faculties of which the above notification is addressed, is one of the oldest and most honored universities of Europe. It was founded in the twelfth century, its medical faculty by the Spanish Arabs. Situated in what was formerly called Languedoc, one of the southern portions of France, it has a botanical garden, the first that was established in Christendom. Its Observatory has for ages been in repute, its Museums of Natural History and Fine Art have long been celebrated. It has made its city one of the intellectual centres of France.
In this university was first translated into Latin Ptolemy's great Greek work, the "Alma Gest." One of the regents was the first European to make tables of the moon, and to determine the obliquity of the ecliptic. He is honorably mentioned by Copernicus. In literature it is distinguished by being the seat of the earliest cultivation of a modern language. From the romance literature of Langue d'Oc, Petrarch and Dante took their inspirations.
But in another respect it has a memorable celebrity. Here the Inquisition was first organized, and Languedoc was the seat of the most dreadful persecutions that the world has ever witnessed. Thousands of persons were put to death, whole cities were burnt. The French Protestantism of the middle ages was extinguished by fire and sword. The professors and doctors of the university were expelled from the country.
