“Extinguished theologians . . ." (1958)

Quote from the March 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science. As the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not. neither can it forget, and though at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of “Genesis” contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade nature to the level of primitive Judaism.”

(T. H. Huxley on Darwin’s Origin of Species, “Westminster Review” 1860.)