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White, president of Cornell University. White, although personally devout,
held an even stronger commitment to the first amendment and sought to
establish a nondenominational university. Speaking of his work with Ezra
Cornell, he wrote: "Far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to
promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism" (1896, vii).
White then presented his central thesis as a paragraph in bold italics:
In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of
religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has
resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science, and invariably; and,
on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how
dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be,
has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science.
(1896, viii)
White began his topic with a metaphor. As a member of the United States
embassy in Russia, he watches from his room above the Neva in St.
Petersburg as a crowd of Russian peasants breaks the ice barrier that still
dams the river as the April thaws approach. The peasants are constructing
hundreds of small channels through the ice, so that the pent-up river may
discharge gradually and not vent its fury in a great flood caused by sudden
collapse of the entire barrier:
The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are press- ing behind
[the ice dam]; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows
that it must yield. But there is a danger that it may .. . break suddenly,
wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation
to a vast population . . . The patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The
barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of
channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow
on beneficent and beautiful.
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