Emerson—Science and Religion

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)

The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God’s empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal entry for March 4, 1831