The requested resignation of President Andrews, of Brown University, on account of his partisanship in [218] favor of "free silver," following, as it did, the removal, in late years, from high places, of quite a number of men for teaching condemned by the churches to which they belonged, has raised a howl of indignation from a large circle of secular and religious newspaper writers. These indignant gentlemen are clamoring for intellectual freedom, the right of untrammeled research, of unfettered liberty, of impartial inquiry, and I know not how many other things with high-sounding epithets attached to them, as if the thumbscrews of the Inquisition were about to be renewed. So loud is the clamor that one who is not moved to join in the cry is apt to be dazed, and to wonder what untold woes are threatening our unhappy country. One of these thoroughly indignant writers has startled us by proclaiming that "there is more political and theological bias and less intellectual freedom in the United States than in any other civilized country, except Russia--and Russia is only half civilized." What a reproach to "the land of the free and the home of the brave"! And what are we all coming to? Who can tell?

      But if one could only control his nerves and collect his thoughts amid this noise, he might be tempted to ask a few questions. He might ask whether, in order to exercise intellectual freedom, to pursue independent research, or to prosecute impartial investigation, it is absolutely necessary to be a president or a professor in a particular institution of learning that does not want him, or to occupy a pulpit in a church which desires to get rid of him. If I am not mistaken, a goodly number of the men who have made original research, and who have blessed the world by their investigations, have done so without being presidents or professors, and that freethinkers in respect to religion have not always occupied [219] pulpits in orthodox churches. If a man agrees with Ingersoll or with Wellhausen, why can he not enjoy as much intellectual freedom on the freethinker's platform as he can in a pulpit or in a professorship endowed for the promotion of religion?

      Again, one might ask why this coveted intellectual freedom should be so one-sided; why it is that some of it is not to be shared by boards of trustees or by the churches. If liberty of thought and action are to be a common heritage, why. should not the trustees of a college or a university be at liberty to decide who shall be their president, and who shall occupy their professorships? And why should not a church have the liberty to choose the men who shall reach in its name the rank and file of its membership? Does the fact that a mail has been elected to a professorship in a university deprive the legal guardians of the institution of all freedom of thought as to whether his teaching is beneficial or injurious to the institution? Should he plunge into the advocacy of some theory in religion or politics for whose advocacy he was not elected to his chair, and by this means drive away patronage or divert expected donations, have the responsible rulers who elected him no right to exercise their own judgment in removing him and selecting another? And in this country of fierce political battles, and hot blood growing out of these, what right has a professor in a college, the patronage of which is drawn from all political parties, to become an active propagandist for any one of them? When he does so he takes an unfair advantage of the position which he occupies, and when he incurs the natural consequences it is unmanly in him or his friends to complain. But this fault in a professor reaches its climax having been selected to give instruction in an [220] institution established and endowed to sustain and propagate belief in a certain religious system, he deliberately seeks to subvert that system, and then whines about a restriction of his intellectual freedom because he is justly deposed from the trust of which he has proved himself unworthy.

[SEBC 218-221]