Andrew Dickson White became the first president of Cornell University in 1866, at thirty four, in partnership with the businessman Ezra Cornell. The new institution was to be nonsectarian, admitting students without a religious test and giving no denomination control of its chairs, at a time when almost every American college was the property of one church or another. The reaction was fierce, and it came from pulpits and from the religious press.
White answered in 1869 with a public lecture called The Battle-Fields of Science, in which he set out a series of episodes where, as he read them, ecclesiastical authority had obstructed enquiry and lost. He expanded it into a small book in 1876 and finally into the two heavy volumes of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896.
He was careful, in every preface, to say what he thought he was doing. His enemy was dogmatic theology, the attempt to settle questions of fact by ecclesiastical authority; religion itself, he wrote, was purified rather than damaged by the process he described. He remained an Episcopalian all his life. The care was wasted on his readers, and the word in the title did the work: what the book delivered to the twentieth century was warfare.