Salient observation from 19th century Presbyterian minister Stuart Robinson, "The Pulpit and Sceptical Culture" (The Princeton Review, Fifty-Fith Year, p. 137):
One department, formerly considered a mere secondary power, seems, by its rapid advance in the precise knowledge of matter and its laws and by its skilful application of this knowledge to the practical uses of society, has gathered an immense popular following, that makes it all-powerful in an age in which learning has become democratic in its spirit. And as its power has increased so its pride and arrogance. Hitherto it had been characteristic of true science to confess that the extension of its knowledge was also the extension of its ignorance. Those who had advanced farthest in exploring the arcana of nature were first to confess how far short they had fallen of a full comprehension of them ; and that the result of all their knowledge of the mysteries of nature was only to find themselves confronted with still more insoluble mysteries. They plodded faithfully on in their effort to discover new facts in nature and patiently arrange them, slowly enlarging the domain of science. But the spirit of the recent scientists is entirely the reverse of all this.