In the preceding chapter, I presented three different registers in which science might be styled an “art of living” drawn from the early nineteenth century. Once reordered, they recapitulate stages in the history of Christianity: Whewell wanting to invest in science the monasticism that had served as the vanguard of Christian spirituality in the Middle Ages, Goethe trying to recapture the first flowering of the Reformation in the midst of the Renaissance and Saint-Simon modernizing the stratified sense of authority that continued to serve Roman Catholicism well through successive periods of political and religious upheaval. Now, two centuries later, science itself is subject to secularization, just as Christendom was in the mid-seventeenth century, say, at the end of the English Civil War or the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. In this context, we might think of today's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences as akin to the old established churches that either bless or damn politicians, according to their stance on the latest millenarian crisis, be it brought on by microbial invaders or self-induced carbon emissions. (The interesting difference is that 350 years ago the authorities would have generally discouraged the millenarian prognosis that “the end is near”) In response, it would be a mistake to conclude that people are losing their faith in science per se; rather they are losing the compulsion to conform to a specific orthodoxy that is upheld by a specially anointed class of priests. In short, just as the secularization of Christianity led to the customization of religious life, the same is now beginning to happen in the case of science.