Scientific credo

In an article I was reading for the New School History course, I found a reference to a novel of Sinclair Lewis' called Arrowsmith, which apparently perfectly exemplifies the philosemitism of mid-20th century understandings of the purity of the scientific project. One can't trust film adaptations, I know, but it's a long novel and the 1931 film is directed by John Ford. Here's the protagonist (played by Ronald Colman), who at one point offers a scientific prayer:

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste.

God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretence and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.

God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error.

God give me strength not to trust to God!

I don't know if Arrowsmith learned this from his tall gaunt Jewish mentor Dr. Gottlieb, nor am I competent to judge its relation to philosemitism. In any case, the secular but not Jewish Arrowsmith fails to live up to the creed, at least in the part of his life narrated in the film. One's wife's' death of a disease one had a serum to cure would addle most minds, surely. But there is hope yet. At the novel's end Arrowsmith leaves his cushy Bell Labs-like set-up in New York City for the woods of Vermont, where a manly fellow researcher invites him to a life of boy scout-like adventure and research.