yonic impediment. The
assertion of ecclesiastics that without the aid of religious learning
and influence our civilization would have been retarded is a statement
that a study of the development of man shows to be directly opposed to
the facts; that religion has been the greatest impediment in the road to
progress. This will be shown in the subsequent chapters. The
oft-repeated assertion that, during the Middle Ages, ecclesiastic
influence was the saving grace is well refuted by Dr. William J.
Robinson:

"We are told by the Church apologists that during the Middle Ages the
priests and monks kept up the torch of learning, that, being the only
literate people, they brought back the study of the classics.
Historically speaking, this is about the most impudent statement that
one could imagine. It was the Church that retarded human progress at
least one thousand years, it is the Church that put a thick,
impenetrable pall over the sun of learning and science, so that humanity
was enveloped in utter darkness, and if the priests and monks later
learned to read and write (from the Arabs, Jews, and Greeks exiled from
Constantinople after 1453), it is because they wanted to keep the power
in their hands; the people they did not permit to learn either to read
or write. _Even the reading of the Bible, bear in mind, was considered a
crime._ We are told that the priests and monks built hospitals and gave
alms to the poor. Having gotten enormous tracts of the best land into
their hands, so that the people were starving, they were willing to
throw a bone occasionally to the latter. It cost them nothing and it
gave them a reputation for charity. They built enormous monasteries with
well filled cellars, and lived on the fat of the land, while the people
lived in wretched hovels, working their lives away for a crust of bread.
The beasts, the domestic animals lived a more comfortable life than did
the men, women, and children of the people. And the Church never, never
raised a finger to ameliorate their condition. It kept them in
superstitious darkness and helped the temporal lords--for a long period
the spiritual were also the temporal lords--to keep them in fear,
subjection and slavery."

The Martian being an impartial observer examined what had been done by
Christianity for the intellectual and material advancement of humanity
during her long reign, and what had been done by science and purely
secular knowledge in its brief period of a