entery,
typhoid, small pox, and many dietary and metabolic diseases. Since 1880,
the medical sciences have accomplished a total net saving of human life
from all diseases which, if equally distributed among the population,
would add sixteen years to the life span of each person. In 1880, the
average duration of human life, that is, the average age at which death
occurred, was 41.78 years. In 1925, the average duration of life was
58.29 years. In other words, those born at this time live on the average
16.5 years longer than those born at any time prior to 1880. In a
population of 120,000,000 this would mean a total of 1,920,000,000
additional years of life. Such a figure is as difficult to conceive of
as are the interstellar spaces. This is one contribution, numerically
expressed, which medical science and its offspring, preventive medicine,
have made to humanity in the short space of fifty years.

Indeed if, as the religionists believe, there is a god, he could not
have punished his subjects more than by instilling in them the "dementia
religiosa." If the Church had not taught that the sum total of all
knowledge was contained in the Bible, and prohibited, on pain of death
and confiscation of property, the promulgation of any discoveries, men
would have reasoned as they are accustomed to at the present day, and we
would not be 2000 years behind in all branches of learning.

But there has never been an advance in science of widespread importance,
which in some manner endangered some mouldy religious concept, that the
Church has not bitterly opposed; an advance which in time has proven of
inestimable good for all mankind. (A glance at the history of human
progress will reveal scores of such instances.) The opposition to
medicine, as previously noted, is only one of many examples which might
have been chosen. In proportion, as the grasp of theology upon education
tightened, medicine declined, and in proportion, as the grip relaxed,
medicine developed.

CHAPTER VIII

RELIGION AND ASTRONOMY

In the early Church, astronomy, like other branches of science, was
looked upon as futile, since the New Testament taught that the earth was
soon to be destroyed and new heavens created.

The heavenly bodies were looked upon by the theologians as either living
beings possessing souls, or as the habitation of the angels. However, as
time passed, the geocentric doctrine, the doctrine that the earth is the
center of the unive