red and forty thousand persons, and of these, nearly 32,000 had been
burnt.

"It is perfectly certain that the Catholic Church has taught, and still
teaches that intellectual liberty is dangerous, that it should be
forbidden. It was driven to take this position because it had taken
another. It taught, and still teaches, that a certain belief is
necessary to salvation. It has always known that investigation and
inquiry led, or might lead, to doubt; that doubt leads, or may lead, to
heresy, and that heresy leads to Hell. In other words, the Catholic
Church has something more important than this world, more important than
the well-being of man here. It regards this life as an opportunity for
joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the saving of
your soul. If the history of the world proves anything, if proves that
the Catholic Church was for many centuries the most merciless
institution that ever existed among men. We, too, know that the
Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of
every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies,
priests to physicians. It hated geologists, persecuted the chemists, and
imprisoned the naturalists, and opposed every discovery of science
calculated to improve the condition of mankind. There is no crime that
the Catholic Church did not commit, no cruelty that it did not reward,
and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most
powerful enemy of human rights. In one hand, it carried an alms dish,
and in the other, a dagger. It argued with the sword, persecuted with
poison, and convicted with faggot." R. G. Ingersoll, "_Rome or Reason_."

"From the time of Newton to our own day, the divergence of science from
the dogmas of the Church has steadily increased. The Church declared
that the earth is the central and most important body in the Universe,
that the sun and moon and stars are tributary to it. On these points she
was worsted by astronomy. She affirmed that a universal deluge had
covered the earth; that the only surviving animals were such as had been
saved in the Ark. In this, her error was established by geology. She
taught that there was a first man who, some 6000 or 8000 years ago, was
suddenly created or called into existence in a condition of physical and
moral perfection, and from that condition he fell. But anthropology has
shown that human beings existed far back in geological time, and in a
savage state bu