essed, were
entertained by Calvin. So far as science is concerned, nothing is owed
to the Reformation. The Procrustean bed of the Pentateuch was still
before her.

In the annals of Christianity the most ill-omened day is that in which
she separated herself from science. She compelled Origen, at that time
(A.D. 231) its chief representative and supporter in the Church, to
abandon his charge in Alexandria, and retire to Caesarea. In vain
through many subsequent centuries did her leading men spend themselves
in--as the phrase then went--"drawing forth the internal juice and
marrow of the Scriptures for the explaining of things." Universal
history from the third to the sixteenth century shows with what result.
The dark ages owe their darkness to this fatal policy. Here and there,
it is true, there were great men, such as Frederick II. and Alphonso X.,
who, standing at a very elevated and general point of view, had detected
the value of learning to civilization, and, in the midst of the dreary
prospect that ecclesiasticism had created around them, had recognized
that science alone can improve the social condition of man.

The infliction of the death-punishment for difference of opinion was
still resorted to. When Calvin caused Servetus to be burnt at Geneva, it
was obvious to every one that the spirit of persecution was unimpaired.
The offense of that philosopher lay in his belief. This was, that the
genuine doctrines of Christianity had been lost even before the time of
the Council of Nicea; that the Holy Ghost animates the whole system of
Nature, like a soul of the world, and that, with the Christ, it will
be absorbed, at the end of all things, into the substance of the Deity,
from which they had emanated. For this he was roasted to death over a
slow fire. Was there any distinction between this Protestant auto-da-fe
and the Catholic one of Vanini, who was burnt at Toulouse, by the
Inquisition, in 1629, for his "Dialogues concerning Nature?"

The invention of printing, the dissemination of books, had introduced
a class of dangers which the persecution of the Inquisition could not
reach. In 1559, Pope Paul IV. instituted the Congregation of the Index
Expurgatorius. "Its duty is to examine books and manuscripts intended
for publication, and to decide whether the people may be permitted to
read them; to correct those books of which the errors are not numerous,
and which contain certain useful and salutary truths, so as to br