acious in preventing or
diminishing plagues and pestilence than have the intervention of the
priest or the practice of prayer. Those in England who hold the old
faith that prayer will suffice to cure disease are to-day termed
"peculiar people", and are occasionally indicted for manslaughter when
their sick children die, because the parents have trusted to God instead
of appealing to the resources of science.

It is certainly a clear gain to astronomical science that the Church
which tried to compel Galileo to unsay the truth has been overborne by
the growing unbelief of the age, even though our little children are
yet taught that Joshua made the sun and moon stand still, and that for
Hezekiah the sun-dial reversed its record. As Buckle, arguing for the
morality of scepticism, says (1):

1 "History of Civilisation", vol. i, p. 345.

"As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate
finger of God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the
modes by which the deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty
of the blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such
supernatural appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the
causes of these mysterious phaenomena, it is necessary that they should
believe, or at all events that they should suspect, that the phaenomena
themselves were capable of being explained by the human mind."

As in astronomy so in geology, the gain of knowledge to humanity has
been almost solely in measure of the rejection of the Christian theory.
A century since it was almost universally held that the world was
created 6,000 years ago, or at any rate, that by the sin of the first
man, Adam, death commenced about that period. Ethnology and Anthropology
have only been possible in so far as, adopting the regretful words of
Sir W. Jones, "intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt
the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses concerning the
primitive world".

Surely it is clear gain to humanity that unbelief has sprung up against
the divine right of kings, that men no longer believe that the monarch
is "God's anointed" or that "the powers that be are ordained of God". In
the struggles for political freedom the weight of the Church was mostly
thrown on the side of the tyrant. The homilies of the Church of England
declare that "even the wicked rulers have their power and authority from
God ", and that "such subjects as are disobedient o