, except by examining the grounds
on which it rests. It is possible that the great majority of voices that
swell the clamor against every book which is regarded as heretical, are
the voices of those who would deem it criminal even to open that book,
or to enter into any real, searching, and impartial investigation of the
subject to which it relates. Innumerable pulpits support this tone of
thought, and represent, with a fervid rhetoric _well fitted to excite
the nerves and imaginations of women_, the deplorable condition of
all who deviate from a certain type of opinions or emotions; a blind
propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates into countless
households, poisoning the peace of families, chilling the mental
confidence of husband and wife, _adding immeasurably to the difficulties
which every searcher into truth has to encounter, and diffusing far and
wide intellectual timidity, disingenuousness, and hypocrisy_."--Lecky.

2. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern
countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the
danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct,
seem always to have perceived."--Buckle.

3. "In the fourth century there arose monachism, and in, the sixth
century the Christians succeeded in cutting off the last ray of
knowledge, and shutting up the schools of Greece. Then followed a long
period of theology, ignorance, and vice."--Puckle.

4. "Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of
Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it
feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in
his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of
the natural sciences was ever odious to it, and was ever regarded with a
suspicious eye, as being a _dangerous enemy to the success of miracles_;
and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow
some physical absurdities. _The triumph of Christianity was thus
the final signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of
philosophy_."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_.

"Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, _though
unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in splendor after
the invention of printing_, was at this period sufficiently powerful to
accomplish their ruin."--Ibid.

"In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the
human mind _r