apidly descending from the height to which it had
raised itself_... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and perfidy....
Theological reveries, superstitions, delusions, are become the sole
genius of man, religious _intolerance his only morality_; and Europe,
crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and military despotism, awaits in
blood and in tears the moment when the _revival of light shall restore
it to liberty, to humanity, and to virtue_.... The priests held human
learning in contempt.... Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces.
Executioners, _under the guidance of legates and priests_, put to
death those whom the soldiers had spared. _A tribunal of monks was
established, with power of condemning to the stake whoever should be
suspected of making use of his reason_.... All sects, all governments,
every species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in
every point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the
exercise of reason.... Meanwhile education, being everywhere subjected
[to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general understanding,
by _clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious
prejudices of their country_... In the eighth century an ignorant pope
had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round,
in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the
fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable,
delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, _accused of having
proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth_. The greatest genius
that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and
infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and
from prison, by asking pardon of God for having taught men better to
understand his works."--Ibid.

Appendix H.

1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the seventeenth
century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by women.--See
Hallam's "Lit. of Europe."

2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the
little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their
education."--Buckle.

3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason prevails
amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many Christians think it
almost a matter of duty to decry the human faculties as poor, mean,
and almost worthless; and thus seek to exalt piety at the expense of
intelligence."--Morell's "Hist. of Speculativ