doubt respecting religion they
can never receive any new scientific conclusion at variance with it--as
Joshua and Copernicus."--Ibid.

3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if possible,
equal to the learning, did find readers, but the illustrious author
was so cruelly reviled by men who called themselves Christians, that
it seemed doubtful if, after such an example, subsequent writers would
hazard their comfort and happiness by attempting to write philosophic
history. Middleton wrote in 1750.... As long as the theological spirit
was alive nothing could be effected."--Ibid.

4. "The questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a
hundred years ago were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds
of years before that.... But the Church had known how to deal with
intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to
Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated, and for the
most part submissive; and _if they were not_, the arm of the Church was
very long and her grasp mortal.... They [the thinkers] could have taught
Europe _earlier than the Church allowed it to learn_, that the sun does
not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the
sun.... After the middle of the last century the insurrection against
the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity
was marked in one of its most important phases by a new, and most
significant, feature.... It was an advance both in knowledge and
in moral motive.... The philosophical movement was represented by
"Diderot" [leading the Encyclopaedist circle.]... Broadly stated the
great central moral of it was this: that human nature is good, that the
world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the
evil of the world _is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions_.
This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a
truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, _and
the beginning of a new dispensation.... Into what fresh and unwelcome
sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology... Every social
improvement since has been the outcome of that new doctrine in one form
or another_.... The teaching of the Church paints men as fallen and
depraved. The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the new fabric
rising was very natural.... The new secular knowledge clashed at
a thousand points, alike in letter and spirit, with t