fidelity.

Physiology and Medicine were opposed on similar grounds. We were all
fearfully and wonderfully made, and the less the mystery was looked into
the better. Disease was sent by God for his own wise ends, and to resist
it was as bad as blasphemy. Every discovery and every reform was decried
as impious. Men now living can remember how the champions of faith
denounced the use of anaesthetics in painful labor as an interference
with God's curse on the daughters of Eve.

Geology was opposed because it discredited Moses, as though that famous
old Jew had watched the deposit of every stratum of the earth's crust.
It was even said that fossils had been put underground by God to puzzle
the wiseacres, and that the Devil had carried shells to the hill-tops
for the purpose of deluding men to infidelity and perdition. Geologists
were anathematised from the pulpits and railed at by tub-thumpers. They
were obliged to feel their way and go slowly. Sir Charles Lyell had to
keep back his strongest conclusions for at least a quarter of a century,
and could not say all he thought until his head was whitened by old age
and he looked into the face of Death.

Biology was opposed tooth and nail as the worst of all infidelity. It
exposed Genesis and put Moses out of court. It destroyed all special
creation, showed man's' kinship with other forms of life, reduced Adam
and Eve to myths, and exploded the doctrine of the Fall. Darwin was for
years treated as Antichrist, and Huxley as the great beast. All that is
being changed, thanks to the sceptical spirit. Darwin's corpse is buried
in Westminster Abbey, but his ideas are undermining all the churches and
crumbling them into dust.

The gospel of Freethought brands persecution as the worst crime against
humanity. It stifles the spirit of progress and strangles its pioneers.
It eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the aspiring, and leaves
only the timid, the sluggish and the grovelling. It removes the lofty
and spares the low. It levels all the hills of thought and makes an
intellectual flatness. It drenches all the paths of freedom with blood
and tears, and makes earth the vestibule of hell.

Persecution is the right arm of priestcraft. The black militia of
theology are the sworn foes of Free-thought. They represent it as the
sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness in
this world or the next. When they speak of the Holy Ghost they mean
themselves. Freethought i