hat a man ever lived who
put his honest thought against such teaching when launched by men
clothed in almost absolute authority!

Hypatia might have lived yesterday, and her death at the hands of a mob
was an accident that might have occurred in Boston, where a respectable
company once threw a rope around the neck of a good man and ran him
through streets supposed to be sacred to liberty and free speech.

A mob is made up of cotton waste, saturated with oil, and a focused idea
causes spontaneous combustion. Let a fire occur in almost any New York
State village, and the town turns wrecker, and loot looms large in the
limited brain of the villager. Civilization is a veneer.

When one sees emotionalism run riot at an evangelistic revival, and five
thousand people are trooping through an undesirable district at
midnight, how long, think you, would a strong voice of opposition be
tolerated?

Hypatia was set upon by a religious mob as she was going in her carriage
from her lecture-hall to her home. She was dragged to a near-by church
with the intent of making her publicly recant, but the embers became a
blaze, and the blaze became a conflagration, and the leaders lost
control. The woman's clothes were torn from her back, her hair torn from
her head, her body beaten to a pulp, dismembered, and then to hide all
traces of the crime and distribute the guilt so no one person could be
blamed, a funeral-pyre quickly consumed the remains of what but an hour
before had been a human being. Daylight came, and the sun's rays could
not locate the guilty ones.

Orestes made a report of the affair, resigned his office, asked the
Government at Rome to investigate, and fled from the city. Had Orestes
endeavored to use his soldiery against the Bishop, the men in the ranks
would have revolted. The investigation was postponed from time to time
for lack of witnesses, and finally it was given out by the Bishop that
Hypatia had gone to Athens, and there had been no mob and no tragedy.

The Bishop nominated a successor to Orestes, and the new official was
confirmed.

Dogmatism as a police system was supreme.

It continued until the time of Dante, or the Italian Renaissance. The
reign of Religious Dogmatism was supreme for well-nigh a thousand
years--we call it the Dark Ages.

[Illustration: SAINT BENEDICT]

SAINT BENEDICT

If any pilgrim monk come from distant parts, if with wish as a
guest to dwell in the monastery,