The lesson we learn from such a cursory glance as this necessarily is at the intellectual progress of Europe during the last two thousand years is full of the deepest meaning. We cannot help being struck by the dogged manner in which the Christian religion has opposed all progress, ruthlessly murdering in cold blood any who dared to suggest that the now-established and universally-accepted theories might possibly possess some little of the truth. Every new scientific truth or discovery has been denounced by the Church, every great benefactor to the human race persecuted and hunted to death by the sleuth-hounds of bigotry and intolerance, and every European war or massacre hatched out of religious differences. To this very day the Church, though robbed of all its old power to inflict evil and misery, persists in its denunciation of all scientific discoveries; and not one of the numerous sects which at present divide the Christian Church is exempt from this charge. Hegel, Bunsen, John Stuart Mill, Rénan, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Carpenter, Herbert Spencer, Emerson, Haeckel, Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo, and, in short, all the leaders of thought of our century, have incurred the bitter hostility of the various Christian sects; and yet what a heirloom the works of these men form for the coming generation! The discovery of the power of chloroform and ether to relieve pain was denounced by the Church because it was proposed to apply it to the relief of the agony of childbirth, the natural inheritance of woman under the divine curse of Eden; the abolition of slavery was also opposed by these human parasites because the practice was ordered in the Bible; and it is well known how the priests of the Church utilised for their own purposes those abominable texts of the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and “Neither shalt thou countenance a poor man in his own cause.”