With the union of church and state under Constantine began a period of mental and moral stagnation, which continued for about ten centuries. It was an anti-millennium, a thousand years of distinctively Christian rule, productive of every conceivable evil, with scarcely a redeeming feature. So black a night settled down on the human race that by common consent the epoch is appropriately known as that of the "Dark Ages." The church was sole master, and independence of thought was visited with torture and death. Persecution, massacre, religious wars without end, and extermination of whole populations and the merciless slaughter of the noblest of the race were its characteristics. Rome, the alleged "holy city," the centre of church power, was a pestilential swamp of vice and crime beyond the ability of words to describe. Not a ray of hope appeared in the blackness until the raising of voices against the extreme control of the church. The human mind refused to remain forever in fetters, and the rising movements of humanism and the renaissance witnessed the beginnings of the great revolt. The Protestant Reformation, an attempt to purify Christianity from within, succeeded in rending the church asunder, but failed to redeem it from the worst of its inherent evils. Its leaders loved religious liberty as little as did their Catholic rivals. Calvinism proved to be as ready to murder in the name of God as ever Romanism has been. Persecution of heretics, witch-hunting and the oppression of the whole people for the profit of ecclesiasticism went merrily on in all lands. The gradual fading out of these horrors has been brought about step by step by no other agency than by the gradual emancipation of the state from the clutches of the church. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY THE TEST OF PROGRESS.