The spiritual aspect of this despotism was the strangest of all. "We can, to a certain extent, imagine that, although evil may result from it, mankind may abandon to a visible authority the direction of their material interests and temporal destiny. We can understand the philosopher who, on being informed that his house was on fire, answered, 'Go and tell my wife. I have nothing to do with the affairs of the household.' But when the matter at issue is conscience, thought, the inward moral existence, for men to abdicate the government of themselves, and to give themselves up to a foreign sway, is an actual moral suicide, a servitude a hundred times more abject than can befall the body, or than that endured by the tethered serf."[7] One is terrified at the sight of the moral prostration of Europe for so long a period, and shrinks from the thought of the eternal state of millions thus enslaved, while an instinctive shudder agitates the soul at the bare conception of the acts of presumptuous insolence towards the King of Zion, committed by those who usurped his authority over the consciences of men. But it is the social condition of Europe during the dark ages which forms our present subject, and therefore we must confine ourselves to the influence of the papacy as it bore in that direction. That influence was fearfully malign. Reducing, as it did, the souls of men to a state of spiritual slavery, robbing them of the birthright of moral inquiry, and interdicting the performance of the bounden duty of proving all things, and holding fast that which is good, it could not fail to cripple and weaken the human mind.