{34} The lessons thus taught were clear and convincing. Many intelligent minds saw that Protestants as well as Catholics lacked not merely the charitable spirit of the gospel, but likewise that knowledge and authority, which are the certain results of divine revelation. The result was soon apparent. A violent reaction followed. Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation, is now the stronghold of infidelity. And why was this? What was it that made large numbers of the best men in Europe hate both the Catholic and Protestant religions? Why did Ricetto, Bruno and Servetus in the hour of martyrdom turn with loathing from that sacred emblem, the crucifix? The reason was simply this: So-called Christianity had been made to them identical with the most horrible oppression of mind, because they who had assumed to represent Christianity had misrepresented it. In other words, the absurd theories, rigid dogmas and heathenish superstitions of apostate Christianity bore no more resemblance to the benign and heavenly principles of the gospel, than an ancient Egyptian mummy, with its shrunken skeleton and ghostly visage, bears to the person of a living being in the meridian of his mental and physical powers. (_See appendix to Vol. IV. Histoire des Mathematiques._) Did space permit it would be easy to show that the Protestant sects have opposed scientific truth as bitterly, and been overthrown as completely as Rome has ever been. Not merely in the examples {35} of geography and astronomy, but also in chemistry and natural philosophy, as shown in the imprisonment of Roger Bacon and John Barillon; in anatomy and surgery as illustrated in the persecutions against Versalius, the great anatomist of the sixteenth century. Nor was it merely in the olden times that this opposition was manifest. Scarcely eighty years have passed since Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination, barely escaped with his life from the persecutions of leading religionists in Protestant England, for conferring upon mankind the knowledge of prevention of a horrible disease. So, also, in 1847, James Y. Simpson, the eminent Scotch physician, who did so much to alleviate human suffering by means of anaesthetics, was denounced throughout Europe and America by the leading Protestant ministers. The persecutors seemed to forget that, in the first surgical operation of which we have record, God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam. (See _Genesis ii._, 21.)