continue to fulminate her absurd and innocuous _anathemas_, but this is about all. The Holy Inquisition, with its two hundred and fifty thousand human victims; the Crusades with its five millions; the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its fifty thousand; to say nothing of the religious horrors of the Netherlands, of England, Scotland, and Ireland since the reformation--all these holy horrors, let us hope, are "hideous blots on the history of the past never to be repeated." Or will it be said of the future history of Christianity, as has been frankly admitted of its past by one of its ardent disciples, Baxter, that "Blood, blood, blood stains every page?" The tables are now turning. The Church, to-day, instead of burning unbelievers, and strangling science by immuring in dungeons its votaries, is herself being strangled by science (with no loss of human blood, however). Her cruel theology and irrational dogmas are prostrate, writhing in their death throes, at the feet of the Hercules of modern science and criticism. A little digression will not be out of order here. Our comic caricaturist at Toronto (of which, on the whole, Canada may feel proud), recently had a cartoon representing the theological Gamaliel of St. Michael's Palace, Toronto, strangling the _serpent_ "Freethought." Now, though usually on the side of truth and impartiality, _Grip_ has undoubtedly, in this case, taken an oblique squint at truth and justice, and has for once, at least, got the cart before the horse. Facts and truth demand that the positions of the gladiators in his cartoon must be reversed, and the zoological nomenclature corrected. And if _Grip_ had read Huxley and Tyndall, and correctly observed the signs of the times, he would scarcely have fallen into this unpardonable error. Let us quote Prof. Huxley on this subject of strangling serpents:-- "It is true that, if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply revenged. _Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules_; and history records that, whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and, though at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism."--_Lay Sermons_, p. 277-8.