From a Church which has always opposed the education of the people, when she had the power, and exterminated or expatriated the best intellects under her jurisdiction, this talk of Freethinkers "re-plunging the world into the depths of barbarism" comes with a very bad grace from his Grace of Toronto. By this Church the Moriscoes were driven out of Spain--100,000 of them--and this because they were the friends of progress, of art and science. Buckle, the historian, tells us:--"When they were thrust out of Spain there was no one to fill their places; arts and manufactures either degenerated or were entirely lost, ard immense regions of arable land were left uncultivated; whole districts were suddenly deserted, and down to the present day have never been repeopled." The Jews also were expelled, as they, too, were in favor of knowledge and improvement, and this was sufficient cause for their expatriation. This relentless enemy--the Church--of all science, all progress in knowledge among the people, ruthlessly exterminated the best minds within its grasp for centuries. Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," vol. 1, p. 171-2, says:-- "During the same period the Holy Inquisition selected with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order to burn and imprison them. In Spain alone some of the best men, those who doubted and questioned--and without doubting and questioning there can be no progress--were eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a thousand a year." Talk to us of barbarism and paganism! A church which, from the time, nearly fifteen centuries ago, when she burnt the Alexandrian Libraries and Museum--the intellectual legacies of centuries--to the present time, has never yet called off her sleuth-hounds with which she has always hunted down the sacred principles of liberty of thought and freedom of conscience! A Church which from "the beginning of that unhappy contest," as Mosheim tells us, "between faith and reason, religion and philosophy, piety and genius, which increased in succeeding ages, and is prolonged even to our times with a violence which renders it extremely difficult to be brought to a conclusion," to this day, would hold the world in barbarous ignorance if its paralyzed hand could but avail against the resistless march of knowledge and truth! Draper, in speaking of the condition of the people under Catholicity in the 14th century, thus pictures the civilizing (?) and elevating influences of that Holy Religion:--