"There was no far reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the physical condition of the nations. Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development, indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields. * * * Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled." For centuries, and centuries, in the Western Empire, subsequent to the invasion of the barbarians, when the Church this Toronto prelate owes allegiance to, had absolute control, such was the dense ignorance that scarcely a layman could be found who could sign his own name. There was very little learning, and what little there was the clergy carefully and jealously confined to themselves; and as Hallam, the historian, tells us:-- "A cloud of ignorance overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness." The same historian (Middle Ages, p. 460,) tells us:--"France reached her lowest point at the beginning of the eighth century, but England was, at that time, more respectable, and did not fall into complete degradation until the middle of the ninth. There could be nothing more deplorable than the state of Italy during the succeeding century. In almost every council the ignorance of the clergy forms a subject for reproach. It is asserted by one held in 992 that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to one another." Lecky, in his "History of Morals," vol. 2, p. 222, tells us that: "Mediæval Catholicity discouraged and suppressed, in every way, secular studies," and further, that, "Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities; not until Mahomedan science and classical freethought and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe commence."