Know you, then, what it is that raises a protest, that keeps these two spirits steadily apart, preventing them from coming nearer? It is a huge reality, born five hundred years ago; a gigantic creation accursed by the Church, even that mighty fabric of science and modern institutions, which she excommunicated stone by stone, but which with every anathema has grown a storey higher. You cannot name one science which has not been itself a rebellion. There is but one way of reconciling the two spirits, of joining into one the two churches. Demolish the younger, that one which from its first beginning was pronounced guilty and doomed as such. Let us, if we can, destroy the natural sciences, the observatory, the museum, the botanical garden, the schools of medicine, and all the modern libraries. Let us burn our laws, our bodies of statutes, and return to the Canon Law. All these novelties came of Satan. Each step forward has been a crime of his doing. He was the wicked logician who, despising the clerical law, preserved and renewed that of jurists and philosophers, grounded on an impious faith, on the freedom of the will. He was that dangerous magician who, while men were discussing the sex of angels and other questions of like sublimity, threw himself fiercely on realities, and created chemistry, physics, mathematics--ay, even mathematics. He sought to revive them, and that was rebellion. People were burnt for saying that three made three. Medicine especially was a Satanic thing, a rebellion against disease, the scourge so justly dealt by God. It was clearly sinful to check the soul on its way towards heaven, to plunge it afresh into life! What atonement shall we make for all this? How are we to put down, to overthrow, this pile of insurrections, whereof at this moment all modern life is made up? Will Satan destroy his work, that he may tread once more the way of angels? That work rests on three everlasting rocks, Reason, Right, and Nature. * * * * * So great is the triumph of the new spirit, that he forgets his battles, hardly at this moment deigns to remember that he has won. It were not amiss to remind him of his wretched beginnings, how coarsely mean, how rude and painfully comic were the shapes he wore in the season of persecution, when through a woman, even the unhappy Witch, he made his first homely flights in science. Bolder than the heretic, the half-Christian reasoner, the scholar who kept one foot within the sacred circle, this woman eagerly escaped therefrom, and under the open sunlight tried to make herself an altar of rough moorland stones. She has perished, as she was certain to perish. By what means? Chiefly by the progress of those very sciences which began with her, through the physician, the naturalist, for whom she had once toiled. The Witch has perished for ever, but not the Fay. She will reappear in the form that never dies.