4. "Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was ever odious to it, and was ever regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a _dangerous enemy to the success of miracles_; and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow some physical absurdities. _The triumph of Christianity was thus the final signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of philosophy_."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_. "Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, _though unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in splendor after the invention of printing_, was at this period sufficiently powerful to accomplish their ruin."--Ibid. "In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the human mind _rapidly descending from the height to which it had raised itself_... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and perfidy.... Theological reveries, superstitions, delusions, are become the sole genius of man, religious _intolerance his only morality_; and Europe, crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and military despotism, awaits in blood and in tears the moment when the _revival of light shall restore it to liberty, to humanity, and to virtue_.... The priests held human learning in contempt.... Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces. Executioners, _under the guidance of legates and priests_, put to death those whom the soldiers had spared. _A tribunal of monks was established, with power of condemning to the stake whoever should be suspected of making use of his reason_.... All sects, all governments, every species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in every point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the exercise of reason.... Meanwhile education, being everywhere subjected [to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general understanding, by _clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious prejudices of their country_... In the eighth century an ignorant pope had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, _accused of having proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth_. The greatest genius that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and from prison, by asking pardon of God for having taught men better to understand his works."--Ibid. Appendix H. 1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the seventeenth century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by women.--See Hallam's "Lit. of Europe."