7. "Taught that education for her was indelicate and irreligious, she has been kept in such gross ignorance as to fall a prey to superstition, and to glory in her own degradation... Such was the prejudice against a liberal education for woman, that the first public examination of a girl in geometry (1829) created as bitter a storm of ridicule as has since assailed women who have entered the law, the pulpit, or the medical profession."--Ibid. Appendix Q. 1. "The five writers to whose genius we owe the first attempt at comprehensive views of history were Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. Of these the second was but a cold believer in Christianity, if, indeed, he believed in it at all; and the other four were avowed and notorious infidels."--Buckle. 2 "Here, then, we have the starting-point of progress--_scepticism_.... All, therefore, that men want is _no hindrance_ from their political and religious rulers.... Until common minds doubt respecting religion they can never receive any new scientific conclusion at variance with it--as Joshua and Copernicus."--Ibid. 3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if possible, equal to the learning, did find readers, but the illustrious author was so cruelly reviled by men who called themselves Christians, that it seemed doubtful if, after such an example, subsequent writers would hazard their comfort and happiness by attempting to write philosophic history. Middleton wrote in 1750.... As long as the theological spirit was alive nothing could be effected."--Ibid.