The subordinate clergy were often, perhaps generally, faithful to the great truths transmitted by the primitive Christians, but, dependent on tradition, and subject to the rule of their sacerdotal superiors, they in vain resisted these influences, and these truths became in time so corrupted as scarcely to retain any resemblance to the original faith. It is believed that, except in these “dark ages,” the Caucasian mind has never retrograded or indeed remained stationary. Progress is the law, the instinct, the necessity of the Caucasian mind, and however much some branches or some nations may decline, there is always some portion, nationality, or community, that embodies the wants of the race, and that moves forward in pursuit of that indefinite perfectability which is its specific and distinguishing characteristic. But it is easily understood how this might have suffered an eclipse under the circumstances then existing. A great proportion of the so-called barbarian conquerors of Rome were ignorant of Christianity, and when they became the converts of the conquered Romans, they naturally exalted their teachers as beings almost superhuman in their superior knowledge; and the general ignorance of the times favored any pretension of the priests, however absurd it might be. In fact a body of men claiming to be, and universally believed to be, the interpreters of the will of the Almighty, necessarily interrupted all inquiry into the laws of nature (the real laws of God), and though some monks themselves, immured in their cells, continued to think, to experiment, to acquire knowledge, as well as in many instances to preserve that already acquired by others, the great mass of the people as well as the great body of the clergy looked upon everything of the kind as wicked, impious, and heretical. And we have only to suppose an intellectual activity and freedom corresponding with our own times throughout these dark centuries, to realize the stupendous evil inflicted on the world by this priestly arrogance and ambition.