To my poor mind, were all these innumerable productions of gloomy and bewildered intellects--misled and crazed by a monstrous Idolatry--swept for ever away, nothing would be lost--nothing, unless the most astonishing monument ever builded by man. However, it is doubtful whether to lose even this is not better than to have _anything_ left of so monstrous a Pretension. Whilst thus the Barbarian _brain_ wasted itself in this wretched work, and piled up its ponderous tomes of useless, and worse than useless, Literature--holding knowledge in general as vain, and _Science_, when, in Priestly interpretation, not according to the barbarous _Sacred Writings_, as a thing to be accursed--activity of body, during the same ages, did _its_ dreadful work. Directed by the Priests, one _Sect_ denounced another as _damnable_, and the stronger attempted to destroy the weaker by "fire and sword." New contentions would arise, to be crushed out by bloody execution; only to spring up again, to be again extirpated. Every _Sect_ as it appeared would fight for supremacy. All worshipped the Christ-God, and sought the same Sacred Writings; and all invoked His aid, and pointed to those Writings for their authority--to exterminate a weaker _Sect_; to deliver over whole provinces to rapine, slaughter, burning, destruction; cities in conflagration; women, children, as well as men, not merely slain, but put to death with tortures unspeakable; massacres, by treachery and surprise, of thousands and tens of thousands! To such work was the activity of body largely directed by Priests and the savage chiefs. For ages these atrocities were perpetrated. History has no parallel of horror; human nature seemed to have become possessed by the _Devil_ of the Superstition, and exceeded its _diabolism_ [pau-di-ki]. In the name of Christ, fire, slaughter, and rapine, spread over the whole immense world. Wherever the Priests of this dark superstition became powerful, everything which opposed them perished. It was a cardinal principle that men could be saved from the dreadful Hell only by the aid of the Priests, and by accepting of their interpretation of the _Sacred Writings_. The system erected by the Priests was called the _Church_, and none could be saved unless they were in the pale of _Holy Church_--unless they, in the manner directed by the Priests, performed all the rites of worship. These not merely were directed to the worship of the Sacred Writings, the Christ-God and Jah, but to the mother of God and to the Pope. In England, by and by, the Priests threw off the Roman Pope, and set up the English Sovereign, for the time being, as Pope, and put men and women to death by fire and torture for still preferring the older Idol.