The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.” Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation. “According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.... The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.” The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence. E.—REFORM.