All the intelligent nations of antiquity were distinguished by a tendency to legislative progress, till the freedom of that progress was checked by the claims of religious infallibility. The founder of the Zendavesta advanced that claim for a pandect of pretended revelations which became the religious code of Central Asia, and as a consequence the intellectual and industrial development of two valiant nations was stunted by legislative conservatism—the proverbially “unalterable laws of the Medes and Persians.” The claims of an infallible revelation preclude the necessity of reform. “Should mortals presume to improve the ordinances of a God?” But the blind hatred of progress which has for so many centuries degraded the Christian hierarchy below the priesthood of all other intolerant creeds, is the earth-renouncing antinaturalism of their founder. The priests of Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed claimed the sufficiency of their dogmas for the purposes of national prosperity. The priests of the nature-hating Galilean attempted to suppress the very desire of that prosperity. “The doctrine of renunciation made patriotism an idle dream: the saints, whose ‘kingdom was not of this world,’ had no business with vanities of that sort; no chieftain could trust his neighbor; cities were pitted against cities and castles against castles; patriotic reformers would vainly have appealed to the sympathies of men who had been taught to reserve their interest for the politics of the New Jerusalem” (Secret of the East, p. 76). The Rev. Spurgeon, of London, England, recently provoked the protests of his Liberal colleagues by the confession that he “positively hated advanced thought;” but only five centuries ago such protests were silenced with the gag and the fagot. For nearly a thousand years every clergyman who had the courage to lift his voice in favor of secular reforms was fiercely attacked as a traitor to the sacred cause of other-worldliness. To question the authority of the church was a crime which could not in the least be palliated by such pleas as the temporal interests of mankind, and a mere hint at the fallibility of “revealed scriptures” could only be expiated in the blood of the offender. Nay, thousands of scientists, historians, and philosophers who had never expressed a direct doubt of that sort, were doomed to a death of torture merely because the logical inference of their discoveries was at variance with the dogmas of the Galilean miracle-mongers. From the reign of Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Protestant revolt the intolerance of Christian bigots interposed an insuperable dam between the projects and the realization of social reforms. “I cannot conceive,” says Hallam, “of any state of society more adverse to the intellectual improvement of mankind than one which admitted no middle line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications.”