The suppression of science has retarded the progress of mankind by a full thousand years. For a century or two the Mediterranean peninsulas still lingered in the evening twilight of pagan civilization, but with the confirmed rule of the church the gloom of utter darkness overspread the homes of her slaves, and the delusions of that dreadful night far exceeded the worst superstitions of pagan barbarism. “The cloud of universal ignorance,” says Hallam, “was broken only by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness. We cannot conceive 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. No original writer of any merit arose, and learning may be said to have languished in a region of twilight for the greater part of a thousand years. In 992 it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to another.” In that midnight hour of unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was persecuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno, Campanella, Kepler, Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus, Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their way through a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics who beset the path of every reformer, and overcame the heroism of all but the stoutest champions of light and freedom. From the tenth to the end of the sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 “heretics,” i.e., scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their love of truth in the flames of the stake.