When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken by the first gleam of modern science, every torch-bearer was persecuted as an incendiary. Astronomers were forced to recant their heresies on their bended knees. Philosophers were caged like wild beasts. Religious skeptics were burnt at the stake, as enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed, almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for centuries subordinated the evidence of their own senses to the rant of epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun of Reason rose visibly above the horizon of the intellectual world, its rays struggled distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even by the storms of the Protestant revolt. The light of modern science has brought its blessings only to the habitants of the social highlands; the valley dwellers still grope their way through the gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices, and centuries may pass before the world has entirely emerged from the shadow of the life-blighting cloud which the son of Sospitra recognized in the rise of the Galilean delusion. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT. Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression of human reason has brought down the curse of the direst retribution. It is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of their local sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery upon the slaves of the Christian church. The victims of a permanent Egyptian darkness might have taken refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in the sunny garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos, but the jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every gate of escape, and for thirteen centuries the nations of Christian Europe suffered all the horrors of enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of that dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the records of the human race, and its horrors bind the duties of every sane survivor to a war of extermination upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose priests turned the paradise of southern Europe into a hell of misery and barbarism.