The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the progress of reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the New Testament. Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says, “have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested interests, but only with facts. We should not ask: ‘Will it be popular?’ ‘Will it seem orthodox?’ but simply, ‘Is it true?’”