If the reader is weary of following up with us this labyrinth of error in this not very long essay, he will pity the present writer; for he has not touched upon one-tenth of the errors which the same short essay holds. We have been careful, too, to be silent on language which might have come from Exeter Hall ranters or from the late Dr. Brownlee, a notorious anti-popery lecturer of former days. Indeed, we can scarcely allow ourselves the freedom of expressing our feelings of indignation at reading such language coming from men who have a reputation for polite culture. “Men,” we say; for at the close of its delivery Mr. Alger’s essay was endorsed by the president of the association as “the admirable essay by Mr. Alger, at once a history and an argument, a summary of facts and also a summary of apprehensions and suggestions, etc.”[33] Another speaker pronounced it a “most magnificent and masterly essay.”[34] We are not over-sensitive in matters of this kind, and before concluding our remarks we give a specimen of the language and spirit of the “most magnificent and masterly essay.” V. FREE-RELIGIONISTS AND THE MONKS. “Few men,” says our estimable writer, “duly feel what a debt the nineteenth century owes to the illustrious founders and cultivators of science, Aristotle, Archimedes, Kepler, Newton, and the hundreds of lesser lights in many departments. What a beneficent and herculean task they have accomplished in breaking the chains of _false_ authority, opening the dungeons of _superstition_, removing the _incubus_ of religious terror! Their sunlit and open-air minds, in harmonious working connection with nature and their race, have done much to dispel the _baneful_ power of a _celibate_ church, the cloistered and _mephitic minds of monks and hermits, introspective dreamers, tyrannical theorizers_, who, set apart from the living interests of men, had woven over Christianity _a horrid web of diseased logic spun out of the entrails of their own morbid brains_.”