All that is beneficial in civilisation, both on its material and on what is called its spiritual side, is placed by the Christian to the credit of Christianity, and the hand of God is traced with becoming reverence in every discovery which ameliorates our lot. This, although the promoters and discoverers are often non-Christians, and although it is well known that it is the Church that has chiefly delayed the advance of science. Whatever may be the case now, the education of the masses never concerned her in olden times. Rather her concern was then that the people should not be educated, much as it is in Russia at the present time. Such education as she did encourage was of the type imparted in the Mohammedan University at Cairo to-day--the three R's and the Koran--and for similar reasons. As late as 1846 Cobden writes to a friend on the subject of national education: "I took the repeal of the Corn Laws as light amusement compared with the difficult task of inducing the priests of all denominations to agree to suffer the people to be educated." Again, Lord Macaulay, speaking of the Roman Catholic Church, in the first chapter of his History of England, says that "during the last three centuries to stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor." So long as organisms are adapted to their environment, neither progressive nor retrogressive development will occur. Because, after the Dark Ages, Europe progressed while Asia stagnated and Africa retrogressed, is modern civilisation to be placed to the credit of the Christian religion? As rationally might any one of the ancient civilisations be credited to the popular superstition of the country then in the van of progress. To such absurd lengths are these pretensions carried that we find persons ignorant enough and fanatical enough to attribute the present predominance of Christian nations to their religion. For a reply to such I cannot better that given by a learned Buddhist monk to a missionary who had told him that nations of the West had become powerful because of their Christianity. "The fact is," retorted the monk, "that nations have become powerful in the degree to which they have rejected the precepts of Christianity, in the extent to which they have substituted for the Christian maxim of 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' that other maxim which shoots 300 bullets a minute."