When at a certain stage of your civilization, about two thousand years ago, you had attained a point of intellectual culture among the few, the fruits of which have been reflected upon you to this day, in some of the grandest recorded achievements of human thought, and while the masses were left to take their undirected way among the empty superstitions which conceded nothing to the growing human sympathy, a seer appeared among you, who served rather as a suggestion than as an immediate success. After the lapse of sufficient time from his death to allow full scope for romance, there was built up out of his memory by your seers a picture of all the virtues which had been growing within your hearts, so entirely adapted to the new age that all the pent-up forces of human sympathy within its scope and influence surrendered to it. But what might have been a triumph and a boon to you in the new impetus to a better and broader humanity, unfortunately held concealed within itself the subtle machinery of your seers and prophets, and was guarded by their evil eyes, so that with this tremendous lever to move you in the direction of their purposes, instead of advancing you, they have turned your civilization back upon itself more than a thousand years. No historical fact is more capable of demonstration than this. None has been more persistently and ingeniously denied, and no natural sequence ever followed more directly a moving cause. From a free and independent exercise of the intellectual activities in the direction of science, art, philosophy, and all knowledge pertaining to yourselves, the Earth upon which you dwell, and the universe, so far as your vision extends, the whole current of your thoughts was turned by the new doctrines toward a paradise, compared with which all things of the Earth were trifles. When you were brought by the fascination of these promises, and the unflagging efforts an interested body of ecclesiastics, to a general belief in these doctrines, you sank into an intellectual torpor, from which you only emerged by a protest of your reason not yet wholly suppressed. You cannot fail to see the utterly dehumanizing tendency of the influences which surrounded you for so many centuries. The common aims and purposes of your lives were submerged by the one engrossing wish to reach heaven; and while your imagination was carried away by its picture, you were led, without hesitation, to place your feet upon the neck of any earthly enterprise that seemed to stand in its way.