center of the universe. It stood still while the sun moved daily over its surface, getting back each morning into its place with the help of angels. The rainbow was a sign placed in the heavens for a purpose. Every known phenomenon of nature was accounted for by scriptural reference. The method of the creation of the world and the origin of man and of woman also, the church possessed in circumstantial detail. The moment true science began its work, and ran counter to any of this fund of knowledge, assumed to have been furnished by the Almighty, the trouble began. But the trouble was not altogether with the honest investigator. If his discovery tended to disprove what was known as scriptural truth, and inadvertently had been allowed to gain the public ear, every prelate in the church began contriving to refute it. A new opportunity for fame was opened to every ambitious theologian, and there immediately began in rebuttal a spinning of texts, and a style of metaphysical argument, from one end of the church to the other, which remain to this day as the most remarkable curiosities of sinuous reasoning and constrained thought on record. All questions of a scientific character had but one method of settlement, were they authorized or denied by scripture? If denied as they usually were, the disturber was either burned at the stake or made to recant. Fame, that chief incentive to all high effort, offered none of its rewards beyond theological circles, and during the ten centuries of complete church supremacy, any advance in knowledge which did not stir the animosity of theologians gained less public attention and applause than the wearing of a hair shirt or a crown of thorns. During a thousand years the church had kept the world slumbering in the darkness of barbarism and superstition punishing with death those it could not convince. Any doubter of generally accepted beliefs, either in religion or science, who can support his position with plausable argument, is entitled at least to the consideration of being a thinker. The constant taking off of every such one, during a term counted by centuries, could have no other effect than to reduce the average of intellectual vigor in the whole. The husbandman, who removes from his acres of growing grain the tallest and heaviest stalks, and instead of saving them for seed, destroys them, insures, in time, the misfortune of dwarfed fields and diminished harvests. The church, since its complete victory over paganism in the fourth century, had not produced with its supreme control over all learning a single noted man of science, or one promising to be such, whom it had not either suppressed or tortured to death, not a painter or poet who had not devoted his genius principally to superstition or sensuality, not a historian whose veracity is not doubted, and not a single towering man of letters. This, too, in a people, among whom mingled the descendants of the Greek masters of literature and philosophy.