It is the despotism of the papacy that lent its darkest character to the Middle Ages; it meant death to all freedom of mental life, decay to all science, corruption to all morality. From the noble height to which the life of the human mind had attained in classical antiquity, in the centuries before Christ and the first century after Christ, it soon sank, under the rule of the papacy, to a level which, in respect of the knowledge of the truth, can only be termed barbarism. It is often protested that other aspects of mental life--poetry and architecture, scholastic learning and patristic philosophy--were richly developed in the Middle Ages. But this activity was in the service of the Church; it did not tend to the cultivation, but to the suppression, of free mental research. The exclusive preparing for an unknown eternity beyond the tomb, the contempt of nature, the withdrawal from the study of it, which are essential elements of Christianity, were urged as a sacred duty by the Roman hierarchy. It was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that a change for the better came in with the Reformation. It is impossible for us here to describe the pitiful retrogression of culture and morality during the twelve centuries of the spiritual despotism of Rome. It is very pithily expressed in a saying of the greatest and the ablest of the Hohenzollerns; Frederick the Great condensed his judgment in the phrase that the study of history led one to think that from Constantine to the date of the Reformation the whole world was insane. L. Büchner has given us an admirable, brief description of this "period of insanity" in his work on _Religious and Scientific Systems_. The reader who desires a closer acquaintance with the subject would do well to consult the historical works of Ranke, Draper, Kolb, Svoboda, etc. The truthful description of the awful condition of the Christian Middle Ages, which is given by these and other unprejudiced historians, is confirmed by all the reliable sources of investigation, and by the historical monuments which have come down from the saddest period of human history. Educated Catholics, who are sincere truth-seekers, cannot be too frequently recommended to study these historical sources for themselves. This is the more necessary as ultramontane literature has still a considerable influence. The old trick of deceiving the faithful by a complete reversal of facts and an invention of miraculous circumstances is still worked by it with great success. We will only mention Lourdes and the "Holy Coat" of Trêves. The ultramontane professor of history at Frankfurt, Johannes Janssen, affords a striking example of the length they will go in distorting historical truth; his much-read works (especially his _History of the German People since the Middle Ages_) are marred by falsification to an incredible extent. The untruthfulness of these Jesuitical productions is on a level with the credulity and