Yet, with all the discipline of the Church and the fear of God, the condition of European society was pitiable. Feudalism, serfdom, the grace of God, and the favor of the monks ruled the land; the poor helots were only too glad to be permitted to raise their miserable huts under the shadow of the castle or the cloister, their secular and spiritual oppressors and exploiters. Even to-day we suffer from the aftermath of these awful ages and conditions, in which there was no question of care for science or higher mental culture save in rare circumstances and in secret. Ignorance, poverty, and superstition combined with the immoral operation of the law of celibacy, which had been introduced in the eleventh century, to consolidate the ever-growing power of the papacy. It has been calculated that there were more than ten million victims of fanatical religious hatred during this "Golden Age" of papal domination; and how many more million human victims must be put to the account of celibacy, oral confession, and moral constraint, the most pernicious and accursed institutions of the papal despotism! Unbelieving philosophers, who have collected disproofs of the existence of God, have overlooked one of the strongest arguments in that sense--the fact that the Roman "Vicar of Christ" could for twelve centuries perpetrate with impunity the most shameful and horrible deeds "in the name of God." III.--THE REFORMATION The history of civilization, which we are so fond of calling "the history of the world," enters upon its third period with the Reformation of the Christian Church, just as its second period begins with the founding of Christianity. With the Reformation begins the new birth of fettered reason, the reawakening of science, which the iron hand of the Christian papacy had relentlessly crushed for twelve hundred years. At the same time the spread of general education had already commenced, owing to the invention of printing about the middle of the fifteenth century; and towards its close several great events occurred, especially the discovery of America in 1492, which prepared the way for the "renaissance" of science in company with that of art. Indeed, certain very important advances were made in the knowledge of nature during the first half of the sixteenth century, which shook the prevailing system to its very foundations. Such were the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan in 1522, which afforded empirical proof of its rotundity, and the founding of the new system of the world by Copernicus in 1543.