In thus speaking of the gradual progress of reason and philosophy, I do not mean to say that the advancement is uninterrupted. Far from it. Though the tide may be rising, each individual wave does not always reach as far as that which preceded it: so man, in his onward progress to a higher state of existence, does occasionally make oblique and even retrograde steps. By the influence of those prejudices which have not yet been dislodged from their strong holds--under the sway of our passions, which indeed may be regulated, but can never be extinguished, reason for awhile succumbs and philosophy disappears. Thus, in the Reformation, the struggle between those who sought to get rid of the ancient abuses, and those who endeavored to maintain them, was accompanied with ferocity, cruelty and injustice; and men were often hated and persecuted in proportion to their sincerity in avowing their real sentiments, and their firmness in maintaining them. Then too, we beheld those who had been the victims of oppression, when power changed hands, becoming persecutors in turn; and this, not on the principle of retaliation, but because the new persecutors were impelled by the same blind fury as their predecessors, in regarding a mere difference of opinion as synonymous with crime. Philosophy had not then advanced far enough to teach them that men were responsible only to their own conscience and their God for their modes of faith; and that punishment tended to make hypocrites of the bad and martyrs of the good, but converts of none. They had yet to learn that the unadulterated common sense of that portion of mankind, who were less frenzied by zeal, revolted at such injustice; and that their sympathies acted more powerfully in favor of the sufferer, than their fears in favor of their persecutors; a truth which has suggested the maxim that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."