Church held unshakable proofs of my vicious ways. As usual, my request that they would say so in print was ignored. Most ex-priests have the same experience. One of the most refined and religious of these seceders, a man who became a most respected professor at Oxford, was pursued by the calumny (never printed) that he had shown indecent photographs to servant-girls! This tactic of the Church militant is happily so notorious that little harm is done among the general public, but Catholics are gravely deluded, in the hope that they will be induced to refrain from reading any except their own mendacious literature. Yet one of the most familiar themes of the men who pursue this tactic is that they alone can inspire high character! Notoriously insincere in their professions, teachers of doctrines which the higher culture of our time and many of their own leading scholars condemn, living in an atmosphere of untruth and unreality, relying on a literature which is generally as indifferent to truth as it is to grace, unscrupulously repeating idle slanders of their opponents, they ask us to believe that they are genuinely concerned about the future of society if we continue to reject their authority. It is not strange that the great cities of the modern world are unmoved by their dirges. The third point of my indictment is that the clergy have forged the historical credentials by which they lay claim to our respect. I have already observed that their version of the history of Europe is peculiar to their own literature, and I have elsewhere (_The Bible in Europe_) shown in detail how worthless it is. The "conversion" of Europe to Christianity in the fourth century was, as every historian of the period shows, an enforcement of the new religion on Europe by imperial authority, accompanied by the most violent and bloody repression of all other religions. We then have the witness of contemporary Christian writers that this "conversion" was followed by a general moral and intellectual decline. The great reforms which Rome had inaugurated were destroyed, and Europe sank into the ignorance, superstition, and grossness of the Middle Ages. It is quite true that the triumph of Christianity coincided with the overthrow of civilisation by the northern tribes, but the Teutonic tribes were not inferior to the Arabs or Turks (whom Mohammedanism civilised in the course of a century or two), and the Church soon obtained despotic power over them. The Eastern Empire, I may add, was _not_ dominated by the barbarians, yet it also suffered a grave moral and intellectual decline. The fact is, that the clergy made no effort to induce the barbarians to restore the old school-system, to reconstruct the Roman law, to free the slaves (and, later, the serfs), to adjust their high native ideal of womanhood to the new social order, or to rebuild the fine civic and philanthropic system of the Romans. Culture fell so low