The battle-fields of science are thickly strewn with these. They have been used against almost every man who has ever done anything new for his fellow-men. The list of those who have been denounced as infidel and atheist includes almost all great men of science--general scholars, inventors, philanthropists. The deepest Christian life, the most noble Christian character, have not availed to shield combatants. Christians like Isaac Newton and Pascal and John Locke and John Milton, and even Howard and Fénelon, have had these weapons hurled against them. Of all proofs of the existence of a God, those of Descartes have been wrought most thoroughly into the minds of modern men; and yet the Protestant theologians of Holland sought to bring him to torture and to death by the charge of atheism, and the Roman Catholic theologians of France prevented the rendering of any due honors to him at his burial.[48] These epithets can hardly be classed with civilized weapons. They are burning arrows. They set fire to great masses of popular prejudices; smoke rises to obscure the real questions; fire bursts forth at times to destroy the attacked party. They are poisoned. They go to the hearts of loving women, they alienate dear children; they injure the man after life is ended, for they leave poisoned wounds in the hearts of those who loved him best--fears for his eternal happiness--dread of the Divine displeasure. Of course, in these days, these weapons, though often effective in disturbing good men and in scaring good women, are somewhat blunted. Indeed, they not unfrequently injure assailants more than assailed. So it was not in the days of Galileo; they were then in all their sharpness and venom. Yet far more vile than the use even of these weapons--vile indeed beyond belief--was the attack by the Archbishop of Pisa. It is a remark made by one of the most moderate and judicially fair of modern philosophic historians, that, of all organizations this world has known, the Roman Church has caused most undeserved woe and shed most innocent blood; but, in the whole terrible succession of Torquemadas and Arbues and Granvilles, the vilest enemy of the human race is probably this same Archbishop of Pisa. This man, whose cathedral is more truly consecrated by the remembrance of Galileo's observation of the lamp swinging before its altar, than by all the church services of a thousand years, began a siege against the great philosopher.