THE seeds of inquiry sown in the sixteenth century resulted in a fruitful display of advanced opinions during the next age. In the page of seventeenth-century history, more names of men, either avowedly heretics, or charged by the orthodox with heresy, or whose labors can be shown to have tended to the growth of heresy, may probably be recorded than can be found during the whole of the previously long period during which the Christian Church assumed to dominate and control European thought. The seventeenth-century muster-roll of heresy is indeed a grand one, and gloriously filled. One of its early martyrs was Julius Caesar Vanini, who was burned at Toulouse, in the year 1619, aged 34, as “an impious and obstinate Atheist.” Was he Atheist, or was he not? This is a question, in answering which the few remains of his works give little ground for sharing the opinion of his persecutors. Yet many writers agree in writing as if his Atheism were of indisputable notoriety. He was a poor Neapolitan priest, he preached a sort of Pantheism; unfortunately for himself, he believed in the utility of public discussion on theological questions, and thus brought upon his head the charge of seeking to convert the world to Atheism. In 1611, two men, named Legat and Whitman, were burned in England for heresy. “But,” says Buckle, “this was the last gasp of expiring bigotry; and since that memorable day the soil of England has never been stained by the blood of a man who has suffered for his religious creed.” Peter Charron, of Paris, ought perhaps to have been included in the sixteenth-century list, for he died in 1603, but his only known work, “La Sagesse,” belongs to the seventeenth century, in which it circulated and obtained reputation. He urged that religion is the accidental result of birth and education, and that therefore variety of creed should not be cause of quarrel between men, as such variety is the result of circumstances over which the men themselves have had no control; and he urges that as each sect claims to be the only true one, we ought to rise superior to all sects, and without being terrified by the fear of future punishment, or allured by the hope of future happiness, “be content with such practical religion as consists in performing the duties of life.” Buckle, who speaks in high terms of Charron, says: “The Sorbonne went so far as to condemn Charron’s great work, but could not succeed in having it prohibited.”