There were centuries of darkness when religion had control of
Christendom. Superstition was almost universal. Not one in twenty
thousand could read or write. During these centuries the people lived
with their back to the sunrise, and pursued their way toward the dens of
ignorance and faith. There was no progress, no invention, no discovery.
On every hand cruelty and worship, persecution and prayer. The priests
were the enemies of thought, of investigation. They were the shepherds,
and the people were their sheep and it was their business to guard
the flock from the wolves of thought and doubt. This world was of
no importance compared with the next. This life was to be spent in
preparing for the life to come. The gold and labor of men were wasted in
building cathedrals and in supporting the pious and the useless. During
these Dark Ages of Christianity, as I said before, nothing was invented,
nothing was discovered, calculated to increase the well-being of men.
The energies of Christendom were wasted in the vain effort to obtain
assistance from the supernatural.
For centuries the business of Christians was to wrest from the followers
of Mohammed the empty sepulcher of Christ. Upon the altar of this folly
millions of lives were sacrificed, and yet the soldiers of the impostor
were victorious, and the wretches who carried the banner of Christ were
scattered like leaves before the storm.
There was, I believe, one invention during these ages. It is said that,
in the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk, invented
gunpowder, but this invention was without a fellow. Yet we cannot give
Christianity the credit, because Bacon was an infidel, and was great
enough to say that in all things reason must be the standard. He was
persecuted and imprisoned, as most sensible men were in those blessed
days. The church was triumphant. The sceptre and mitre were in her
hands, and yet her success was the result of force and fraud, and it
carried within itself the seeds of its defeat. The church attempted the
impossible. It endeavored to make the world of one belief; to force all
minds to a common form, and utterly destroy the individuality of man.
To accomplish this it employed every art and artifice that cunning could
suggest It inflicted every cruelty by every means that malice could
invent.
But, in spite of all, a few men began to think.
They became interested in the affairs of this world--in the great
panorama of nature. They began to seek for causes, for the explanations
of phenomena. They were not satisfied with the assertions of the church.
These thinkers withdrew their gaze from the skies and looked at their
own surroundings. They were unspiritual enough to desire comfort here.
They became sensible and secular, worldly and wise.
What was the result? They began to invent, to discover, to find the
relation between facts, the conditions of happiness and the means that
would increase the well-being of their fellow-men.
Movable types were invented, paper was borrowed from the Moors, books
appeared, and it became possible to save the intellectual wealth so that
each generation could hand it to the next. History began to take the
place of legend and rumor. The telescope was invented. The orbits of the
stars were traced, and men became citizens of the universe. The steam
engine was constructed, and now steam, the great slave, does the work
of hundreds of millions of men. The Black Art, the impossible, was
abandoned, and chemistry, the useful, took its place. Astrology became
astronomy. Kepler discovered the three great laws, one of the greatest
triumphs of human genius, and our constellation became a poem, a
symphony. Newton gave us the mathematical expression of the attraction
of gravitation. Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. He gave
us the fact, and Draper gave us the reason. Steamships conquered the
seas and railways covered the land. Houses and streets were lighted with
gas. Through the invention of matches fire became the companion of
man. The art of photography became known; the sun became an artist.
Telegraphs and cables were invented. The lightning became a carrier of
thought, and the nations became neighbors. Anaesthetics were discovered
and pain was lost in sleep. Surgery became a science. The telephone was
invented--the telephone that carries and deposits in listening ears the
waves of words. The phonograph, that catches and retains in marks and
dots and gives again the echoes of our speech.
Then came electric light that fills the night with day, and all the
wonderful machines that use the subtle force--the same force that leaps
from the summer cloud to ravage and destroy.
The Spectrum Analysis that tells us of the substance of the sun; the
Roentgen rays that change the opaque to the transparent. The
great thinkers demonstrated the indestructibility of force and
matter--demonstrated that the indestructible could not have been
created. The geologist, in rocks and deposits and mountains and
continents, read a little of the story of the world--of its changes, of
the glacial epoch--the story of vegetable and animal life.
The biologists, through the fossil forms of life, established the
antiquity of man and demonstrated the worthlessness of Holy Writ. Then
came evolution, the survival of the fittest and natural selection.
Thousands of mysteries were explained and science wrested the sceptre
from superstition. The cell theory was advanced, and embryology was
studied; the microscope discovered germs of disease and taught us how
to stay the plague. These great theories and discoveries, together with
countless inventions, are the children of intellectual liberty.