Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to
principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once required to be an
infidel, to brave the Church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons, her
tongues of fire--to defy and scorn her heaven and her hell--her devil
and her God? They were the noblest sons of earth. They were the real
saviors of our race, the destroyers of superstition, and the creators
of Science. They were the real Titans who bared their grand foreheads to
all the thunderbolts of all the gods.