D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever Reason surrenders to Dogma, the exponents of that dogma will claim unreasonable prerogatives. Irresponsible dogmatists have never failed to pursue the interests of their creed at the expense of the interests of mankind. The lessons of Science could not be reconciled with the doctrines of Antinaturalism, and in the interest of that doctrine the spiritual taskmasters of medieval Europe suppressed Science by methods that have retarded the progress of mankind for thirteen hundred years. The suppression of Freethought enabled the enemies of Nature to complete their triumph by the suppression of social and political liberty; and for ages the church has been the faithful ally of Despotism. The priest-ridden rulers of the expiring Roman empire and the priest-ridden rabble of the Roman provinces assisted in the persecution of Freethought, and that crime against reason was avenged by the development of a system of spiritual tyranny which at last forced even [[133]]princes to kiss the dust of Canossa and degraded the lot of peasants beneath that of savages and wild beasts. The war against natural science avenged itself in the neglect of agriculture, and the enormous spread of deserts, which the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger proposed to reclaim by prayer-meetings. The surrender of Freethought to faith sealed the fate of millions of heretics and “sorcerers,” who expiated an imaginary crime in the agonies of the stake. Not the abrogation of civil rights, not the intimidation of princes and commoners, but the eradication of Freethought, enabled the priests of an unnatural creed to enforce their hideous superstitions upon the prisoners of the numberless monasteries which for a series of centuries combined all the conditions for the systematic suppression of moral, intellectual, and personal freedom.
“I am not come to bring peace but the sword,” said the ingenuous founder of a creed which could not fail to produce an irrepressible conflict between the delusions of its doctrines and the inspirations of nature and science—and, of course, also between the would-be followers of its own preposterous precepts—and neither the lust of conquest nor the jealousy of rival nations has ever stained this earth with the torrents of blood shed by the bigots of that creed after its triumph over the protests of Freethought. The fatuous attempt to crush out dissent by substituting a roll of parchment for the book of Nature avenged itself by murderous wars about the interpretation of those same parchments. The dogmatists who had tried to perpetuate their power by the murder [[134]]of modest rationalists, were assailed by hordes of their own irrationalists, raging about the ceremonial details of the wafer-rite and the immersion rite. The bigots who had refused to heed the pleadings of Bruno and Campanella were forced to acknowledge the battle-axe logic of the Hussites.