D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [[157]]neighbors to take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones, crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes, wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers of a modern nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists, astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days of Horace and Pliny would [[158]]have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the face of the entire Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records. Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles; witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.