Talk to us of barbarism and paganism! A church which, from the time, nearly fifteen centuries ago, when she burnt the Alexandrian Libraries and Museum—the intellectual legacies of centuries—to the present time, has never yet called off her sleuth-hounds with which she has always hunted down the sacred principles of liberty of thought and freedom of conscience! A Church which from "the beginning of that unhappy contest," as Mosheim tells us, "between faith and reason, religion and philosophy, piety and genius, which increased in succeeding ages, and is prolonged even to our times with a violence which renders it extremely difficult to be brought to a conclusion," to this day, would hold the world in barbarous ignorance if its paralyzed hand could but avail against the resistless march of knowledge and truth! Draper, in speaking of the condition of the people under Catholicity in the 14th century, thus pictures the civilizing (?) and elevating influences of that Holy Religion:—
"There was no far reaching, no persistent plan to ameliorate the physical condition of the nations. Nothing was done to favor their intellectual development, indeed, on the contrary, it was the settled policy to keep them not merely illiterate, but ignorant. Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields. * * * Pestilences were permitted to stalk forth unchecked, or at best opposed only by mummeries. Bad food, wretched clothing, inadequate shelter, were suffered to produce their result, and at the end of a thousand years the population of Europe had not doubled."
For centuries, and centuries, in the Western Empire, subsequent to the invasion of the barbarians, when the Church this Toronto prelate owes allegiance to, had absolute control, such was the dense ignorance that scarcely a layman could be found who could sign his own name. There was very little learning, and what little there was the clergy carefully and jealously confined to themselves; and as Hallam, the historian, tells us:—
"A cloud of ignorance overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights, who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness." The same historian (Middle Ages, p. 460,) tells us:—"France reached her lowest point at the beginning of the eighth century, but England was, at that time, more respectable, and did not fall into complete degradation until the middle of the ninth. There could be nothing more deplorable than the state of Italy during the succeeding century. In almost every council the ignorance of the clergy forms a subject for reproach. It is asserted by one held in 992 that scarcely a single person was to be found in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of salutation to one another."
Lecky, in his "History of Morals," vol. 2, p. 222, tells us that:
"Mediæval Catholicity discouraged and suppressed, in every way, secular studies," and further, that, "Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities; not until Mahomedan science and classical freethought and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe commence."
And, I would ask Archbishop Lynch, what was the condition of the Byzantine Empire during the thousand years or upwards of its existence?—An empire under the sway of his Church, from its foundation by the first Christian emperor, Constantine—that exemplary Christian murderer who, because the Pagan priests refused him absolution for his enormities, hastened to the bosom of the Christian Church, whose priests he found more pliable, having little compunction or hesitancy about granting absolution to the new proselyte. What is the record of history touching this Empire under the aegis of Catholic Christianity? The historian Lecky thus graphically sets forth its condition:—
"The universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. Though very cruel and very sensual, there have been times when cruelty assumed more ruthless, and sensuality more extravagant aspects, but there has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forms, the elements, of greatness, and none to which the epithet mean may be so emphatically applied. The Byzantine Empire was pre-eminently the age of treachery. Its vices were the vices of men who ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous. * * * The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides." In speaking of the condition of the Western Empire the same author proceeds:—"A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud, that could favor received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only broken by the scrutinizing, innovating and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men who are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of Augustus, or in the age of the Antonines rather than in any period that elapsed between the triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century."
The same historian, whose accuracy Archbishop Lynch will scarcely attempt to impeach, thus judicially and impartially sums up the influences of Catholic Christianity both in the Eastern and Western Empires during many centuries when it had the fullest sway:—
"When we remember that in the Byzantine Empire the renovating power of theology was tried in a new capital, free from Pagan traditions, and for more than one thousand years unsubdued by barbarians, and that in the west, the Church, for at least seven hundred years after the shocks of the invasion had subsided, exercised a control more absolute than any other moral or intellectual agency has ever attained, it will appear, I think, that the experiment was very sufficiently tried. It is easy to make a catalogue of the glaring vices of antiquity, and to contrast them with the pure morality of Christian writings; but, if we desire to form a just estimate of the realized improvement, we must compare the classical and ecclesiastical civilizations as wholes, and must observe in each case not only the vices that were repressed but also the degree and variety of positive excellence attained."