There is a tradition that a year before the conversion of Constantine the son of the prophetess Sospitra was praying in the temple of Serapis, when the spirit of his mother came over him and the veil of the future was withdrawn. “Woe to our children!” he exclaimed, when he awakened from his trance, “I see a cloud approaching, a great darkness is going to spread over the face of the world.” That darkness proved a thirteen hundred years’ eclipse of common sense and reason. There is a doubt if the total destruction of all cities of the civilized world could have struck a more cruel blow to Science than the dogma of salvation by faith and abstinence from the pursuit of free inquiry. The ethics of the world-renouncing fanatic condemned the love of secular knowledge as they condemned the love of health and the pursuit of physical prosperity, and the children [[91]]of the next fifty generations were systematically trained to despise the highest attribute of the human spirit. Spiritual poverty became a test of moral worth; philosophers and free inquirers were banished, while mental castrates were fattened at the expense of toiling rustics and mechanics; science was dreaded as an ally of skepticism, if not of the arch-fiend in person; the suspicion of sorcery attached to the cultivation of almost any intellectual pursuit, and the Emperor Justinian actually passed a law for the “suppression of mathematicians.”
When the tyranny of the church reached the zenith of its power, natural science became almost a tradition of the past. The pedants of the convent schools divided their time between the forgery of miracle legends and the elaboration of insane dogmas. The most extravagant absurdities were propagated under the name of historical records; medleys of nursery-tales and ghost-stories which the poorest village school-teacher of pagan Rome would have rejected with disgust were gravely discussed by so-called scholars. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization,” quotes samples of such chronicles which might be mistaken for products of satire, if abundant evidence of contemporary writers did not prove them to have been the current staple of medieval science.
When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken by the first gleam of modern science, every torch-bearer was persecuted as an incendiary. Astronomers were forced to recant their heresies on their bended knees. Philosophers were caged like wild beasts. Religious skeptics were burnt at the stake, as [[92]]enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed, almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for centuries subordinated the evidence of their own senses to the rant of epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun of Reason rose visibly above the horizon of the intellectual world, its rays struggled distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even by the storms of the Protestant revolt.
The light of modern science has brought its blessings only to the habitants of the social highlands; the valley dwellers still grope their way through the gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices, and centuries may pass before the world has entirely emerged from the shadow of the life-blighting cloud which the son of Sospitra recognized in the rise of the Galilean delusion.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression of human reason has brought down the curse of the direst retribution. It is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of their local sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery upon the slaves of the Christian church. The victims of a permanent Egyptian darkness might have taken refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in the sunny garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos, but the jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every [[93]]gate of escape, and for thirteen centuries the nations of Christian Europe suffered all the horrors of enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of that dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the records of the human race, and its horrors bind the duties of every sane survivor to a war of extermination upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose priests turned the paradise of southern Europe into a hell of misery and barbarism.
The battle against the demon of darkness became a struggle for existence, in which the powers of Nature at last prevailed, but for millions of our fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too late; spring-time and morning returned in vain for many a once fertile land where the soil itself had lost its reproductive power, where the outrages of Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen into callous slaves. The storm that awakened the nations of northern Europe from the dreams of their poison-fever could not break the spell of a deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediterranean coast-lands remains to warn the nations of the future, as the bleaching bones of a perished caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track of the simoom.
The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws and encouragements to martial prowess, has produced no ruinous results of physical degeneration, but the entire neglect of mental culture has not failed to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige. For after the northern nations of Christendom had broken the yoke of their spiritual tyrants, the children [[94]]of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters of their less grievous bondage, but also to its total indifference to secular science, and from that day the crescent of the prophet became a waning moon.