"What do you mean?"
"Who is more free to criticise religion than the materialistic man of science?"
"But a religious man is not cruel."
"Have you not read history? Have you not shuddered at the crimes recorded in the name of the religions of man?"
"Yes; but these cruelties were committed by misguided men under the cloak of the church, or of false religions, during the dark ages. Do not blame religion, but the men who abused the cause."
"Yes," he added, "you are right; they were fanatics, crazed beings, men; yes, even communities, raving mad. Crazed leaders can infuse the minds of the people with their fallacies, and thus become leaders of crazed nations. Not, as I have depicted in my scientific enthusiast, one man alone in the privacy of his home torturing a single child, but whole nations pillaging, burning, torturing, and destroying. But this is foreign to our subject. Beware, I reiterate, of the science of human biology. The man who enters the field can not foresee the end, the man who studies the science of life, and records his experiments, can not know the extremes to which a fanatical follower may carry the thought-current of his leader. I have not overdrawn the lesson. Besides, science is now really torturing, burning, maiming, and destroying humanity. The act of destruction has been transferred from barbarians and the fanatic in religion to the follower of the devotees of science."
"No; I say, no."
"Who created the steam engine? Who evolves improved machinery? Who creates improved artillery, and explosives? Scientific men."
He hesitated.
"Go on."