64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



selves, a hierarchy, a caste, a class that had undertaken the intellect- 

 ual as well as much other schooling of Europe. They ruled in and 

 throughout every sphere. They fixed everything in thought, religious 

 doctrine, general philosophy, science, art, poetry all. In a great 

 measure they formed and controlled public opinion. They fashioned 

 after their own views the minds of youth. 



All this was well enough for a time. Europe needed it, and the 

 gain was greater than the loss ; better almost any education than no 

 education ; not but that their education was the best, but there comes 

 a time when formal education by human teachers must cease when 

 " school is out " ; and when this time arrived in Europe, and here and 

 there men were in thought beginning to go without their teachers 

 and beyond their teachers, then the Church, instead of, like a wise 

 father, letting them go, tried to hold them. 



The Church had become lifted up with the idea that theirs alone 

 was the wisdom which could train, and theirs alone was the right to 

 train ; that it was their legitimate business. And so they tried to 

 regulate thought all the thought of the world so far as they could 

 reach that world. 



Learning was oppressed, original speculation in philosophy, original 

 research in science, were prevented. Human reason was bound, for 

 woe to him who claimed to find in metaphysics, mathematics, or the 

 physical sciences that which contradicted what was stated ! " The 

 habit of doubt, the impartiality of suspended judgment, the desire 

 to hear both sides of a disputed question, the going beyond what 

 was taught," the making discoveries, all were condemned. Freedom, 

 the condition of true inquiry, was cursed. Blind, unquestioning ac- 

 ceptance was blessed. The people were allowed a literature of imagi- 

 nation, but the effort was made to strictly keep them out of any 

 moral and physical truth other than Rome had provided. 



~YY r e now come to the change of the tide, to the beginning of better 

 days for inquiry, to the dawn of the day of liberty. While liberty 

 of thought was always more or less asserting itself, still, after a while, 

 such assertion increased in emphasis and force. Several facts were 

 favorable. It seems that, after all, the Church admitted the principle 

 of freedom, for she advocated free thinking for herself. She main- 

 tained that religious belief and practice should not be brought under 

 the absolute control of the civil government, and, by this assertion of 

 the independence of the spiritual and therefore of the intellectual 

 world, she prepared the way for the independence of the individual in 

 these worlds. The language she held for herself as a whole, for her- 

 self in matters of religion and conscience, and for herself in the in- 

 tellectual sphere, led the way for similar language by each person 

 for himself. 



Another great gain for freedom of thought was when secular gov- 

 ernment began to think for itself in its executive, legislative, and judi- 



