PKEFACE IX 



brought about by necessity, experience, suffering, is 

 horrible. When the Veil is lifted it looks like a 

 hideous dream. Probably no book exposes this 

 struggle so clearly as that interesting and well- written 

 work by Win wood Reade, " The Martyrdom of Man." 

 The student should also study the various works by 

 S. Laing, especially " Modern Science and Modern 

 Thought" and " Human Origins." He will then 

 obtain definite ideas of the origins of our various 

 religions, and a knowledge that man has existed on 

 this world for a time which is, to the human mind, 

 that of infinity. 



For the selfish and cruel errors of the past, whereby 

 the present views of the Universe were repudiated ; 

 how the pioneers of science, as also the weak-minded, 

 were persecuted, tortured, and killed ; how hundreds 

 of thousands a great unknown number of human 

 creatures have suffered for thinking for themselves ; l 

 how myths, more silly than children's fairy tales, have 

 been imposed upon the community as fundamental 

 truths for these facts, the student should read 

 Andrew Dickson White's " History of the Warfare of 

 Science with Religion in Christendom" (1896). 



For a little known, but very important, phase of the 



1 " In Germany alone, it is estimated that in the great age of 

 witch-burning . . . more than 100,000 persons perished by an ex- 

 cruciating death in the course of a single century. . . . From first to 

 last, hundreds of thousands of victims perished in horrible tortures 

 for the crime of thinking for themselves." (" Problems of the 

 Future," S. Laing, 1894, pp. 288, 290.) 



