8o PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



knowledge of things temporal as of things spiritual. 

 So that the Reformation was but an exchange of 

 fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the scraping 

 of a little rust off the chains which still bound the 

 mind. * Learning perished where Luther reigned,' 

 said Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Re- 

 former agreeing with his coadjutor, Melancthon, in 

 permitting no tampering with the written Word. 

 Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that 

 the earth was fixed and that sun and stars travelled 

 round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, 

 one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Com- 

 mentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions 

 about the creation as narrated in that book would 

 render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein 

 he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther 

 called them ' locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice.' 

 Reason he denounced as the * arch whore ' and the 

 'devil's bride'; Aristotle is a 'prince of darkness, 

 horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, 

 and twice execrable.' Consistently enough, Luther 

 believed vehemently in a personal devil, and in 

 witches ; * I would myself burn them,' he says, ' even 

 as it is written in the Bible that the priests stoned 

 offenders.' To him demoniacal possession was a fact 

 clear as noonday : idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all 

 other mental and nervous disorders were due to it. 

 Hence, a movement whose intent appeared to be the 

 freeing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the 

 bolts that imprisoned it ; arresting the physical ex- 

 planation of mental diseases and that curative treat- 

 ment of them which is one of the countless services 

 of science to suffering mankind. To Luther, the 



