MORAL EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 301 



was granted and extended ; savage laws were repealed ; 

 numerous laws protecting labour were passed, which embodied 

 the philanthropic tendencies of modern times ; liberty of 

 conscience, of speech, of meeting, of publication were de- 

 manded and obtained. Class privilege disappeared. Equality 

 before the law came to be a recognised principle in legislation 

 and in the administration of justice. The governmental 

 fabric itself became the embodiment of popular wishes the 

 people making and unmaking cabinets, and gradually altering 

 the oligarchal form of the body politic until government 

 became either a mixed monarchy or a republic. These vast 

 changes were brought about by the concurrence of numerous 

 causes, no doubt, some of which were distinct or more or less 

 remote from science. They did not come without political 

 convulsions, but these were the explosions of the INDUSTRIAL 

 SPIRIT and its tendencies, struggling for existence and recog- 

 nition, and breaking up the superficial obstacles which opposed 

 natural growth, so that the industrial spirit, fostered and 

 made day by day more resistless by science and its applications, 

 has been from beginning to end at once the most powerful, 

 permanent, and general cause of the eventful changes just 

 indicated. 



Passing on now to RELIGION and RELIGIOUS GOVERNMENT, 

 we find science more mighty than in all else. The conceptions 

 of God and the World which priests and men had formed 

 before the advent of scientific knowledge were very limited 

 and baleful. The earth constituted the universe, the sun, 

 moon, and stars being attached to a solid firmament for the 

 lighting of it. Suddenly Columbus and Copernicus revealed 

 the constitution of the world we live in. A little later, 

 Galileo's telescope revealed a universe undreamt of. The 

 sun, moon, stars are no longer mere flames. The earth 

 becomes a speck an appendage of the sun ; the stars 

 become suns, and their numbers, where none were visible 

 before, are counted by millions and millions; man, who 

 thought himself the centre and purpose of creation, becomes 

 an atom ; theological conceptions, in a word, are revolu- 

 tionised. The universe and its creation, God and His work, 

 appear in their true light, and the notion of the Divinity 



