3O2 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



becomes overwhelming. Puerile ideas are swept away, and 

 the whole majesty and incomprehensibleness of the creation 

 are enhanced a thousandfold. God can no longer be repre- 

 sented as an angry Jehovah, swayed like ourselves by petty 

 passions, and ever ready to chastise and scourge His people, 

 but as the Essence of all good, ever shedding beneficence on 

 all the beings and worlds to which it has given existence. 

 Religion became more exalted and sublime. Furthermore, 

 Galileo, after many tentative efforts to the same end for 

 centuries, demonstrated the predominance of law, of which 

 astronomy and physics gave then numerous proofs, but 

 which geology later on made strikingly evident to all minds. 

 This had results of different kinds : it brought about, 

 by its influence on man's thoughts, changes in religious 

 and civil government, which had far greater practical 

 beneficent effects than all the others put together. For the 

 substitution of the conception of permanent law for that 

 of daily supernatural intervention destroyed, though only 

 gradually, but in the end entirely, the belief in witchcraft, 

 evil spirits, magic, necromancy, theurgy, thaumaturgy, 

 sortilege, and sorcery of every kind. This mental disease 

 had for centuries been the cause of abominable horrors. 

 Thousands of victims were daily burnt alive upon suspicion 

 of witchery, by batches of twenty, two hundred, four hundred 

 at a time, even in small towns, and the burnings were 

 regarded as popular festivals witchery being considered as 

 the working of Satan and heresy. Religious government had 

 become religious terrorism, in comparison with the evil of 

 which the revolting atrocities of the Roman emperors, or the 

 violence of the French Revolution, or the savagery of Dahomey 

 sink into insignificance into insignificance because these 

 evils were only intermittent and momentary, whereas the 

 religious Reign of Terror lasted without intermission for 

 centuries and centuries, and was a relentless ever-present and 

 ever-active scourge from which no escape was possible. All 

 religions seemed heresies in the eyes of the one in power, 

 and the heretics were looked upon as enemies whom it was 

 righteous to visit with massacre, exterminating wars, torture, 

 and the stake. All these frightful things gradually ceased 



