MORAL EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS. 307 



the victors is the only one that remains in their hands, viz., 

 calumny. The benefactors are called scoffers, abettors of 

 Satan, atheists ; the faithful are warned against reading their 

 execrated works if they cherish religion, and the innocent 

 and pious Christians live on in the ignorance of the evils 

 destroyed and the good done by John Weir and Cornelius 

 Agrippa, by Montaigne and Charron, by Descartes and Locke, 

 by Bayle and Voltaire, by Middleton and Rousseau. Nor 

 should we omit Raynal, whose animated cosmorama, which 

 rapidly went through twenty successive editions and was read 

 by all in every part of the world, gave currency to the ideas 

 of the time and universally popularised them.* These were 

 the true deliverers. 



They did not attack things truly holy any more than 

 Luther had done before. Nor did they use the extreme 

 violence, crudity, virulence, and coarse invectives which 

 Luther poured out in his six thousand pamphlets. Far 

 from assailing the essence of the Christian teaching, they 

 on the contrary fertilised the precept of the modern world, 

 " Love one another." This sublime precept had until then 

 practically remained a dead letter in Europe. For ages it 

 had been replaced by the Inquisitors' tacit command, " Hate 

 one another," " Kill all those who differ from us in opinion " 

 a command not expressed in words, but acted upon with 

 ferocious ruthlessness against the so-called heretic, Mussul- 

 man, Jew, Indian; against Protestants in Roman Catholic 

 kingdoms, against Romanists in Protestant countries. 

 Whereas Christian charity, so distorted by fanatical teachers 

 and so barren until the XVIIIth century, was of all others 

 the one seed which the benefactors we just mentioned dis- 

 seminated all round. They it was who brought into 

 fruition the radiant doctrine of brotherly sympathy, en- 

 lightened as they were, not by dogma, but by the SPIRIT OF 

 TRUE HUMANITY. But they attacked, and attacked fiercely, 

 " with an eloquence and force never surpassed," f a religious 

 tyranny and an unscrupulous sacerdotal order. They, like 



* Mr. John Morley : s Encyclopedists. 

 t Mr. John Morley. 



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