SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY. 323 



It is the despotism of the Papacy that lent its 

 darkest character to the Middle Ages ; it meant death 

 to all freedom of mental life, decay to all science, 

 corruption to all morality. From the noble height to 

 which the life of the human mind had attained in 

 classical antiquity, in the centuries before Christ and 

 the first century after Christ, it soon sank, under the 

 rule of the Papacy, to a level which, in respect of the 

 knowledge of the truth, can only be termed barbarism. 

 It is often protested that other aspects of mental life — 

 poetry and architecture, scholastic learning and 

 patristic philosophy — were richly developed in the 

 Middle Ages. But this activity was in the service of 

 the Church ; it did not tend to the cultivation, but 

 to the suppression, of free mental research. The 

 exclusive preparing for an unknown eternity beyond 

 the tomb, the contempt of nature, the withdrawal from 

 the study of it, which are essential elements of Chris- 

 tianity, were urged as a sacred duty by the Roman 

 hierarchy. It was not until the beginning of the 

 sixteenth century that a change for the better came in 

 with the Reformation. 



It is impossible for us to describe here the pitiful 

 retrogression of culture and morality during the 

 twelve centuries of the spiritual despotism of Rome. 

 It is very pithily expressed in a saying of the greatest 

 and ablest of the Hohenzollerns ; Frederick the 

 Great condensed his judgment in the phrase that the 

 study of history led one to think that from Constantine 

 to the date of the Reformation the whole world was 

 insane. L. Buchner has given us an admirable, brief 

 description of this " period of insanity " in his work 

 on Religious and Scientific Systems. The reader who 

 desires a closer acquaintance with the subject would 



