SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY. 329 



agitation of the peasantry. Worse still was the 

 fanatical Calvin, of Geneva, who had the talented 

 Spanish physician, Serveto, burnt alive in 1553, 

 because he rejected the absurd dogma of the Trinity. 

 The fanatical " true believers " of the reformed Church 

 followed only too frequently in the blood-stained foot- 

 steps of their Papal enemies ; as they do even in our 

 own day. Deeds of unparalleled cruelty followed in 

 the train of the Reformation — the massacre of St. 

 Bartholomew and the persecution of the Huguenots in 

 France, bloody heretic-hunts in Italy, civil war in 

 England, and the Thirty Years' War in Germany. 

 Yet, in spite of those grave blemishes, to the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries belongs the honour of once 

 more opening a free path to the thoughtful mind, and 

 delivering reason from the oppressive yoke of the 

 Papacy. Thus only was made possible that great 

 development of different tendencies in critical philo- 

 sophy and of new paths in science which won for the 

 subsequent eighteenth century the honourable title of 

 " the century of enlightenment."' 



IV. THE PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY OF THE NINETEENTH 



CENTURY. 



As the fourth and last stage in the history of Chris- 

 tianity we oppose our nineteenth century to all its 

 predecessors. It is true that the enlightenment of 

 preceding centuries had promoted critical thought in 

 every direction, and the rise of science itself had 

 furnished powerful empirical weapons ; yet it seems 

 to us that our progress along both lines has been 

 quite phenomenal during the nineteenth century. It 

 has inaugurated an entirely new period in the history 



