WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 9 
The ethics of Paganism were outranked by the ethics 
of Christianity, and religion contested for supremacy 
over philosophy. 
Unhappily, in its efforts to ennoble man, faith ab- 
solved itself from reason and alienated the intellect by 
denying liberty of thought to the human mind. The 
rich legacy of truth, which had been received from the 
Pagan world, was cast aside, and nature was no longer 
interpreted according to any standard of verified know]- 
edge, but by scripture texts which were made to har- 
monize with the abstractions of the monastery. Belief 
stifled inquiry and dogma supplanted reason, and, for 
over a thousand years, an ignorant credulity dominated 
the human mind and intellectual darkness brooded over 
the world. 
This was, however, but the ebbing tide of thought, not 
its death; the transformation of reason into emotion ; 
the materialization of faith into the objects of its adora- 
tion. The principle of conservation applies to mental as 
well as to physical affairs, and *‘ fosters the eternal vital 
process of advancing reason.” 
The germs of knowledge, which had been scattered 
from the intellectual watch-towers of Athens and Alex- 
andria, of Grenada and Cordova, came floating down 
through the murky atmosphere of the middle-ages, 
until, under the energizing influences of the great geo- 
graphical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, they developed into a grand renaissance of 
thought, and it was again demonstrated that the world 
was more than the senses made it, and that the horizon 
of truth extended far beyond the mental perspective ot 
the past. 
W hen the anchor dropped from the prow of Magellan’s 
ship in the harbor of San Lucar, it carried with it to the 
bottom of the sea the false Patristic doctrine that the 
earth is flat. Then it was that the picture, which nature 
