THE ARREST OF INQUIRY. g? 



fetters, or, as Huxley happily puts it, the scraping 

 of a little rust off the chains which still bound the 

 mind. " Learning perished where Luther reigned," 

 Baid Erasmus, and in proof of it we find the Re- 

 former agreeing with his coadjutor, Melanchthon, in 

 permitting no tampering with the written Word. 

 Copernicus notwithstanding, they had no doubt that 

 the earth was fixed and that sun arid stars travelled 

 round it, because the Bible said so. Peter Martyr, 

 one of the early Lutheran converts, in his Com- 

 mentary on Genesis, declared that wrong opinions 

 about the creation as narrated in that book would 

 render valueless all the promises of Christ. Wherein 

 he spoke truly. As for the schoolmen, Luther called 

 them "locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice." Rea- 

 son he denounced as the " arch whore " and the 

 " devil's bride," Aristotle is a " prince of darkness, 

 horrid impostor, public and professed liar, beast, and 

 twice execrable." Consistently enough, Luther be- 

 lieved vehemently in a personal devil, and in witches; 

 " I would myself burn them," he says, " even as it is 

 written in the Bible that the priests stoned offenders." 

 To him demoniacal possession was a fact clear as 

 noonday: idiocy, lunacy, epilepsy and all other men- 

 tal and nervous disorders were due to it. Hence, 

 a movement whose intent appeared to be the free- 

 ing of the human spirit riveted more tightly the 

 bolts that imprisoned it; arresting the physical ex- 

 planation of mental diseases and that curative treat- 

 ment of them which is one of the countless services 



