the condition of the French nation in 1794, when
Anarchy unfurled its red banner at the head of the most gigantic social
revolution the world has ever known.

At the present time, community of interests, as well as higher
civilization, would utterly forbid the total subjugation of one
civilized nation by another, such as occurred in the olden times; hence
no nation need fear annihilation from such a source. The danger comes
from another point, and consists in the almost certain uprising, at some
time in the future, of degenerate individuals in open warfare and
rebellion against society.

The question whether the world is growing better or worse is often
debated, and can be answered affirmatively on both sides. Better,
because superstition, bigotry, and dogmatism have given way, to a great
extent, to the tolerance and freedom of higher civilization and purer
ethics in normal, healthy man; worse, because crime (and I mean by crime
_all_ anti-social acts) has greatly increased on account of the
pernicious influence of degeneration.

That superstition, bigotry, and dogmatism are on the wane, and that they
will, sooner or later, be entombed in that depository of obsolete savage
mental habitudes--absolute and utter oblivion--a glance at the success
that science has achieved in the warfare waged against it by the Church,
will at once declare. (Throughout this article I use the word Church to
express priests of any and every denomination, whether Jew, Gentile, or
Pagan, Protestant or Catholic.) A short incursion into this subject, _i.
e._, the Church's warfare on science, is absolutely necessary. For the
triumph of science over its enemies--superstition, bigotry, and
dogmatism, coincidently, ignorance and illiterateness--shows that the
civilized world, at the present time, is markedly different in some
respects from the world of ancient, medieval, and even comparatively
recent times; and, in summing up, this changed condition will be a
weighty factor in making up an answer to the question which heads this
paper.

When Olympus first faded away from the enlightened eyesight of the
Greeks, and changed into space besprinkled with stars; when Zeus no
longer held his divine court on its mystic summit; when oracles became
mute and the fabled wonders of the "Odyssey" either vanished, or
resolved themselves into prosaic commonplaces under the investigations
of the skeptic or the accidental discoverer, the Church made a most
strenu