Heart.

It is a quiet time now, and people hate each other less than formerly.
They hate few indeed but their own friends. I have seen Methodists
admiring Jesuits. Those lawyers and physicians whom the Church in the
Middle Ages called the children of Satan, I have seen making shrewd
covenant with the old conquered Spirit.

But get we away from these pretences. They who gravely propose that
Satan should make peace and settle down, have they thought much about
the matter?

There is no hindrance as regards ill-will. The dead are dead. The
millions of former victims sleep in peace, be they Albigenses,
Vaudois, or Protestants, Moors, Jews, or American Indians. The Witch,
universal martyr of the Middle Ages, has nought to say. Her ashes have
been scattered to the winds.

Know you, then, what it is that raises a protest, that keeps these two
spirits steadily apart, preventing them from coming nearer? It is a
huge reality, born five hundred years ago; a gigantic creation
accursed by the Church, even that mighty fabric of science and modern
institutions, which she excommunicated stone by stone, but which with
every anathema has grown a storey higher. You cannot name one science
which has not been itself a rebellion.

There is but one way of reconciling the two spirits, of joining into
one the two churches. Demolish the younger, that one which from its
first beginning was pronounced guilty and doomed as such. Let us, if
we can, destroy the natural sciences, the observatory, the museum, the
botanical garden, the schools of medicine, and all the modern
libraries. Let us burn our laws, our bodies of statutes, and return to
the Canon Law.

All these novelties came of Satan. Each step forward has been a crime
of his doing.

He was the wicked logician who, despising the clerical law, preserved
and renewed that of jurists and philosophers, grounded on an impious
faith, on the freedom of the will.

He was that dangerous magician who, while men were discussing the sex
of angels and other questions of like sublimity, threw himself
fiercely on realities, and created chemistry, physics, mathematics--ay,
even mathematics. He sought to revive them, and that was rebellion.
People were burnt for saying that three made three.

Medicine especially was a Satanic thing, a rebellion against disease,
the scourge so justly dealt by God. It was clearly sinful to check the
soul on its way towards heaven, to plunge it afresh into life!

What