their cloisters, and, a few
years later, Luther married a nun called Catharine von Bora. This tale
did not greatly impress our guest.

A Catholic Brother, not to be outdone, extols the glories of his
Universal Church, and the Martian again sets out to investigate. This
time he finds:

The quotations in the New Testament which the Catholic creed interprets
as giving divine authority to its representatives on earth is a late
interpolation; the Trinity as stated above is a paradox which no
rational being can understand, and its dogmas and idolatry are
consistent with a civilization of 4000 years ago.

A study of the lives of its popes put to shame the statement that they
could possibly be the earthly representatives of a Benevolent Being. "In
the ninth and tenth centuries the papacy passed through a period of
shameful disorder. The Rome of John X was a cloaca in which the Popes
set the example of the worst misconduct." (For a good short account of
the lives of the popes, see Draper's, "History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe.")

During the complete control by the Church of civilization in Europe, it
has retarded the progress of humanity for at least 2000 years, and its
precepts and fundamental principles are today detrimental to the advance
of mankind. It has to its credit a long series of judicial murders for
differences of opinion. The Crusades, instigated by the popes and
seconded by the monks, cost millions of lives and exhausted the
resources of Christian Europe; they aggravated fanaticism, exaggerated
the worship of saints and relics to the point of mania, and encouraged
the abuse of and traffic in indulgences. There had never been a single
opinion persecuted by the Church in the Middle Ages the adoption of
which would not have brought about a diminution of her revenues; the
Church has always primarily considered her finances. The papacy was
responsible for the Inquisition, and it actively encouraged and excited
its ferocity. It gave birth to the Witchcraft Mania. The first Grand
Inquisitor, Torquemada, received the congratulations of the Pope. It
diabolically applauded the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and instigated the
numerous religious wars that tore Europe asunder, and was the cause of
the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and incalculable suffering.
With such savage alacrity did it carry out its object of protecting the
interests of religion that between 1481 and 1808 it had punished three
hund