has it operated in both
ways? Let us find the answer, by testing each of these theories of its
office by means of the facts.

The first of the three is that which has generally been held within the
Christian church. It dates from the first ages of the church, and
witnesses to a valuable truth. The sacred care with which the Christians
treasured the doctrine, and spurned the attempts of heretics to explain it
away, proves the strength of the conviction that they possessed a definite
treasure of divine truth, introduced at a definite period. Their very want
of toleration,(1015) the tenacity of their attachment to the faith, is a
proof of their undoubting conviction concerning the historic verity of the
facts connected with redemption, and the definite character of the dogmas
which interpreted the facts. In later ages however, the same idea of
sacredness has been extended by the Romish church to the mass of error
which Christianity has taken up into itself in the progress of ages; and
in Protestant countries has led to the attempt to restrain the thoughts of
men even on the secular subjects most remote from religion, where the
ancient sacred literature seemed to suggest any indirect information. The
doubt on the part of religious men, of any progress being made by free
thought, has often expressed itself too in the affirmation, that the
history of unbelief shows an exact recurrence of the same doubts, without
progress from age to age, and an intimation that new suggestions of doubt
are only old foes under new faces.

While Christians have thus generally regarded free inquiry in religion as
wholly a loss; freethinkers have taken the very opposite view, and
regarded it as an unmixed gain. The distinguished writer(1016) of our own
time on the history of civilisation, whose premature death will prevent
the fulfilment of his large design, has illustrated, with the clearness
and grasp over facts which constitute some of his excellences, the office
of scepticism, in securing for the human mind the political liberty and
toleration which he prized so dearly. His central thought was, that
civilisation depended upon the progress of intellect,(1017) the
emancipation of the human mind from all authority save that of inductive
science: he pointed out with triumphant enthusiasm, the services which he
conceived that unbelief had performed, in rescuing Europe from degrading
beliefs like witchcraft, and from the introduction of supernatura