ontend, and in despite of which they have slowly
won their way. Excommunications, dungeons, fires, sneers, polite
persecution, bitter neglect, tell the story, from the time the
Athenians banned Anaxagoras for calling the sun a mass of fire, to
the day an English mob burned the warehouses of Arkwright because
he had invented the spinning jenny. But, despite all the hostile
energies of establishment, prejudice, and scorn, the earnest
votaries of philosophical truth have studied and toiled with ever
accumulating victories, until now a hundred sciences are ripe with
emancipating fruits and perfect freedom to be taught. Railroads
gird the lands with ribs of trade, telegraphs thread the airs with
electric tidings of events, and steamships crease the seas with
channels of foam and fire. There is no longer danger of any one
being put to death, or even being excluded from the "best
society," for saying that the earth moves. An eclipse cannot be
regarded as the frown of God when it is regularly foretold with
certainty. The measurement of the atmosphere exterminated the
wiseacre proverb, "Nature abhors a vacuum," by the burlesque
addition, "but only for the first thirty two feet." The madman
cannot be looked on as divinely inspired, his words to be caught
as oracles, or as possessed by a devil, to be chained and
scourged, since Pinel's great work has brought insanity within the
range of organic disease. When Franklin's kite drew electricity
from the cloud to his knuckle, the superstitious theory of thunder
died a natural death.

The vast progress effected in all departments of physical science
during the last four centuries has not been made in any kindred
degree in the prevailing theology. Most of the harsh, unreasonable
tenets of the elaborately morbid and distorted mediaval
theologyare still retained in the creeds of the great majority of
Christendom. The causes of this difference are plain. The
establishment of newly discovered truths in material science being
less intimately connected with the prerogatives of the ruling
classes, less clearly hostile to the permanence of their power,
they have not offered so pertinacious an opposition to progress in
this province: they have yielded a much larger freedom to
physicists than to moralists, to discoverers of mathematical,
chemical, and mechanical law than to reformers of political and
religious thought. Livy tells us that, in the five hundred and
seventy third year of Rome, some