concealed books of Numa were
found, which, on examination by the priests, being thought
injurious to the established religion, were ordered to be
burned.25 The charge was not that they were ungenuine, nor that
their contents were false; but they were dangerous. In the second
century, an imperial decree forbade the reading of the Sibylline
Oracles, because they contained prophecies of Christ and doctrines
of Christianity. By an act of the English Parliament, in the
middle of the seventeenth century, every copy of the Racovian
Catechism (an exposition of the Socinian doctrine) that could be
obtained was burned in the streets.

25 Lib. xl. cap. xxix.

The Index Expurgatorius for Catholic countries is still freshly
filled every year. And in Protestant countries a more subtle and a
more effectual influence prevents, on the part of the majority,
the candid perusal of all theological discussions which are not
pitched in the orthodox key. Certain dogmas are the absorbed
thought of the sects which defend them: no fresh and independent
thinking is to be expected on those subjects, no matter how purely
fictitious these secretions of the brain of the denomination or of
some ancient leader may be, no matter how glaringly out of keeping
with the intelligence and liberty which reign in other realms of
faith and feeling. There is nowhere else in the world a tyranny so
pervasive and despotic as that which rules in the department of
theological opinion. The prevalent slothful and slavish surrender
of the grand privileges and duties of individual thought,
independent personal conviction and action in religious matters,
is at once astonishing, pernicious, and disgraceful. The effect of
entrenched tradition, priestly directors, a bigoted, overawing,
and persecuting sectarianism, is nowhere else a hundredth part so
powerful or so extensive.

In addition to the bitter determination by interested persons to
suppress reforming investigations of the doctrines which hold
their private prejudices in supremacy, and to the tremendous
social prestige of old establishment, another cause has been
active to keep theology stationary while science has been making
such rapid conquests. Science deals with tangible quantities,
theology with abstract qualities. The cultivation of the former
yields visible practical results of material comfort; the
cultivation of the latter yields only inward spiritual results of
mental welfare. Accordingly, science h