Excerpt from From Dawn to Sunrise: A Review, Historical and Philosophical, of the Religious Ideas of Mankind
A Fear agitates the mind of the Christian philosopher, at the present time, that another great religious eclipse is impending, such as have during historic times chilled the soul of mankind for ages and destroyed its liberty and spiritual vitality.
Europe lay under a penumbra of gloom and horror from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, - the Dark Ages. Then religion, divorced from science, was wedded to superstition and priestcraft in the bands of an infernal wedlock, and the fearful progeny of such an unholy union was slavery, intellectual stupefaction, all crime known to human law, unnameable vice, and physical disease. At that melancholy period it was religiously taught that a man could purchase from another man, with money, exemption from penalty in this world and the world to come, even though committing the foulest murder and treason; but if he denied that the bread and wine in the hands of the priest was not miraculously transformed into the actual body of the crucified Saviour, if he refused to assert that the autocrat who sat in St. Peter's chair, steeped in venality, vice and crime, was the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace and Purity, if he dared to believe that the earth turned upon its axis, he was subjected to all the indignity and bodily torture the ingenuity of man, aided by the Devil, could devise.
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