English Secularism

ideas than no

r Nichol

s of enterprise to put their new powers to use. Theology being especially a forbidden subject an

pen field; and unforeseen victories are recorded, in the annals of the wars of infantine rationalism, against the full-grown powers of superstition and darkness. In every age val

ld intimidate-who caused the right of free speech and free publicity to be finally conceded. Thus rulers c

and social progress; but as philosophers have found, down to Huxley's day, all exploration was impossible in that direction. Murchison, Brewster, Buckland, and other pioneers of science were intimidated. Lyell held back his book, on the Antiquity of Man, twenty years. Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer were waiting to be heard. As Huxley has justly said: "there was no Thoroughfare into the Kingdom of Nature-By Order-Moses." Hence, to examine theology, to discover whether its authority was absolute, became a necessity. It was soon seen that there was ground for scepticism. The priests resented criticism by representing the sceptic of their pretensions, as being sceptical of everything, whereas they were only sceptics of clerical infallibility. They indeed did aver that branches of human knowledge, received as well established, were really open to question, in order to show that if men could not

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of the unive

of Provide

from peril by p

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uiring. They had enchanted many believers, but the explorers of whom we speak had acquired the questioning spirit, and had learned prudently to look at both sides of familiar subjects and soon discovered that the fair-seeming propositions which had formerly imposed on their imagination were un

nd; by more from enthusiasm for facts; by the bolder sort from resentment at the intimidation and cruelty with which inquiry had been suppressed so long; and

re would science be but for open thought, the nursing mother of enterp

ed in by minute rules and restrictions the various classes forming the Hindu community have had but little room for expansion and p

tha Nat

logy would have been stagnant centuries ago, had not insurgent thinkers, at the peril of their lives, created commotion in it. Morals would have been