There was the massacre of the Vaudois, during which twenty-eight villages were given to the flames, and upwards of 4000 men, women, and children, slaughtered under circumstances of almost incredible atrocity. This was followed by the holocaust of Cahors, when a meeting-house in which the Calvinists had assembled for worship, was set fire to, and as the terror-stricken congregation rushed from it into the streets, they were cut to pieces by the pikes, axes, and daggers of the fanatical multitude outside. Scarcely less horrible and sanguinary, were the massacres at Vassi, Tours, and Sens. Then came the butchery of more than 5000 Protestant citizens of Toulouse, and the hideous horrors of St. Bartholomew, when for three days the Huguenots of Paris were being shot down like dogs; when "corpses blocked the doorways; mutilated bodies lay in every lane and passage; thousands were cast into the Seine, then swollen by a flood;" and 70,000 "heretics" were slain, according to the computation of Sully, and 100,000 according to that of Bishop Péréfixe.

If we turn to the Netherlands, we find tens of thousands of human beings given to the gallows, the sword, the stake, or the living grave, by the ferocious Duke of Alva, in his avowed determination to extirpate Protestantism from the Low Countries:

"No mode in which human beings have ever caused their fellow creatures to suffer," writes Mr. Morley, was omitted from daily practice. Men, women, and children, old and young, nobles and paupers, opulent burghers, hospital patients, lunatics, dead bodies, all were indiscriminately made to furnish food for the scaffold and the stake. Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs, burned before slow fires, pinched to death with red-hot tongs, broken upon the wheel, starved, and flayed alive. Their skins, stripped from the living body, were stretched upon drums, to be beaten in the march of their brethren to the gallows. Unborn infants were torn from the living bodies of their mothers; women and children were violated by thousands; and whole populations burned and hacked to pieces by soldiers in every mode which cruelty, in its wanton ingenuity, could devise."*

We cross over to Ireland, and find the Protestant Cromwell giving orders for an indiscriminate massacre of the garrison of Drogheda, and of every man, woman, and child in that city. A thousand aged and very young people of both sexes, take refuge in the Church of St. Peter, and not one of them is permitted to quit it alive. At Wexford, three hundred women and children gather round the market-cross for protection, and he puts them all to the sword, so that his men were wading ankle-deep in their blood, "for which,” he writes to Mr. Speaker Lenthall," as for all, we pray God may have Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, Part III., chap. 9.

*

all the glory!" And before this saintly soldier.quitted Ireland, he shipped 80,000 Irishmen to the sugar plantations at Barbadoes, there to labour as slaves," and, in six years' time, such was the treatment they received there, that out of the 80,000 there were not twenty men left."*

Is it needful to speak of the Inquisition in Spain, which caused no less than 31,000 persons to be burnt alive, and 290,000 to undergo other forms of punishment, many of them attended with unspeakable suffering, both mental and physical? Is it necessary to call to mind the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Spain, and the appalling consequences of that barbarous and pitiless decree? Is it necessary to dwell upon the banishment of the Moriscoes from the same country in 1609, when about "a million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts, because the sincerity of their religious opinions was doubtful. . . In one expedition, in which 140,000 were carried to Africa, upwards of 100,000 suffered death in its most frightful forms after their expulsion from Spain."+

Would not Europe have escaped this succession of horrors if a different issue of the battle of Tours had led to the ascendancy of the wise, progressive and tolerant Arab, from the pillars of Hercules to the islands of the Hebrides? Nor would the frightful carnage and the enormous waste of treasure occasioned by the Crusades, have had to be recorded and deplored. These mad wars were entirely religious. Their pretext was to rescue from "infidels" the supposed tomb of One, whose sacred name they insulted and defiled alike by their language and their daily lives. There were eight of these delirious expeditions; and the cautious Hallam declares that "so many crimes and so much misery have seldom been accumulated in so short a space as in the three years of the first;" when nearly a million of European lives were lost. At the taking of Jerusalem, "seventy thousand Mohammedans were massacred. Many who had received a promise of life from the leaders were pitilessly slaughtered by the soldiery. The thoroughfares were choked up with corpses; the temple and Solomon's porch, where some of the Saracens had made a desperate resistance, were filled with blood to the height of a horse's knee; and in the general rage against the enemies of Christ"-is it possible that the butchers could have imagined they were his friends?" the Jews were burnt in

* Ireland's Case Stated: By the Very Rev. J. N. Burke, O.P. + Buckle's History of Civilisation in England. Vol. 2, p. 491.

their synagogue. When weary of slaying, the crusaders employed the surviving Saracens in clearing the city of the dead bodies and burning them without the walls; and, having spared them until this labour was performed, they either killed them or sold them as slaves."* During the second crusade occurred the memorable siege of Acre, in which 120,000 Christians and 180,000 Moslems perished. When the city capitulated, 8000 of the latter, who had been taken prisoners, "were led forth and remorselessly butchered in the sight of Saladin and his army, who could only look on in impotent distress." After the successful siege of Constantinople, in the next crusade, the Latin Catholics took a savage delight in defiling the churches of the Greek Catholics; sacred relics were thrown into filthy places; the consecrated host was trampled under foot; a strumpet was placed on the throne of the patriarch, and indecent songs were sung, and lewd dances performed around her.+ But why prolong the dismal narrative? Enough to say that, in the words of Gibbon, “The principle of the crusades was a savage fanaticism; and the most important effects were analogous to the cause.... The belief of the Catholics was corrupted by new legends, their practice by new superstitions; and the establishment of the Inquisition, the mendicant orders of monks and friars, the last abuse of indulgences, and the final progress of idolatry, flowed from the baleful fountain of the holy war. The active spirits of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and religion; and if the ninth and tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of absurdity and fable." And yet these were the very centuries, during which Spain was being irradiated by the splendour of Arab civilization, morality and learning, which if it had spread over the rest of Europe, would have changed the history of the world; and would probably have ante-dated nineteenth century discoveries by something like a thousand years. For it must be remembered that many of these were anticipated by the Arabs in Spain; while, as * J. C. Robertson's History of the Christian Church. Vol. 4, pp. 408-9.

+ On the night of the assault more houses were burned than could be found in any three of the largest cities in France. Even Christian historians compare with shame the storming of Constantinople by the Catholics with the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin. Pope Innocent himself was compelled to protest against crimes that had outrun his intentions. He says:-"They practised fornications, incests, adulteries, in the sight of men. They abandoned matrons and virgins, consecrated to God, to the lewdness of grooms. They lifted their hands against the treasures of the churches, what is more heinous, the very consecrated vessels-tearing the tablets of silver from the very altars, breaking in pieces the most sacred things, caring off crosses and relics." And both victors and victims were Christians!

Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Ch. 61.

Dr. Draper has pointed out, the principles of the Baconian philosophy itself, were not only understood but carried into practice in the East, from whence these wonderful people came, eighteen hundred years before the birth of

The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.

The Arabs in Spain produced a succession of writers upon jurisprudence, mental and moral philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, music, geography, astronomy, mathematics, rhetoric, grammar and natural philosophy, so numerous and so gifted, as to excite the unqualified astonishment and admiration even of those who are only familiar with their works by report. They introduced the mariner's compass into Europe; they published pharmacopoeias; they taught us the use of the cautery and the knife in surgery; they gave us our arithmetical notation by nine digits and a cypher; they invented the common method of solving quadratic equations; they demonstrated the sphericity of the globe; they promulgated the true theory of light, and understood the phenomena of refraction and diffraction; they determined the height of the atmosphere; they were acquainted with the principle of gravitation, and constructed tables of specific gravities; they had several kinds of clepsydras, and they were the first to apply the pendulum to the measure of time; they anticipated Torricelli in weighing the atmosphere; Newton, in the recognition of gravity as a force; and Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, and Haeckel in announcing the doctrine of the progressive development of animal forms. They were enthusiastic and indefatigable in the pursuit of science; and they exhibited a spirit of tolerance beyond all praise. Renan tells us, in the noble monument he has consecrated to the memory of Averroes, how, in Andalusia, "Christians, Jews, Mussulmans, spoke the same language, sang the same poetry, and participated in the same literary and scientific studies;" how "all the barriers which separated men were removed, and all laboured with one accord to forward the work of a common civilisation;" and how "the mosques of Cordova, where the students might be reckoned by thousands, became the active centres of philosophical and scientific studies." And Dr. Draper informs us that "in Cordova, Granada, and other great cities, there were universities frequently under the superintendence of Jews; the Mohammedan reason being that the real learning of man is of more public importance than any particular religious opinions he may entertain. In this they followed the example of the Asiatic Khalif Haroun Alraschid, who actually conferred the superintendence of his schools on John Masné, a

Nestorian Christian. Indeed, it may be doubted whether, at this time, any European nation is sufficiently advanced to follow such an example."

Now turn to the history of science in Christendom, and what do we find? Its most illustrious investigators have been martyred for their devoted study of what Bacon calls "the Word of God revealed in facts." For this, Cecco d'Ascoli, at seventy years of age, was burned alive; the posthumous work of the immortal Copernicus was solemnly condemned;* Galileo was cast into prison; Descartes ran a narrow risk of being tortured;† Kepler was persecuted and his mother denounced as a witch; Albertus Magnus placed under a ban by the Dominican orders; Roger Bacon imprisoned for fourteen years; Antonio de Dominis deprived of his archbishopic of Spalatro and immured in the dungeons of the Inquisition; Pierre de la Ramée silenced by an edict, and butchered on the night of St. Bartholomew; Borelli reduced to beggary; Oliva driven to suicide; Arnold de Villa Nova excommunicated and exiled; Andreas Vesalius compelled to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as an atonement of his sin for revealing the anatomical wonders of the human body; Hypatia ferociously cut to pieces in the streets of Alexandria; Servetus burnt alive in Geneva; Giordano Bruno subjected to the same penalty in Rome; Campanella imprisoned for seventeen years, and seven times exposed to the torture; and Vanini strangled after having had his tongue cut out. Nor is the spirit of persecution yet extinct, even in Protestant countries which boast of their enlightenment? A century and a half ago, charges of sorcery and atheism were hurled at the supporters of inoculation in the mother country, and it was stigmatised as a diabolical operation by the occupants of Church of England pulpits. A little later, vaccination was denounced by the Rev. Dr. Ramsden, in a sermon before the University of Cambridge; and within the memory of the writer, the discoverer of chloroform was assailed with all kinds of opprobrious epithets by the Presbyterian clergy of Scotland; Dr. Buckland, Dean Conybeare, and Professor Sedgwick, were pronounced to be infidels for asserting that the world is more than 6000 years old; and the science of geology was declared to be "a dark art," "infernal artillery," and "an awful evasion of the testimony of revelation." The Dean of York coarsely attacked the late Mary Somerville, on account of her scientific researches, * Luther and Melancthon vied with the Roman Catholic Church in reprobating Copernicus.

+ The Protestant theologians of Holland were just as bitter against the philosopher as the members of the older faith.