The "common man" knows in a vague way the massive fact that the modern mind has made more progress in precise and profound knowledge of life and matter in the last century than it had been able to make in more than two thousand years previous to this epoch. He is at times disposed to wonder at this surprising phenomenon, but it is not likely to occur to him at any time what might be the historical rationale underlying and explaining the event itself. And he would have to read a work like Andrew D. White's great two-volume ...
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The "common man" knows in a vague way the massive fact that the modern mind has made more progress in precise and profound knowledge of life and matter in the last century than it had been able to make in more than two thousand years previous to this epoch. He is at times disposed to wonder at this surprising phenomenon, but it is not likely to occur to him at any time what might be the historical rationale underlying and explaining the event itself. And he would have to read a work like Andrew D. White's great two-volume History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom to have had his eyes opened to the realization of a mighty fact of sixty generations of Western history, which would be likely to stagger his thinking beyond measure. He would, by such a work - along with others that would further strengthen its force - come to understand at last that a brutal, if sanctimonious, power dominant in the West for over eighteen hundred years held the mind of the entire Occident in leash, and with summary vengeance crushed down every movement of that mind toward the grasp of truth in the realm of scientific fact. And finally there would crash through into his intellect the explosive realization that this searching, prying mind of Western man has achieved more knowledge that can lift human life immeasurably, in the hundred years since it has been free from ecclesiastical tyranny, and able to think and broadcast its findings, than it had won in all previous history. And if the logic of events had its course with him, he would conclude at last that the age-long despotism of priestcraft in European history has been the most blighting calamity that ever afflicted assumedly civilized humanity. Gulled by the natural influences of pietism and sanctity traditionally flaunted before the mass mind by religionists, he would never have sensed the diabolical character of religious tyranny, had not science demonstrated what the free mind could accomplish, once it had thrown off the trammels and shackles of churchly [Page 4] prohibition. Fifty years of freedom - and science has advanced the human race in vital knowledge farther than it had ever progressed in all previous time! It took this astounding development of modern achievement to tear the veil of pious blindness and submissiveness from off the common man's eyes, and to reveal to his unobstructed vision the ugliness and falsity of two thousand years of futile religious hallucination for his world of the West. The Dark Ages indeed! And science, crushed to earth for long generations, is seen rising at last to lift the pall of superstitious pietism from off the mind of Western man, to let it prove its immortal divine genius.
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