Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/19

Rh fate of those nations to whom salvation came too late; on whose destiny the curse of that superstition has been wrought out to the bitter end. The attempt to carry the theories of the Hebrew fanatics into practice led to a state of affairs against which the unpossessed part of mankind had to combine in sheer self-defense; the maniacs were overpowered, but only after a struggle which has trampled the chief battle-fields into dust, and not before they had turned the Mediterranean God-garden into such a pandemonium of madness, tyranny, and wretchedness, that the lot of the African savages appeared heaven in comparison. The annals of pagan despotism furnish no parallel to the pages stained with blood and tears that record the horrors of the inquisitorial butcheries and man-hunts of the middle ages. The history of science is the history of a day with a bright morning and a sunny evening, but interrupted at the noontide hour by a total eclipse of common sense and reason. The men that inculcated a belief in the possibility of witchcraft and demoniac possession are responsible for the agonies of the three million human beings that perished in the flames of the stake; the dogma of total natural depravity guided the arm that aimed its poisoned daggers at the heart of every social, political, or scientific reformer. But the direst of all the evils which made the rule of the miracle-mongers the unhappiest period in the history of this earth was, after all, their total neglect of physical education—the logical outcome of their Nature-hating insanity. Their disciples were assured, in the name of an infallible revelator, that all earthly concernments are vain; that we can not please God without mortifying our bodies; that our natural instincts must be suppressed, in order to qualify our souls for the New Jerusalem. The joys of Nature were to be shunned as man-traps of the arch-fiend. Sickness was to be cured by prayer and certain ecclesiastic ceremonies. "Bodily exercise," we are informed, "profited but little." The Olympic games were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The health-code of the Mosaic dispensation was repealed as unessential, and indeed superfluous, in a community of miracle-workers who could defy the laws of Nature with the aid of supernal spirits. Gluttony and besottedness were encouraged by the example of the ministers of that creed. Manly exercises, the festivals of the seasons, mirth, pastimes, and health-giving sports were discouraged as unworthy of a true saint; the sons of the thaumaturgic church were taught that our natural desires and natural dispositions are wholly evil; that the study of worldly sciences is vain, and solicitude for the welfare of the body a proof of an unregenerate heart.

To these doctrines we owe the consequences of our countless sins against the physical laws of God; the many irretrievable losses by the ruin of a former civilization; the terrible night of the long centuries when science was paralyzed, when industrial progress was