Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/104

80 by Pope Gregory V., for marrying his god-mother, the Princess Bertha, his servants threw out of the window the meat served up to the king, and  Queen Bertha was delivered of a goose in punishment  of the incestuous marriage. I doubt if in our time the waiters of the king of France would, if he were  excommunicated, throw his dinner out of the window, and whether the queen would give birth to a  gosling.

There remain, it is true, a few bigoted fanatics in the suburbs; but the disease, like vermin, attacks only the lowest of the populace. Every day reason penetrates farther into France, into the shops of  merchants as well as the mansions of lords. We must cultivate the fruits of reason, the more willingly since it is now impossible to prevent them from  developing. France, enlightened by Pascal, Nicole, Arnaud, Bossuet, Descartes, Gassendi, Bayle, Fontenelle, etc., cannot be ruled as it was ruled in  earlier times.

If the masters of error—the grand masters—so long paid and honoured for brutalising the human species, ordered us to-day to believe that the seed  must die in order to germinate; that the earth  stands motionless on its foundations—that it does  not travel round the sun; that the tides are not  a natural effect of gravitation; that the rainbow  is not due to the refraction and reflection of light,  etc., and based their decrees on ill-understood passages  of Scripture, we know how they would be regarded  by educated men. Would it be too much to call them fools? And if these masters employed force and persecution to secure the ascendancy of