2 "Here, then, we have the starting-point of progress--_scepticism_.... All, therefore, that men want is _no hindrance_ from their political and religious rulers.... Until common minds doubt respecting religion they can never receive any new scientific conclusion at variance with it--as Joshua and Copernicus."--Ibid.
3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if possible, equal to the learning, did find readers, but the illustrious author was so cruelly reviled by men who called themselves Christians, that it seemed doubtful if, after such an example, subsequent writers would hazard their comfort and happiness by attempting to write philosophic history. Middleton wrote in 1750.... As long as the theological spirit was alive nothing could be effected."--Ibid.
4. "The questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that.... But the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated, and for the most part submissive; and _if they were not_, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp mortal.... They [the thinkers] could have taught Europe _earlier than the Church allowed it to learn_, that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun.... After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was marked in one of its most important phases by a new, and most significant, feature.... It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral motive.... The philosophical movement was represented by "Diderot" [leading the Encyclopaedist circle.]... Broadly stated the great central moral of it was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world _is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions_. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, _and the beginning of a new dispensation.... Into what fresh and unwelcome sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology... Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that new doctrine in one form or another_.... The teaching of the Church paints men as fallen and depraved. The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the new fabric rising was very natural.... The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points, alike in letter and spirit, with the old sacred lore.... A hundred years ago this perception was vague and indefinite, but there was an unmistakable apprehension that _the Catholic ideal of womanhood_ was no more adequate to the facts of life, than Catholic views about science, or popery, or labor, or political order and authority."--Morley.