The ascendancy of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendancy
which naturally and properly belongs to intellectual superiority.
The priests, with all their faults, were by far the wisest
portion of society. It was, therefore, on the whole, good that
they should be respected and obeyed. The encroachments of the
ecclesiastical power on the province of the civil power produced
much more happiness than misery, while the ecclesiastical power
was in the hands of the only class that had studied history,
philosophy, and public law, and while the civil power was in the
hands of savage chiefs, who could not read their own grants and
edicts. But a change took place. Knowledge gradually spread among
laymen. At the commencement of the sixteenth century many of them
were in every intellectual attainment fully equal to the most
enlightened of their spiritual pastors. Thenceforward that
dominion, which, during the dark ages, had been, in spite of many
abuses, a legitimate and salutary guardianship, became an unjust
and noxious tyranny.

From the time when the barbarians overran the Western Empire to
the time of the revival of letters, the influence of the Church
of Rome had been generally favourable to science to civilisation,
and to good government. But, during the last three centuries, to
stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object.
Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in
knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has
been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse
proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces
of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in
political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant
countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been