[63] they were not a bit worse than the priests and monarchs of
primitive ages who sacrificed human beings to their deities. The Greek
king, Agamemnon, who immolated his daughter Iphigenia to obtain
favourable winds from the gods, was perhaps a most affectionate father,
and the seer who advised him to do so may have been a man of high
integrity. They acted according to their beliefs. And so in the Middle
Ages and afterwards men of kindly temper and the purest zeal for
morality were absolutely devoid of mercy where heresy was suspected.
Hatred of heresy was a sort of infectious germ, generated by the
doctrine of exclusive salvation.

It has been observed that this dogma also injured the sense of truth. As
man’s eternal fate was at stake, it seemed plainly legitimate or rather
imperative to use any means to enforce the true belief—even falsehood
and imposture. There was no scruple about the invention of miracles or
any fictions that were edifying. A disinterested appreciation of truth
will not begin to prevail till the seventeenth century.

While this principle, with the associated doctrines of sin, hell, and
the last judgment, led to such consequences, there were other doctrines
and implications in Christianity which, forming a solid rampart against
the

[64] advance of knowledge, blocked the paths of science in the Middle
Ages, and obstructed its progress till the latter half of the nineteenth
century. In every important field of scientific research, the ground was
occupied by false views which the Church declared to be true on the
infallible authority of the Bible. The Jewish account of Creation and
the Fall of Man, inextricably bound up with the Christian theory of
Redemption, excluded from free inquiry geology, zoology, and