literature and science rightly so called, might have produced, in the
persons of superior native capacity, somewhat of a competency and a
disposition to question, to examine, to call for evidence, and to detect
some of the fallacies imposed for Christian faith. But in such
completeness of ignorance, the general mind was on all sides pressed and
borne down to its fate. All reaction ceased; and the people were reduced
to exist in one huge, unintelligent, monotonous substance, united by the
interfusion of a vile superstition, which permitted just enough mental
life in the mass to leave it capable of being actuated to all the purposes
of cheats, and tyrants,--a proper subject for the dominion of "our Lord
God the Pope," as he was sometimes denominated; and might have been
denominated without exciting indignation, in the hearing of millions of
beings bearing the form of men and the name of Christians.

Reflect that all this took place under the nominal ascendency of the best
and brightest economy of instruction from heaven. Reflect that it was in
nations where even the sovereign authority professed homage to the
religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national
institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for
all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and
bodies of its slaves. And then consider what _should_ have been the
condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged
by all as the true religion. The people _should_ have consisted of so many
beings having each, in some degree, the independent, beneficial use of his
_mind_; all of them trained with a reference to the necessity of their
being apprized of their responsibility to their Creator, for the exercise
of their reason on the matters of belief and choice; all of them
capacitated for improvement by being furnished with the rudiments and
instrumental means of knowledge; and all having within their reach, in
their own language, the Scriptures of divine truth, some by immediate