It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no
other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast
chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we
call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone
on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that
chasm would have been filled up with characters rising supe-
rior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we
now so much admire would have appeared respectably in
the background of the scene. But the christian system laid
all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of
the sixteenth century, we look back through that long
chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy
desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision
to the fertile hills beyond.

It is an inconsistency scarcely possible to be credited,
that any thing should exist, under the name of a religion,
that held it to be irreligious to study and contemplate the
structure of the universe that God had made. But the fact
is too well established to be denied. The event that served
more than any other to break the first link in this long
chain of despotic ignorance, is that known by the name of
the Reformation by Luther. From that time, though it
does not appear to have made any part of the intention of

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