The tragedy was over; the sorely-tried soul had escaped from its tormentors, and the bitterest enemies of the reformer could not refuse to him the praise that no philosopher of old had faced death with more composure than he had shown in his dreadful extremity.  No faltering of the voice had betrayed an internal struggle.  Palsgrave Louis, seeing Huss’s mantle on the arm of one of the executioners, ordered it thrown into the flames lest it should be reverenced as a relic, and promised the man to compensate him.  With the same view the body was carefully reduced to ashes and thrown into the Rhine, and even the earth around the stake was dug up and carted off; yet the Bohemians long hovered around the spot and carried home fragments of the neighboring clay, which they reverenced as relics of their martyr.  The next day thanks were returned to God in a solemn procession in which figured Sigismund and his queen, the princes and nobles, nineteen cardinals, two patriarchs, seventy-seven bishops, and all the clergy of the council.  A few days later Sigismund, who had delayed his departure for Spain to see the matter concluded, left Constance, feeling that his work was done.

#Hell-Fire#

If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would only be in some remote and wholly savage place, such as the mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands.  It could no longer happen in any civilized country; the reason being, not any abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the power of science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular State.  The advance of that arm the church has fought systematically, in every country, and at every point.  To quote Buckle:  “A careful study of the history of religious toleration will prove that in every Christian country where it has been adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of the secular classes.”  The wolf of superstition has been driven into its lair, but it has backed away snarling, and it still crouches, watching for a chance to spring.  The Church which burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that the earth moves round the sun—­that same church, in the name of the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of this book, it will be solely because of the police.  Not being allowed to burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world which they have created, and which they run to suit themselves.

It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated, that the measure of the civilization which any nation has attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of institutionalized religion.  Those peoples which are wholly under the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans, Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual life does not exist.  Farther in advance are Hindoos and Turks, who are religious, but not exclusively.  Still farther on the way are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick MacGill: