Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SOCIAL PROGRESS: INDUSTRIAL, POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS The improved condition of society at the close of the Middle Ages favoured the invention of printing. In order to appreciate this statement, it will be necessary to cast a glance backward and note some of the social agitations prophetic of better things to come. As the benighted mind of Europe gradually awakened and man became more and more conscious of his true dignity and inalienable birthright, he strove to emancipate himself from the gyves and galling fetters of ecclesiastical and feudal thraldom. The ecclesiastical system and the feudal system had kept him unlearned and unfree. The Church had proved remiss in her duty as the self-constituted custodian and dispenser of knowledge, which for selfish, politic reasons she kept bound up in the cerements of a dead language. For seven centuries, from the sixth to the thirteenth, the treasures of learning were held under lock and key by a jealous hierarchy and rendered inaccessible to the people. But now a change was M passing over the face of European society. Only the selfish policy of the temporal and spiritual rulers of the people remained unchanged,?immobile and oppressive as of yore. Undaunted by suffering and harsh repression, the common man continued to aspire, to strive after better things, to struggle upward toward light and freedom. For these were the times in which the Genius of Liberty descended from her mountain heights and drew nearer the sad abodes of men, imparting to their drooping spirits the vivifying breath of a new life. Animated and cheered by the bright vision and the hope of future good, society began to rebel against the existing order of things, to thirst after knowledge, to crave a larger, freer, more generous existence. This feeli…
