they declaimed against it from their pulpits in the midst of the plague, recommending, instead, rosaries and scapulars, and proclaiming that the hideous disease had been sent by Jehovah to punish them for their one glad, unecclesiastical festival—the Carnival. Happily, it is said that the episode has planted germs of scepticism in Catholic Canada which will never be eradicated. The theological opposition to the use of anaesthetics, especially in parturition, lasted until the middle of this century; women were denied the relief of anaesthetics in the awful pangs of child-birth (they were even burnt alive in olden days for having used them) because Genesis taught those pangs to be a legitimate curse from Jehovah. Hypnotism has met with keen theological opposition, for it has brought whole categories of "miracles" within the domain of science; it was violently denounced on that ground by the cathedral-preacher of Augsburg as late as 1888.
Lastly, we may instance the science of political economy as one that has been grievously hindered by Scriptural teaching. Both in the Old and New Testaments the loan of money at interest is condemned. On the other hand, it was soon discovered in the progress of commerce that such loans were not only a matter of great convenience, but of absolute necessity. For many centuries the commercial world was oppressed by this ecclesiastical stricture; fathers, popes, and councils sternly prohibiting all interest on money. The policy was firmly imbedded in canon law, and was vigorously followed out by clergy and authorities. The result was that, says Dr. White, "the whole evolution of European civilization was greatly hindered," and the practice of money-lending was confined to the Jews; being certainly damned already, the latter lost little by practising it—though, after driving the Jews from every other industry and restricting money-lending to them, it is hard that the Church should now inspire anti-Semitic movements. By the middle of the eighteenth century the ecclesiastical policy, certainly based on Scripture as it was, had become intolerable, and theologians began to retreat. Benedict XIV., in 1745, decreed that usury (which he took to be synonymous with interest) was a sin, but might be permissible in certain conditions; and in 1830 Mastrofini issued an authorized work in which he contended that the Church only condemned
