There was no blinking the fact that the crass stupidity of the Church had made church-going unpopular--almost impossible--with intelligent men and women.

The Church insulted the intelligence by trying to reconcile the teachings of Judaism with the teachings of Christianity, when the two were absolutely irreconcilable.
It was the crass stupidity of the Church that had caused it--for its self-protection, it fancied--to bitterly oppose every truth that was revealed to man.

The Church had tortured and burned at the stake the great men to whom God had revealed the great facts of nature's workings--the motion of the earth and the other planets.

But these facts, being Divine Truth, became accepted by the world in spite of the thumb-screws and the fagots--the arguments of the Church against Divine Truth.

The list of the Divine Truths which the Church had bitterly opposed was a sickening document.