They could have taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun.

But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties of moral and social direction.

This function, so immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted.

We are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of man.

The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.
The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that rejection.
After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant feature.