text: " They felt the absurdity of many of the legends which the devout Catholics received as undoubted truths and they saw no use in perpetuating the belief in them; and thence they conceived that they must always have been equally unserviceable forgetting that the eighteenth was not the eighth century; and that during the dark ages violence would have rioted without control if when reason was in abeyance knowledge scanty and military strength alone in estimation superstition had not thrown its unseen fetters over the barbarian's arms