text:  They saw that the Romish clergy during five centuries had laboured strenuously and often with the most frightful cruelty to crush independence of thought in matters of faith and chain the human mind to the tenets often absurd and erroneous of her Papal creed; and they forgot that during five preceding centuries the Christian church had laboured as assiduously to establish the independence of thought from physical coercion and had alone kept alive during the interregnum of reason the sparks of knowledge and the principles of freedom