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Updated: June 23, 2025
The misfortune is that his conclusions have been employed by persons incompetent to appreciate their foundation, as arguments in favour of obscurantism.
The initial stages of this Germanic occupation of the Fatherland are sufficiently obscure under the cloud of unrecorded antiquity that covers them; and then, an abundance of obscurantism has also been added by the vapours of misguided vanity that have surrounded so nearly all historical inquiry on the part of patriotic German scholars.
Even in the days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its ecclesia militans of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense of decency regarding the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty of scientific teaching from the indignity of that preventive censure which in those days rendered repressive legislation superfluous.
Over against these musty claims of Portugal there stood the offers of "The International Association of the Congo" to bring the blessings of free trade and civilisation to downtrodden millions of negroes, if only access were granted from the sea. The contrast between the dull obscurantism of Lisbon and the benevolent intentions of Brussels struck the popular imagination.
I also hold with equal strength and sincerity to the belief, which I have already expressed, that the shortcomings of the Roman Catholic clergy are largely to be accounted for, not by any innate tendency on their part towards obscurantism, but by the sad history of Ireland in the past. I would appeal to those of my co-religionists who think otherwise to suspend their judgment for a time.
In other words, the harm done by Christian doctrines, in this respect, may lie less in the obscurantism of the dark interval between ancient and modern civilization, than in the obstructions which they offered when science had revived in spite of them and could no longer be crushed.
But Trinity College, Oxford, made him an honorary fellow in 1877, an honour which seemed to prognosticate the far higher distinction which was soon to be conferred upon him. The death of Pius IX in 1878 brought to an end the long reign of obscurantism at the Vatican, and with the election of Leo XIII Newman emerged from the cloud under which he had remained for more than a generation.
But for the obstructiveness and obscurantism of the Transvaal Boers, the rate of progress and development which would characterise the whole South African continent would be unparalleled in the history of any other country. The reactionary policy of the Transvaal is the one spoke in the wheel. It must therefore be removed in the name of humanity and civilisation."
Murphy was not told many of these latter things, though obscurantism is always to be utterly condemned. It was thought better that he should not know them, or other darker facts to do with modern scientific times, lest by chance they give rise to strange and unorthodox reflections in a brain so active as his.
In the East the harem is, as Vambéry well says, the "bulwark of obscurantism." Ignorant and fanatical herself, the harem woman implants her ignorance and fanaticism in her sons as well as in her daughters.
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