Without legitimate protectors from whom they might seek redress, the wretched tributaries either tried to match their oppressors in craft, or yielded abjectly to all their demands. Some parted with whatever they possessed, and finally sold their sons and daughters into slavery or prostitution;[859] others posted their holdings against the visits of the surveyors with notices designating them as the property of some influential neighbour.[860] Such local magnates, who maintained, perhaps, a guard of Isaurian bandits, were wont to bid defiance to the law as well as to the lawlessness of the Rector and his satellites.[861] To their protection, in many instances, the lesser owners were impelled to consign themselves unconditionally, hoping to find with them a haven of refuge against merciless exaction. The patron implored readily accepted the trust, but the suppliant soon discovered that his condition was assimilated to that of a serf.[862] The web of social order was strained or ruptured in every grade of life; traders joined the ranks of the clergy in order to abuse the facilities for commerce conceded to ministers of religion;[863] the proceedings of the Irenarchs among the rustic population were so vexatious, that they were accounted disturbers, instead of guardians of the peace,[864] and the simple pastor had to be denied the use of a horse, lest it should enable him to rob with too much security on the public highways.[865]
Superstition flourishes because knowledge is still the luxury of the few. By education alone can we hope to attain to the extinction of that phase of mind termed belief, or faith, which has always been inculcated as a virtue or a duty by the priest, and condemned as a vice of the intellect by the philosopher. In every age, the ability to discern the lines of demarcation which separate the known from the unknown is the initial stage of advancement; and in the training of youth, the prime object of the educator should be to confer this power on every individual; for in the uninformed minds of a great majority of mankind, fact and fancy are for the most part inextricably entangled. The efforts of authority to dispel or perpetuate error are most potent when acting on the impressionable faculties of early life. In a sane and progressive world the first conception to be engrafted in the expanding mind should be that knowledge has no foothold beyond the causeways pushed by science into the ocean of the unknown.[866]