Christians2 are perpetually crying that we destroy and never build up. Nothing could be more false, for all negation3 has a positive side, and we cannot deny error without affirming truth. But even if it were true, it would not lessen4 the value of our work. You must clear the ground before you can build, and plough before you sow. Splendor5 gives no strength to an edifice6 whose foundations are treacherous7, nor can a harvest be reaped from fields unprepared for the seed.
Freethought is, in this respect, like a skilful8 physician, whose function it is to expel disease and leave the patient sound and well. No sick man claims that the doctor shall supply him with something in place of his malady9. It is enough that the enemy of his health is driven out. He is then in a position to act for himself. He has legs to walk with, a brain to devise, and hands to execute his will. What more does he need? What more can he ask without declaring himself a weakling or a fool? So it is with superstition10, the deadliest disease of the mind. Free-thought casts it out, with its blindness and its terrors, and leaves the mind clear and free. All nature is then before us to study and enjoy. Truth shines on us with celestial11 light, Goodness smiles on our best endeavors, and Beauty thrills our senses and kindles12 our imagination with the subtle magic of her charms.
What a boon13 it is to think freely, to let the intellect dart14 out in quest of truth at every point of the compass, to feel the delight of the chase and the gladness of capture! What a noble privilege to pour treasures of knowledge into the crucible15 of the brain, and separate gold from the dross16!
The Freethinker takes nothing on trust, if he can help it; he dissects17, analyses, and proves everything. Does this make him a barren sceptic? Not so. What he discards he knows to be worthless, and he also knows the value of what he prizes. If one sweet vision turns out a mirage18, how does it lessen our enjoyment19 at the true oasis20, or shake our certitude of water and shade under the palm trees by the well?
The masses of men do not think freely. They scarcely think at all out of their round of business. They are trained not to think. From the cradle to the grave orthodoxy has them in its clutches. Their religion is settled by priests, and their political and social institutions by custom. They look askance at the man who dares to question what is established; not reflecting that all orthodoxies were once heterodox, that without innovation there could never have been any progress, and that if inquisitive21 fellows had not gone prying22 about in forbidden quarters ages ago, the world would still be peopled by savages23 dressed in nakedness, war-paint, and feathers. The mental stultification24 which begins in youth reaches ossification25 as men grow older. Lack of thought ends in incapacity to think.
Real Freethought is impossible without education. The mind cannot operate without means or construct without materials. Theology opposes education: Freethought supports it. The poor as well as the rich should share in its blessings26. Education is a social capital which should be supplied to all. It enriches and expands. It not only furnishes the mind, but strengthens its faculties27. Knowledge is power. A race of giants could not level the Alps; but ordinary men, equipped with science, bore through their base, and made easy channels for the intercourse28 of divided nations.
Growth comes with use, and power with exercise. Education makes both possible. It puts the means of salvation29 at the service of all, and, prevents the faculties from moving about in vacuo, and finally standing30 still from sheer hopelessness. The educated man has a whole magazine of appliances at his command, and his intellect is trained in using them, while the uneducated man has nothing but his strength, and his training is limited to its use.
Freethought demands education for all. It claims a mental inheritance for every child born into the world. Superstition demands ignorance, stupidity, and degradation31. Wherever the schoolmaster is busy, Freethought prospers32; where he is not found, superstition reigns33 supreme34 and levels the people in the dust.
Free speech and Freethought go together. If one is hampered35 the other languishes36. What is the use of thinking if I may not express my thought? We claim equal liberty for all. The priest shall say what he believes and so shall the sceptic. No law shall protect the one and disfranchise the other. If any man disapproves37 what I say, he need not hear me a second time. What more does he require? Let him listen to what he likes, and leave others to do the same. Let us have justice and fair play all round.
Freethought is not only useful but laudable. It involves labor38 and trouble. Ours is not a gospel for those who love the soft pillow of faith. The Freethinker does not let his ship rot away in harbor; he spreads his canvas and sails the seas of thought. What though tempests beat and billows roar? He is undaunted, and leaves the avoidance of danger to the sluggard39 and the slave. He will not pay their price for ease and safety. Away he sails with Vigilance at the prow40 and Wisdom at the helm. He not only traverses the ocean highways, but skirts unmapped coasts and ventures on uncharted seas. He gathers spoils in every zone, and returns with a rich freight that compensates41 for all hazards. Some day or other, you say, he will be shipwrecked and lost. Perhaps. All things end somehow. But if he goes down he will die like a man and not like a coward, and have for his requiem43 the psalm44 of the tempest and the anthem45 of the waves.
Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. It means caution, independence, honesty and veracity46. Faith means negligence47, serfdom, insincerity and deception48. The man who never doubts never thinks. He is like a straw in the wind or a waif on the sea. He is one of the helpless, docile49, unquestioning millions, who keep the world in a state of stagnation50, and serve as a fulcrum51 for the lever of despotism. The stupidity of the people, says Whitman, is always inviting52 the insolence53 of power.
Buckle54 has well said that scepticism is "the necessary antecedent of all progress." Without it we should still be groping in the night of the Dark Ages. The very foundations of modern science and philosophy were laid on ground which was wrested55 from the Church, and every stone was cemented with the blood of martyrs56. As the edifice arose the sharpshooters of faith attacked the builders at every point, and they still continue their old practice, although their missiles can hardly reach the towering heights where their enemies are now at work.
Astronomy was opposed by the Church because it unsettled old notions of the earth being the centre of the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars mere57 lights stuck in the solid firmament58, and worked to and fro like sliding panels. Did not the Bible say that General Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and how could this have happened unless it moved round the earth? And was not the earth certainly flat, as millions of flats believed it to be? The Catholic Inquisition forced Galileo to recant, and Protestant Luther called Copernicus "an old fool."
Chemistry was opposed as an impious prying into the secrets of God. It was put in the same class with sorcery and witchcraft59, and punished in the same way. The early chemists were considered as agents of the Devil, and their successors are still regarded as "uncanny" in the more ignorant parts of Christendom. Roger Bacon was persecuted60 by his brother monks61; his testing fire was thought to have come from the pit, and the explosion of his gunpowder62 was the Devil vanishing in smoke and smell. Even at the end of last century, the clergy-led mob of Birmingham who wrecked42 Priestley's house and destroyed his apparatus63, no doubt felt that there was a close connexion between chemistry and infidelity.
Physiology64 and Medicine were opposed on similar grounds. We were all fearfully and wonderfully made, and the less the mystery was looked into the better. Disease was sent by God for his own wise ends, and to resist it was as bad as blasphemy65. Every discovery and every reform was decried66 as impious. Men now living can remember how the champions of faith denounced the use of anaesthetics in painful labor as an interference with God's curse on the daughters of Eve.
Geology was opposed because it discredited67 Moses, as though that famous old Jew had watched the deposit of every stratum68 of the earth's crust. It was even said that fossils had been put underground by God to puzzle the wiseacres, and that the Devil had carried shells to the hilltops for the purpose of deluding69 men to infidelity and perdition. Geologists70 were anathematised from the pulpits and railed at by tub-thumpers. They were obliged to feel their way and go slowly. Sir Charles Lyell had to keep back his strongest conclusions for at least a quarter of a century, and could not say all he thought until his head was whitened by old age and he looked into the face of Death.
Biology was opposed tooth and nail as the worst of all infidelity. It exposed Genesis and put Moses out of court. It destroyed all special creation, showed man's kinship with other forms of life, reduced Adam and Eve to myths, and exploded the doctrine71 of the Fall. Darwin was for years treated as Antichrist, and Huxley as the great beast. All that is being changed, thanks to the sceptical spirit. Darwin's corpse72 is buried in Westminster Abbey, but his ideas are undermining all the churches and crumbling73 them into dust.
The gospel of Freethought brands persecution74 as the worst crime against humanity. It stifles75 the spirit of progress and strangles its pioneers. It eliminates the brave, the adventurous76 and the aspiring77, and leaves only the timid, the sluggish78 and the grovelling79. It removes the lofty and spares the low. It levels all the hills of thought and makes an intellectual flatness. It drenches80 all the paths of freedom with blood and tears, and makes earth the vestibule of hell.
Persecution is the right arm of priestcraft. The black militia81 of theology are the sworn foes82 of Freethought. They represent it as the sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness in this world or the next. When they speak of the Holy Ghost they mean themselves. Freethought is a crime against them. It strips off the mystery that invests their craft, and shows them as they really are, a horde83 of bandits who levy84 black mail on honest industry, and preach a despot in heaven in order to main-tain their own tyranny on earth.
The gospel of Freethought would destroy all priesthoods. Every man should be his own priest. If a professional soul-doctor gives you wrong advice and leads you to ruin, he will not be damned for you He will see you so first. We must take all responsibility, and we should also take the power. Instead of putting our thinking out, as we put our washing, let us do it at home. No man can do another's thinking for him. What is thought in the originator is only acquiescence85 in the man who takes it at secondhand.
If we do our own thinking in religion we shall do it in everything else. We reject authority and act for ourselves. Spiritual and temporal power are brought under the same rule. They must justify86 themselves or go. The Freethinker is thus a politician and a social reformer. What a Christian1 may be he must be. Freethinkers are naturally Radicals87. They are almost to a man on the side of justice freedom and progress. The Tories know this, and hence they seek to suppress us by the violence of unjust law. They see that we are a growing danger to every kind of privilege, a menace to all the idle classes who live in luxury on the sweat and labor of others—the devouring88 drones who live on the working bees.
The gospel of Freethought teaches us to distinguish between the knowable and the unknowable. We cannot fathom89 the infinite "mystery of the universe" with our finite plummet90, nor see aught behind the veil of death. Here is our appointed province:
"This world which is the world
Of all of us, and where in the end
We find our happiness or not at all."
Let us make the best of this world and take our chance of any other. If there is a heaven, we dare say it will hold all honest men. If it will not, those who go elsewhere will at least be in good company.
Our salvation is here and now. It is certain and not contingent91. We need not die before we realise it. Ours is a gospel, and the only gospel, for this side of the grave. The promises of theology cannot be made good till after death; ours are all redeemable92 in this life.
We ask men to acknowledge realities and dismiss fictions. When you have sifted93 all the learned sermons ever preached, you will find very little good grain. Theology deals with dreams and phantasies, and gives no guidance to practical men. The whole truth of life may be summed up in a few words. Happiness is the only good, suffering the only evil, and selfishness the only sin. And the whole duty of man may be expressed in one sentence, slightly altered from Voltaire—Learn what is true in order to do what is right. If a man can tell you anything about these matters, listen to him; if not, turn a deaf ear, and let him preach to the wind.
The only noble things in this world are great hearts and great brains, There is no virtue94 in a starveling piety95 which turns all beauty into ugliness and shrivels up every natural affection. Let the heart beat high with courage and enterprise, and throb96 with warm passion. Let the brain be an active engine of thought, imagination and will. The gospel of sorrow has had its day, and the time has come for the gospel of gladness. Let us live out our lives to the full, radiating joy on all in our own circle, and diffusing97 happiness through the grander circle of humanity, until at last we retire from the banquet of life, as others have done before us, and sink in eternal repose98.
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1
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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Christians
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| n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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negation
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| n.否定；否认 | |
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lessen
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| vt.减少，减轻；缩小 | |
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splendor
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| n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌 | |
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edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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treacherous
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| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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malady
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| n.病，疾病(通常做比喻) | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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kindles
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的第三人称单数 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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boon
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| n.恩赐，恩物，恩惠 | |
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dart
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| v.猛冲，投掷；n.飞镖，猛冲 | |
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crucible
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| n.坩锅，严酷的考验 | |
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dross
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| n.渣滓；无用之物 | |
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dissects
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| v.解剖（动物等）( dissect的第三人称单数 )；仔细分析或研究 | |
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mirage
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| n.海市蜃楼，幻景 | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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oasis
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| n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方 | |
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inquisitive
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| adj.求知欲强的，好奇的，好寻根究底的 | |
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prying
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| adj.爱打听的v.打听，刺探（他人的私事）( pry的现在分词 )；撬开 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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stultification
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| n.使显得愚笨，使变无效 | |
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ossification
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| n.骨化，（思想等的）僵化 | |
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blessings
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| n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福 | |
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faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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salvation
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| n.（尤指基督）救世，超度，拯救，解困 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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degradation
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| n.降级；低落；退化；陵削；降解；衰变 | |
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prospers
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| v.成功，兴旺( prosper的第三人称单数 ) | |
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reigns
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| n.君主的统治( reign的名词复数 )；君主统治时期；任期；当政期 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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hampered
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| 妨碍，束缚，限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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languishes
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| 长期受苦( languish的第三人称单数 )； 受折磨； 变得（越来越）衰弱； 因渴望而变得憔悴或闷闷不乐 | |
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disapproves
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| v.不赞成( disapprove的第三人称单数 ) | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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sluggard
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| n.懒人；adj.懒惰的 | |
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prow
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| n.(飞机)机头，船头 | |
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compensates
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| 补偿，报酬( compensate的第三人称单数 )； 给（某人）赔偿（或赔款） | |
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wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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requiem
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| n.安魂曲，安灵曲 | |
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psalm
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| n.赞美诗，圣诗 | |
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anthem
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| n.圣歌，赞美诗，颂歌 | |
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veracity
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| n.诚实 | |
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negligence
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| n.疏忽，玩忽，粗心大意 | |
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deception
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| n.欺骗，欺诈；骗局，诡计 | |
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docile
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| adj.驯服的，易控制的，容易教的 | |
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stagnation
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| n. 停滞 | |
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fulcrum
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| n.杠杆支点 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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buckle
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| n.扣子，带扣；v.把...扣住，由于压力而弯曲 | |
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wrested
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| （用力）拧( wrest的过去式和过去分词 )； 费力取得； （从…）攫取； （ 从… ） 强行取去… | |
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martyrs
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| n.martyr的复数形式；烈士( martyr的名词复数 )；殉道者；殉教者；乞怜者（向人诉苦以博取同情） | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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firmament
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| n.苍穹；最高层 | |
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witchcraft
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| n.魔法，巫术 | |
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persecuted
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| （尤指宗教或政治信仰的）迫害(~sb. for sth.)( persecute的过去式和过去分词 )； 烦扰，困扰或骚扰某人 | |
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monks
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| n.修道士，僧侣( monk的名词复数 ) | |
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gunpowder
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| n.火药 | |
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apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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physiology
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| n.生理学，生理机能 | |
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blasphemy
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| n.亵渎，渎神 | |
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decried
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| v.公开反对，谴责( decry的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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discredited
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| 不足信的，不名誉的 | |
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stratum
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| n.地层，社会阶层 | |
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deluding
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| v.欺骗，哄骗( delude的现在分词 ) | |
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geologists
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| 地质学家，地质学者( geologist的名词复数 ) | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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persecution
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| n. 迫害,烦扰 | |
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stifles
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的第三人称单数 )； 镇压，遏制 | |
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adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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aspiring
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| adj.有志气的；有抱负的；高耸的v.渴望；追求 | |
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sluggish
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| adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的 | |
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grovelling
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| adj.卑下的，奴颜婢膝的v.卑躬屈节，奴颜婢膝( grovel的现在分词 )；趴 | |
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80
drenches
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| v.使湿透( drench的第三人称单数 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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81
militia
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| n.民兵，民兵组织 | |
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foes
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| 敌人，仇敌( foe的名词复数 ) | |
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horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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84
levy
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| n.征收税或其他款项，征收额 | |
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85
acquiescence
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| n.默许；顺从 | |
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86
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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87
radicals
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| n.激进分子( radical的名词复数 )；根基；基本原理；[数学]根数 | |
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88
devouring
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| 吞没( devour的现在分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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fathom
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| v.领悟，彻底了解 | |
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90
plummet
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| vi.(价格、水平等)骤然下跌；n.铅坠；重压物 | |
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91
contingent
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| adj.视条件而定的；n.一组，代表团，分遣队 | |
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redeemable
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| 可赎回的，可补救的 | |
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93
sifted
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| v.筛( sift的过去式和过去分词 )；筛滤；细查；详审 | |
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94
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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95
piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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96
throb
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| v.震颤，颤动；(急速强烈地)跳动，搏动 | |
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97
diffusing
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| （使光）模糊，漫射，漫散( diffuse的现在分词 )； （使）扩散； （使）弥漫； （使）传播 | |
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98
repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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