420.] "The Inquisition is, perhaps, the most
active cause of that intellectual death that visited Spain at the close of
the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a
censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and
for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests,
their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy." [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to
321.] "Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the
clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the
answer is still, Catholic superstition!" [Napoleon Roussell.]

Infidels, who are noted leaders in "Free Thought," as it is termed, are
invariably men whose religious education was in the religious literature
of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious
literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious
matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too
well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the
philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete
religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated,
and he is, at once, an infidel. No man is to blame for setting his face
like a flint against old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, and high-toned
Calvinism, nor for repudiating Papal and clerical authority known in the
Spanish Inquisition with all its horrible, unscriptural and ungodly
barbarities. But why it is that the infidel's religious foot should set
away back yonder in the smoke of the dark ages, and his scientific foot
away down here with the railroad and telegraph, is rather difficult of
solution. It is rather amusing, since all well-educated American Catholics
condemn the Inquisition along with all the abominable cruelties of the
dark ages. And, as for Calvinism, there is not enough left for seed if it
was properly distributed--_it is old and thin._

"EVEN NOW ARE THERE MANY ANTI-CHRISTS."

Col. Ingersoll says: "He (Paine) knew that every abuse had been embalmed
in scripture, that every outrage was in partnership with some holy text."
If such was really true every rascal, scoundrel and villain should carry a
copy of the Bible. Do they? Are they in affinity with the Bible? Are they
even friendly to it? Things that are in affinity with each other are drawn
together. "A fellow feeling makes us very kind." "By their fruits ye shall
know them." "Birds of a fe