n, what
shall be said of the Puritans who were far more wicked, though they
lived, moved, and had their being in an atmosphere so surcharged with
religion that children and grown persons lay awake all night, sobbing
and rolling on the floor in search of secret sins that they could not
remember well enough to repent? It is well to remember that there has
perhaps never been in history a community in which Christianity had so
perfect a laboratory in which to experiment.

"The very purpose of the Colony was announced as the propagation of the
Gospel. The Bible was the law book. The Colony lacked all the things on
which preachers lay the blame for ungodliness; yet, every infamy known
to history, from fiendish torture to luxurious degeneracy flourished
amazingly. This ancient and impregnable fact has been ignored. The
records have been studiously veiled in a cloud of misty reverence, and
concealed under every form of rhetoric known to apologists."

We can only conclude that religion does not seem to act as an effectual
check against sexual immorality. Furthermore, high moral principles can
be inculcated without any religious background, and have been in spite
of religion. A man who is moral because of his reason and his
sensibilities, and his comprehension of the necessary social structure
of the world is a far better citizen than the man who feebly attempts a
moral life because he expects a mythical existence in a delusional
heaven or wishes to avoid hell-fire. A secular code of morals based upon
the best experiences of communal and national life would place its
highest obligation not to a deity but to the welfare of all fellowmen.

CHAPTER XIV

CHRISTIANITY AND WAR

"Instead of diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has
actually and very seriously increased it; we may look in vain for any
period since Constantine in which the clergy as a body exerted
themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a
particular war with an energy at all comparable to that which they
displayed in stimulating the fanaticism of the Crusades, in producing
the atrocious massacres of the Albigenses, in embittering the religious
contests that followed the Reformation." (_Lecky._)

Any institution that can sanction war is the most immoral institution
that the mind of man can imagine. That an institution which claims to
have under its guidance the moral activity of this earth, has instituted
and co