lawful debts, his lawful debts within the
letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the
letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and
no one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it
meant.

There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture;
the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one
for agricultural co-operation and the other for political
independence--both of them definitely and specifically non-religious.
This same thing has been true of the movements which have helped on
happier nations, such as the republics of France and America, which
have put an end to the power of the priestly caste to take property by
force, and to dominate the mind of the child without its parents'
consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently not
yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty to the
child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though it has the
misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still permitted that
parents should terrify their little ones with images of a personal
devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to
found schools for the teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted to
organize gigantic campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities
full of men, women and children with hell-fire phobias. In the
American city where I write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon
their knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning,
sobbing, screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my
morning paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in
Los Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living
God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their neighbors.
The police officers testified that the accused claimed to be possessed
of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this possession they
"crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and barked like dogs." There
were "other acts, even more startling", about which the newspapers did
not go into details. And again, a week or two later, I read how a
woman has been heard screaming, and found tied to a bed-post, being
whipped by a man. She belonged to a religious sect which had found her
guilty of witchcraft. Another woman was about to shoot her, but this
woman's nerve failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed
a whipping. The victim explained to