with
the hot lightning of his scorn and his wrath, it is these infallible
people, who are perfectly right in their ideas, and who look with
contempt upon people who are outside of the pale of their own inherited
infallible creeds and opinions.

We believe, then, that the people who are free to study the splendors
of God in the universe, in human history, in human life, and free to
accept all new and higher and finer ideas, are more likely to find God,
and come into sympathetic and tender relations with him, than those who
are bound to opinions by the supposed fixed and revealed truths of the
past.

We reject, then, these old-time creeds for another reason, for the sake
of man. A long vista of thought and illustration stretches out before
me as I pronounce these words; but I can only touch upon a point here
or there.

One of the most disastrous things that have happened in the history of
the past and it has happened over and over again is this blocking and
hindering of human advance, until by and by the tide, the growing
current, becomes too strong to be held back any more; and it has swept
away all barriers and devastated society, politically, socially,
religiously, morally, and in every other way.

And why? Simply because the natural flow of human thought, the natural
growth of human opinion, has been hindered artificially by the
assumption of an infallibility on the part of those who have tried to
keep the world from growth.

Suppose you teach men that certain theological opinions are identical
with religion, until they believe it. The time comes when they cannot
hold those opinions any more, and they break away; and they give up
religion, and perhaps the sanctities of life, which they are accustomed
to associate with religion.

Take the time of the French Revolution. People went mad. They were
opposed not only to the State: they were opposed to the Church. They
tried to abolish God, they tried to abolish the Ten Commandments; they
tried to abolish everything that had been so long established and
associated with the old regime.

Were the people really enemies of God? Were they enemies of religion?
Were they enemies of truth? No: it was a caricature of God that they
were fighting, it was a caricature of religion that they were opposed
to. When Voltaire declared that the Church was infamous, it was not
religion that he wished to overthrow: it was this tyranny that had been
associated with the dominance of the