ve city in the world, no more liberal, than Boston.
Chicago is full of liberal people. So is San Francisco. The brain
of New York is liberal. Every town, every city, is liberal in the
precise proportion that it is intelligent.

_Question_. Will the religion of humanity be the religion of the
future?

_Answer_. Yes; it is the only religion now. All other is
superstition. What they call religion rests upon a supposed relation
between man and God. In what they call religion man is asked to
do something for God. As God wants nothing, and can by no possibility
accept anything, such a religion is simply superstition. Humanity
is the only possible religion. Whoever imagines that he can do
anything for God is mistaken. Whoever imagines that he can add to
his happiness in the next world by being useless in this, is also
mistaken. And whoever thinks that any God cares how he cuts his
hair or his clothes, or what he eats, or whether he fasts, or rings
a bell, or puts holy water on his breast, or counts beads, or shuts
his eyes and says words to the clouds, is laboring under a great
mistake.

_Question_. A man in the Swaim Court Martial case was excluded as
a witness because he was an Atheist. Do you think the law in the
next decade will permit the affirmative oath?

_Answer_. If belief affected your eyes, your ears, any of your
senses, or your memory, then, of course, no man ought to be a
witness who had not the proper belief. But unless it can be shown
that Atheism interferes with the sight, the hearing, or the memory,
why should justice shut the door to truth?

In most of the States of this Union I could not give testimony.
Should a man be murdered before my eyes I could not tell a jury
who did it. Christianity endeavors to make an honest man an outlaw.
Christianity has such a contemptible opinion of human nature that
it does not believe a man can tell the truth unless frightened by
a belief in God. No lower opinion of the human race has ever been
expressed.

_Question_. Do you think that bigotry would persecute now for
religious opinion's sake, if it were not for the law and the press?

_Answer_. I think that the church would persecute to-day if it
had the power, just as it persecuted in the past. We are indebted
for nearly all our religious liberty to the hypocrisy of the church.
The church does not believe. Some in the church do, and if they
had the power, they would torture and burn as of yor