vil. With it brains
are below par, and ignorance is at a premium. It has never learned that
the most valuable capital in this world is the brain of a scholar.

FEAR.

Every earnest thought, like every earnest thinker, adds something to
the wealth of the world. Blind belief in the thought of another produces
only hopeless mediocrity. Individual effort, not mere acceptance, marks
the growth of the mind. The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of
the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think,
and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought
without fear.

Fear is the nearest approach to the ball and chain that this age will
permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers of to-day that
so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be left for those who
come after us. We owe physical freedom to the intellectual giants of the
past; let us leave mental freedom to the intellectual children of the
future.

Fear scatters the blossoms of genius to the winds, and superstition
buries truth beneath the incrustation of inherited mediocrity. Fear
puts the fetters of religious stagnation on every child of the brain. It
covers the form of purity and truth with the contagion of contumely and
distrust. It warps and dwarfs every character that it touches. It is the
father, mother, and nurse of hypocrisy. It is the one great disgrace
of our day, the one incalculable curse of our time; and its nurse and
hot-bed is the Church.

Because I, a woman, have dared to speak publicly against the
dictatorship of the Church, the Church, with its usual force and honor,
answers argument with personal abuse. One reply it gives. It is this. If
a woman did not find comfort and happiness in the Church, she would not
cling to it. If it were not good for her, she in her purity and truth
would not uphold it in the face of the undeniable fact that the present
generation of thinking men have left it utterly.

You will find, however, that in every land, under every form of faith,
in each phase of credulity, it is the woman who clings closest and
longest to the religion she has been taught; yet no Christian will
maintain that this fact establishes the truth of any other belief.*

* "Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the
harem of an Oriental They do not complain.... They think
our women insufferably unfeminine."
--Mill.

They will not argue from this tha