urnace--a real one--heated seven times
hotter than it takes to melt iron, did not injure those three tropical
innocents--did not even singe their eye-brows--it does look a little as
if we should stand a pretty fair show with the spiritual fuel they now
promise us hereafter. Still I must say I don't believe I should like the
climate.

Speaking of Bible arguments, I must tell you of a new one I heard
recently. A gentleman acquaintance of mine asked a colored woman, who
had applied to him for money to help build a colored people's church,
whether she thought God was black or white. She replied that the Bible
implied that he was black--that it said, "And His wool shall be whiter
than snow;" and that _white men don't have wool!_

WHAT YOU MAY THINK.

Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of belief and
faith around its members, and you will show me a collection of hopeless
mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out. They object to being
fossilized. They decline to go down to history as physical members of
the nineteenth century, and mental members of the third.

I would rather have the right to put on my monument, "She was abreast of
her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the feathered tribes
chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said of me, "She was a good
woman because she had a pure heart," than to have this record: "She was
a Christian. She was afraid of hell. She cast her burdens on the Lord,
and went to heaven."

You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord." Rather let
us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives."

But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by what you
believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate a thinker. It
proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by means of brains large
enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I cannot, and you shall not
outgrow the past. The measure of my capacity shall be the limit of your
attainment."

The laws of a nation presume to regulate only what you may do. The
Church is kind enough to say what you may think. It proposes to control
the mental condition of every man and woman for time and eternity, and
its first command is that we shall not grow.

It seems to me rather a queer admission to make, but the Church says
that a child or a fool knows quite enough for its purpose--and it does
not seem to be my place to question that fact. Now that may be all very
well for t