ith which the doctrine has been asserted the foregoing pages can only
faintly indicate. **

But certainly, if for thousands of years the clergy have, as a body,
misconstrued or misunderstood the spirit of their own book (to which
they have always claimed to possess the only key), they should not blame
those who to-day take issue with them upon their information, their
dictates, their _basis of morality_, or their interpretations of the
rights of humanity.

If, as they claim to-day, the Bible is the friend of women and no
respecter of persons, a conclusion which it took them hundreds of years
to reach, it has taken them too long to discover the fact for their
guidance to be either a desirable or a safe one for humanity; and the
millions of women they have degraded and oppressed in the past are
certainly not an argument in favor of their infallibility now. ***

* See Appendix N.

** See Appendix O.

*** See Appendix P.

Let them give way to men who, claiming no right to divine authority or
superhuman wisdom, speak in the interest of all humanity the best they
know (always acknowledged to be subject to revision for the better); who
are not bound back and retarded by the outgrown toggery of the Jewish
civilization of David and his time or the Christian dictatorship of
Paul.* Acknowledging themselves as false and oppressive interpreters
of divine law for centuries past is but a poor recommendation of their
ability or integrity for the future.

* See Appendix Q.

Whichever horn of the dilemma they accept, there is but one honorable
course for the clergy to pursue, and that is to resign in favor of those
who have all along been on the right track, without a pretence of divine
guidance; who in despite of faith and fagot have made progress possible.

MORALS.*

* See Appendices T and V.

After my lecture on Men, Women, and Gods, in Chicago, I was asked how it
would be possible to train children to be good without a belief in the
divinity of the Bible; how they could be made to know it is wrong to be
and steal and kill.

The belief that the Bible is the originator of these and like moral
ideas, or that Christ was their first teacher, is far from the truth;
and it is only another evidence of the duplicity or ignorance of
the Church that such a belief obtains or that such a falsehood is
systematically taught.

It is too easily forgotten that morals are universal, that Christianity
is