But, lest it be claimed that
this is a British peculiarity, allow me to defer to the patriotic
sentiment of my readers by one other little set of tables which, while
not complete, is equally as suggestive.

"In sixty-six different prisons, jails, reformatories, refuges,
penitentiaries, and lock-ups there were, for the years given in reports,
41,335 men and boys, women and girls, of the following religious sects:

Catholics..................................................................
16,431

Church of England....................................................
9,975

Eighteen other Protestant denominations.................... 14,811

Universalists.............................................................
5

Jews, Chinese, and Mormons..................................... 110

Infidels (two so-called, one avowed)............................ 3

"These included the prisons of Iowa, Michigan, Tennessee, New York,
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, and Canada."

Present these two tables to those who assure you that crime follows in
the wake of Infidelity, and you will have time to take a comfortable nap
before your Christian friend returns to the attack or braces up after
the shock sustained by his sentiments and inflicted by these two small
but truly suggestive tables.

One cold fact like this will inoculate one of the faithful with more
modesty than an hour of usual argument based upon the assumptions of the
clergy and the ignorance of his hearers.

Infidels are not perfect. Many of them need reconstruction sadly, but
the above data seem to indicate that they compare rather favorably with
their fellow-men in the matter of good citizenship.

"Moreover, as Goethe has already shown, the celebrated Mosaic moral
precepts, the so-called Ten Commandments, were _not_ upon the tables
upon which Moses wrote the laws of the covenant which God made with his
people.

"Even the extraordinary diversity of the many religions diffused over
the surface of the earth suffices to show that they can stand in no
necessary connection with morals, as it is well known that wherever
tolerably well-ordered political and social conditions exist, the moral
precepts in their essential principles are the same, whilst when such
conditions are wanting, a wild and irregular confusion, or even an
entire deficiency of moral notions is met with.* History also shows
incontrovertibly that religion and morality have by no m