ly refrain from using that
power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We
daily see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be
stimulated by the _contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom
God has not been so merciful as he has to themselves_."
--Mill.

The time is not far distant when a bondage of the intellect to the
Church will receive no more respectful consideration than a bondage
of the body to a master. This nineteenth century cannot much longer
be bound by the ignorance and intolerance of an age when might was the
highest law and force the only appeal. We need to recognize that the
broadest possible liberty is the greatest possible good; and that the
liberty to think is the highest good of all. So don't let people make
you afraid to think, or to laugh at nonsense wherever you see it.

Solomon saying it cannot make a silly thing wise, nor Moses doing it a
cruel thing kind. David cannot make brutality gentle, nor Paul injustice
just; and that the Bible sustains a wrong can never make it right.

Don't you know that if the leading men of the Old Testament were living
to-day, they would be known as liars, thieves, and murderers--some
indeed as monsters to whom even these terms would be base flattery.
Despoilers of those who had not injured them; infamous liars in the name
of God; murderers of men; butchers of children; debauchers of women;
if they were living in the nineteenth century they would be unanimously
elected to the gallows--that is if they escaped Judge Lynch long enough.
And yet they are held up to us, who have outgrown their morals, as
authorities on the subject of God's will to man, as Prophets, Saints,
Mediators!

Do you want your children taught to believe in the purity and honor
of such men? Do you want your children taught to worship a God who
sanctioned, commanded, and gloried (and usually participated) in their
worst crimes? Do you want them to believe that at any time, in any age,
a God was the director in the most heinous crimes, in the vilest
plots, in the most cruel, vulgar, cowardly acts of vice that were ever
recorded? Either he was or else Moses' word is not worth a copper, and
theology is the invention of ignorance. He did these hideous things
or the Bible is mistaken about it. There is to-day that kind of a God
somewhere in space waiting around to pounce on anybody who doesn't
a