ine:

It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth
or the sky, or the other elements of this world, respecting which
one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain
reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and
mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a
Christian, speaking of such matters as being according to the
Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such
nonsense that the unbeliever, perceiving him to be as wide from the
mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.

FOOTNOTES:

[K] But if Adam and Eve are not historical personages there is no
doctrine of supernaturalistic Christianism resting on the solid ground
of facts and the whole of its immense dogmatic structure is floating in
the air of theories and myths.--Author.

[L] It is questionable whether such persons as Samson, Jonah and Daniel
ever lived, but it is certain that their adventures are as mythical as
anything in Aesop's Fables.--Author.

[M] But these nine texts which for some years were often triumphantly
pointed to as the pillars upon which securely rested the historicalness
of Jesus as a man are now lying in the dust where the learned and
brilliant Professor William Benjamin Smith of Tulane University put them
by his great contribution to the Christological problem in a book,
entitled Ecce Deus in which he, as I think, proves conclusively that the
Jesus of the New Testament never was a real man but always an imaginary
god, the Christian recasting of the Jewish God, a new Jehovah.--Author.

IV. WOULD SOCIALISM CHANGE HUMAN NATURE?

Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever,
Or the priests of the bloody Faith:
They stand on the brink of that mighty river
Whose waves they have tainted with death,
It is fed from the depths of a thousand dells,
Around them it foams and rages and swells,
And their swords and their scepters I floating see
Like wrecks in the surge of eternity.

--Shelley.

My revolt against the existing capitalist system of economics and the
capitalized political and religious systems which support it is
complete, and the end which I have in view in this booklet is that of
primitive Christianism, as it is taught by Mary in the Magnificat, the
putting down of the owning masters of the world and the exaltation of
the working slaves, only that I do n