he same in all Christian countries. Today, in
civilized governments, the death penalty is attached only to murder and
treason; and in some it has been entirely abolished. What a commentary
upon the divine systems of the World!

In the days of Thomas Paine the church was ignorant, bloody, and
relentless. In Scotland the "kirk" was at the summit of its power. It
was a full sister of the Spanish Inquisition. It waged war upon human
nature. It was the enemy of happiness, the hater of joy, and the
despiser of liberty. It taught parents to murder their children rather
than to allow them to propagate error. If the mother held opinions of
which the infamous "kirk" disapproved, her children were taken from her
arms, her babe from her very bosom, and she was not allowed to see
them, or write them a word. It would not allow ship-wrecked sailors to
be rescued from drowning on Sunday.

Oh, you have no idea what a muss it kicks up in heaven to have anybody
swim on Sunday. It fills all the wheeling worlds with sadness to see a
boy in a boat, and the attention of the recording secretary is called
to it. In a voice of thunder they say, "Upset him!" It sought to
annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious
cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious,
heartless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: "The
kirk holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy." And
this same Scotch kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the
moral grandeur to say, "The world is my country, and to do good my
religion." And this same kirk abhorred the man who said, "Any system
of religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a true system."

At that time nothing so delighted the church as the beauties of endless
torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling
in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century a boy by the name of
Thomas Aikenhead was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for having denied
the inspiration of the scriptures, and for having, on several
occasions, when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm.
Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was
found guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of
the scaffold and covered with stones, and though his mother came with
her face covered with tears, begging for t