eally mattered were Health and
Success. Health and Success are undoubtedly great things and well
worthy of possession, but I wish to secure them only through the
expression of truth. If you gag my tongue, chain my pen and cry,
"Believe and you will have Health," I would say, "Give me liberty or
give me death!" Christian Scientists ask you to buy Mrs. Eddy's book,
"Science and Health."

When the volume is handed you, you are promised health and success if
you believe its every word; and if you don't, you are threatened with
"moral idiocy."

It is the old promise of Paradise and the threat of Hell in a new guise.
As for me, I decline the book.

* * * * *

Stephen Girard was a great merchant who had a great love of truth; but
if he had been in a retail business, his zeal for truth might have been
slightly modified.

As a rule, the world of humanity can be divided into two parts: the
practical men and the searchers for truth. Usually the latter have
nothing to lose but their head. Spinoza, Galileo, Bruno, Thomas Paine,
Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, are the pure type. Then
come Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson, crowded out of their
pulpits, scorned by their Alma Mater, pitied by the public--yet holding
true to their course.

And lo! they grew rich; whereas, if they had stuck close to the shore
and safety, they would have been drowned in the shallows of oblivion.

On the other hand, we find in, say, the directorate of the Standard Oil
Company, many men who are zealous members of the orthodox churches,
giving large sums in support of the "gospel," and taking an active
interest in its promulgation. All of them say, with the late Mr. Morgan,
"My mother's religion is good enough for me." So here we get practical
shrewdness combined with minds that, so far as abstract truth is
concerned, are simply prairie-dog towns.

These men belong to a type that will cling to error as long as it is
soft, easy and popular. Most certainly these men are not fools--they are
highly competent and useful in their way. But as for superstition, they
find it soothing; it saves the trouble of thinking, and all their
energies are needed in business.

Religion, to them, is a social diversion, with a chance of salvation on
the side. Inertia does not grip them when it comes to commerce--but in
religion it does. Lincoln once said that there was just one thing, and
only one thing, that God Almigh