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miracles. Take from the minds of men the idea of the supernatural, and
superstition ceases to exist; for this reason the Church has always
despised the man who explains the wonderful. The moment that it began
to be apparent that prayer could do nothing for the body, the priest
shifted his ground and began praying for the soul.

After the devil was substantially abandoned in the practice of
medicine, and when it was admitted that God had nothing to do with
ordinary coughs and colds, it was still believed that all the diseases
were sent by Him as punishment for the people; it was thought to be a
kind of blasphemy to even stay the ravages of pestilence. Formerly,
when a pestilence fell upon a people, the arguments of the priest were
boundless. He told the people that they had refused to pay their
tithes, and they had doubted some of the doctrines of the church, that
in their hearts they had contempt for some of the priests of the Lord,
and God was now taking his revenge, and the people, for the most part,
believed this issue of falsehood, and hastened to fall upon their knees
and to pour out their wealth upon the altars of hypocrisy.

The Church never wanted disease to be absolutely under the control of
man. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preached a sermon
against vaccination. His idea was that if God had decreed that through
all eternity certain men should die of small pox, it was a frightful
sin to endeavor to prevent it; that plagues and pestilence were
instruments in the hands of God with which to gain the love and worship
of mankind; to find the cure for the disease was to take the punishment
from the Church. No one tries to cure the ague with prayer because
quinine has been found to be altogether more reliable. Just as soon as
a specific is found for a disease, that disease is left out of the list
of prayer. The number of diseases with which God from time to time
afflicts mankind is continually decreasing, because the number of
diseases that man can cure is continually increasing. In a few years
all diseases will be under the control of man. The science of medicine
has but one enemy--superstition. Man was afraid to save his body for
fear he would lose his soul. Is it any wonder that the people in those
days believed in and taught the infamous doctrine of eternal
punishment, that makes God a heartless monster and man a slimy
hypocrite and slave?

The ghosts were also historians, and wrote