h you have not
received from your surroundings. You can imagine an animal with the
hoof of a bison, with the pouch of the kangaroo, with the wings of an
eagle, with the beak of a bird, and with the tail of the lion; and yet
every point of this monster you borrowed from nature. Every thing you
can think of--every thing you can dream of, is borrowed from your
surroundings--everything. And there is nothing on this earth coming
from any other sphere whatever. Man has produced every religion in the
world. And why? Because each generation bodes forth the knowledge and
the belief of the people at the time it was made, and in no book is
there any knowledge found, except that of the people who wrote it. In
no book is there found any knowledge, except that of the time in which
it was written. Barbarians have produced, and always will produce
barbarian religions. Barbarians have produced, and always will produce
ideas in harmony with their surroundings, and all the religions of the
past were produced by barbarians--every one of them. We are making
religions today. We are making religions to-night. That is to say, we
are changing them, and the religion of to-day is not the religion of
one year ago. What changed it? Science has done it; education and the
growing heart of man has done it. We are making these religions every
day, and just to the extent that we become civilized ourselves will we
improve the religion of our fathers. If the religion of one hundred
years ago, compared with the religion of to-day is so low, what will it
be in one thousand years?

If we continue making the inroads upon orthodoxy which we have been
making during the last twenty-five years, what will it be fifty years
from to-night? It will have to be remonetized by that time, or else it
will not be legal tender. In my judgment, every religion that stands by
appealing to miracles is dishonor. [sic] Every religion in the world
has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that
they all tell the truth--about others. Why? Suppose Mr. Smith should
tell Mr. Brown that he--Smith--saw a corpse get out of the grave, and
that when he first saw it, it was covered with the worm's of death, and
that in his presence it was reclothed in healthy, beautiful flesh. And
then suppose Mr. Brown should tell Mr. Smith, "I saw the same thing
myself. I was in a graveyard once, and I saw a dead man rise." Suppose
then that Smith should say to Brown, "You're a liar