e was necessary to its
existence. In order to compel obedience it declared that it had the
truth and all the truth; that God had made it the keeper of all his
secrets; his agent and his vice-agent. It declared that all other
religions were false and infamous. It rendered all compromises
impossible, and all thought superfluous. Thought was an enemy,
obedience was its friend. Investigation was fraught with danger;
therefore investigation was suppressed. The holy of holies was behind
the curtain. All this was upon the principle that forgers hate to have
the signature examined by an expert, and that imposture detests
curiosity.

"He that hath ears to hear let him hear," has always been one of the
favorite texts of the church.

In short, Christianity has always opposed every forward movement of the
human race. Across the highway of progress it has always been building
breastworks of bibles, tracts, commentaries, prayerbooks, creeds,
dogmas and platforms, and at every advance the Christians have gathered
behind these heaps of rubbish and shot the poisoned arrows of malice at
the soldiers of freedom.

And even the liberal Christian of today has his holy of holies, and in
the niche of the temple of his heart has his idol. He still clings to
a part of the old superstition, and all the pleasant memories of the
old belief linger in the horizon of his thoughts like a sunset. We
associate the memory of those we love with the religion of our
childhood. It seems almost a sacrilege to rudely destroy the idols
that our fathers worshiped, and turn their sacred and beautiful truths
into the silly fables of barbarism. Some throw away the old testament
and cling to the new, while others give up everything except the idea
that there is a personal God, and that in some wonderful way we are the
objects of His care.

Even this, in my opinion, as science, the great iconoclast, marches
onward, will have to be abandoned with the rest. The great ghost will
surely share the fate of the little ones. They fled at the first
appearance of the dawn, and the other will vanish with the perfect day.
Until then, the independence of man is little more than a dream.
Overshadowed by an immense personality--in the presence of the
irresponsible and the infinite, the individuality of man is lost, and
he falls prostrate in the very dust of fear. Beneath the frown of the
absolute, man stands a wretched, trembling slave--beneath his smile be
is at