them the honest truth of his thought. As it is now, ministers are
employed like attorneys--for the plaintiff or the defendant. If a few
people know of a young man in the neighborhood maybe who has not a good
constitution,--he may not be healthy enough to be wicked--a young man
who has shown no decided talent--it occurs to them to make him a
minister. They contribute and send him to some school. If it turns
out that that young man has more of the man in him than they thought,
and he changes his opinion, everyone who contributed will feel himself
individually swindled--and they will follow that young man to the grave
with the poisoned shafts of malice and slander. I want it so that
every one will be free--so that a pulpit will not be a pillory. They
have in Massachusetts, at a place called Andover, a kind of minister
factory; and every professor in that factory takes an oath once in
every five years--that is as long as an oath will last--that not only
has he not during the last five years, but so help him God, he will not
during the next five years intellectually advance; and probably there
is no oath he could easier keep. Since the foundation of that
institution there has not been one case of perjury. They believe the
same creed they first taught when the foundation stone was laid, and
now when they send out a minister they brand him as hardware from
Sheffield and Birmingham. And every man who knows where he was educated
knows his creed, knows every argument of his creed, every book that he
reads, and just what he amounts to intellectually, and knows he will
shrink and shrivel, and become solemnly stupid day after day until he
meets with death. It is all wrong; it is cruel. Those men should be
allowed to grow. They should have the air of liberty and the sunshine
of thought.

I want to free the schools of our country. I want it so that when a
professor in a college finds some fact inconsistent with Moses, he will
not hide the fact. I wish to see an eternal divorce and separation
between church and schools. The common school is the bread of life,
but there should be nothing taught except what somebody knows; and
anything else should not be maintained by a system of general taxation.
I want its professors so that they will tell everything they find; that
they will be free to investigate in every direction, and will not be
trammeled by the superstitions of our day. What has religion to do with
facts? Nothing.