"May 12. The people of christendom have had it rung in their ears for nearly two thousand years that man is essentially bad, unutterably wicked, unspeakably depraved, and, worst of all, this horrid state comes to him, not of his own creating, but by inevitable and unavoidable inheritance. In our ignorance and credulity how we have wept over the weakness and folly of our first parents in yielding to the flattery and persuasive eloquence of the cruel serpent in the pure and primitive bowers of Eden. Our tears have flown and flown, with no gentle, soothing hand to touch our eyes and bid them cease; no voice panoplied with authority to speak to; no words of hope and cheer. We have been told in answer to our anxious entreaties for blissful hope and loving counsel that there is a superabundance of evil in us, and a trifling, insignificant quantity of good, and that nothing short of a miracle of regeneration can save us from unutterable and unending misery in the life to come; that without this miraculous interposition of divine grace, the little good that is in us will be swallowed up and devoured by the appalling evil of our sinfully inherited natures. Oh, man, how you degrade your true nobility, your godlike and divine nobility, by bowing the knee to this hideous monster of falsehood, and by kneeling at this unholy shrine. In direct opposition to this abominable and degrading doctrine stands the truth in its pristine and noble beauty. "According to this Christian doctrine we behold in man a combination of good and evil, and in the struggle for the mastery the evil is to be mightier than the good. The good emanating from and partaking of the majestic excellence of the eternal, infinite God must, alas, succumb to and be overthrown by evil, its unholy rival. Can man conceive of a scheme more degrading and heartless, and more completely dishonoring to God and his infinite perfections of wisdom, goodness and power--a doctrine more utterly subversive of moral goodness, deific excellence, and that more completely wrecks the moral government of God and dumps into one common funeral heap the hopes and happiness of the human race. No, no, this is not true; it is false, false, basely false.