It is an established maxim in law and all administration of justice, that where a man’s property, character, and professional success are involved, he is barred from testimony as an incompetent witness. And it is deemed no disparagement to the most honorable and high‐minded men in the community to be dealt with on the assumption that such personal interests so bias men’s judgment that they can not be trusted. Now it will not be denied by any one, that our religious periodicals are all supported by the differing sects with the express understanding that each shall advocate the views of the sect that especially patronizes it. And should any editor become convinced that the opinions he was appointed to advocate are false, he could not honorably retain his office without declaring his change of opinion, and this declaration would inevitably result in the loss of his professional character and income among his friends and supporters. For example, if the editor of the Independent were to become convinced that churches organized on the Congregational mode were unscriptural, and should attempt to defend such a view, he would either resign his post or be removed from it. The same would be true in regard to the editors of the Presbyterian, Episcopal, Baptist and Methodist religious magazines and newspapers. So in regard to the professors of our theological schools, who are the chief supporters of theological magazines. They must all teach the Augustinian dogma of a depraved nature transmitted from Adam to all his descendants, or resign their professional reputation, their office and its income. These being facts, it may properly be affirmed that the religious press in this country is barred from the full and free discussion of the great question of eternal life, “What must we do to be saved?” One of the most remarkable indications of this fact is the course pursued by the leading religious periodicals of each sect in noticing the work before referred to, _Common Sense applied to Religion, or the Bible and the People_. In that work, and in an article in the Independent, as well as by private letters, an appeal was made to their editors, who, many of them, are personal friends of the writer, to instruct her and to instruct the public wherein there was any failure in that work, either in setting forth truly the principles of common sense and the rules of interpretation, or in deducing by these principles the _system_ of common sense, or in proving that the Augustinian dogma and the system founded on it were contrary to the common sense and the moral sense of mankind, and unsupported by the Bible.