Then pass a step further, and think of the constitution of nature and of the laws of the world. Does this world of nature allow of Freethought? Do these natural laws allow a man to make mistakes with impunity? Let any man think wrong of the powers of nature, that fire will not burn nor water drown, and he will soon find himself visited with a sharp and merciless punishment, for there are no laws so merciless as those of nature. He that transgresses them ignorantly or wittingly, is beaten alike with many stripes. The great revolving machinery of the world will not arrest its revolutions because of the cry of a human creature that by a very innocent error, even by his mistaken action of Freethought, is ground to pieces beneath them. If the man of science warns us of the consequences of transgressing the laws that he has discovered, we should be at liberty to think differently from him, but it will be at our own proper peril, if we exercise our Freethought. As sure as you do, so you will suffer from it. It is not the prophet or his warning that brings down the penalty, it is not the book upon sanitary law that brings diptheria or scarlet fever, it is not the sinking of the mercury in the glass that brings the storm; the written proof in the one case, the mute proof in the other, foretell the evil, but do not create it. Nature and science, then, have their warnings, and threatenings, and penalties; and nature and science avenge themselves on Freethought. And mark this, the more and more you lose sight of personal will, the fainter and fainter seems to grow the chance of forgiveness, less and less room there seems to be for Freethought; there is something in the words, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” there is something in the loving will that has power to save the Freethought of his erring creatures from the soulless and merciless machinery of law.