We honestly admit that our purpose is to discredit the Bible as the infallible word of God. Believing as we do, with Voltaire, that despotism can never be abolished without destroying the dogmas on which it rests, and that the Bible is the grand source and sanction of them all, we are profoundly anxious to expose its pretentions. The educated classes already see through them, and the upper classes credit them just as little, although they dare not openly profess a scepticism which would imperil their privileges. But the multitude are still left to the manipulation of priests, credulous victims of the Black Army everywhere arrayed against freedom and progress. It is to liberate these from thraldom that we labor, sacrifice and suffer. Without being indifferent to what the world calls success, we acknowledge the sovereignty of loftier aims. Compared with the advancement of Freethought everything else is to us of trivial moment. It may interest, and perhaps surprise, some to learn that for the famous Christmas Number of the Freethinker which was successfully prosecuted, the editor received absolutely nothing for his work except twelve months' imprisonment, while the then registered proprietor, who suffered nine months of the same fate, actually shared with him a pecuniary loss of five pounds. We are really in deadly earnest, like all the greater soldiers of freedom who preceded us; and we employ our smaller resources of satire, as such giants as Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus, Voltaire and Heine used theirs, for ends that reach far forward into the mighty future, and affect the welfare of unimagined generations of mankind. Now the masses do not read learned disquisitions; they have no leisure to make themselves adequately acquainted with the history of the Bible documents; nor can they study comparative religion, trace out the analogies between Christianity and older faiths, and realise how all the elaborate developments of doctrine and ritual in modern creeds have sprung from a few simple beliefs and practices of savage superstition. But they are conversant with one or two cardinal ideas of science, and they know the principles which underlie our daily life. What is called common sense (the logic of common experience) is their philosophy, and whoever seeks to move them must appeal to them through that. Strange as it may appear, it is that very common sense which the clergy dread far more than all the disclosures of learning and all the revelations of science; the reason being, that learning and science are the privilege of a few, while common sense is the possession of all, and affects the very foundations of spiritual and political tyranny.