The world has never had a gospel which is at all comparable in its excellency to that of Marxian Socialism. The gospel of Jesuine Christianism, according to the orthodox interpretation of it, is no exception; for, granting it to be superior to the Mosaic, Buddhistic, Mohammedan and other gospels, it is, nevertheless, almost infinitely inferior to the Marxian gospel. Gospels are for the purpose of saving the world from its suffering. The Jesuine and Marxian gospels are alike in having for their object the salvation of the proletarian world. V. About three years ago I discovered that I had spent a long, strenuous and open-handed ministry in preaching lies to the permanent ruin of my health and the temporary embarrassment of my purse; therefore I had the unhappy experience of being forced to see that all this part of my life, its prime, had been mostly, if not wholly wasted and worse. What was to be done? My friends told me as plainly as they could, and some succeeded in making it brutally plain, that in losing my faith in the supernaturalistic dogmas of traditional Christianism, as they are literally interpreted in the doctrinal standards of the orthodox churches, I had lost the pearl of great price. My soul told me that I had never possessed this jewel, but that, even with the little time and enfeebled strength that remained to me, I might yet find it, if only I should cease looking for it in the field of supernaturalism, under the direction of divine authority, and begin looking for it in the field of naturalism, under the direction of human reason. Happily, where faith went out courage came in, and it increased with my desperation until (though standing on the shore of death where the deep and unknown stream lies darkly between the present and future) I could and I did undertake the supreme task of my life--the breaking of the chains by which I was bound as a slave to the degrading superstition that I was, both by an inherited and cultivated disposition, a doomed man, and by an inherent weakness, a helpless one with no power to emancipate myself. Of such enslaving chains I mention three among the strongest, the severed parts of which, with those of all the rest, now lie scattered about me: (1) the chain of the fear of God; (2) the chain of the fear of the devil, and (3) the chain of the fear of man. Hitherto I had been a child, thinking as a child, understanding as a child and speaking as a child. Henceforth I was to be a man, the greatest, conscious, personal being who has anything to do with this world; and as a man, I put away the things of a child, especially the most childish of all things, fear, the fear of God, the fear of devil and the fear of man.