Unfortunately we preach to the deaf. For one man who reasons there are a hundred who do not. The struggle against the domination of the spiritual directors is very platonic and the clergy despise it. The Church has organised marriage, birth, and death into ceremonies which seduce the imagination and please the women. Compare the civil marriage and the religious marriage; the former cold, dull, insipid; the latter impressive and attractive with the altar garlanded with flowers, and the enchantment of the music which makes the creator descend into the bosom of the spouse, “_Veni, Creator Spiritus_.” It will be centuries before the religious form of marriage is entirely replaced by the civil. A certain free-thinking father refrained from having his four boys baptized so as to leave them entire liberty of conscience. All four got baptized on the eve of their marriage as their brides wished to be married in church. Faith or convention, that is how the world goes--and the priests smile at the simplicity of the layman. What is Sunday for most Christians but a day for fine clothes? Tradition has created a distinguished society often permeated with hypocrisy, but to belong to which is “good form.” Ancient errors are preserved without being credited. Convention governs the “well-disposed” people. Independence of spirit is the rarest of phenomena. All religions are sacred and respectable if they raise our thoughts to a higher ideal, when they console the afflicted and relieve misery. But let them not be exploited, and let there be no killing in their name! Ideal and sentiment are part of the domain of thought, with as much right as Reason. It is a mistaken policy to suppress them, and it plays into the hands of reactionaries, who profit by the errors. To claim that science demonstrates the non-existence of God and of the soul is an unscientific argument. An education without ideals or responsibility, which neglects conscience and proclaims rights without duties, is as false as that of the Catechism which teaches the creation of Adam and Eve, the temptation of the serpent, the universal deluge, the incarnation of God, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God the Father, or the resurrection of our bodies (articles of faith which cannot, without heresy, be interpreted as symbols, but must be taken literally), and it is socially more dangerous, as we see by its fruits for the last thirty years, the gradual increase of crime and the rule of the Apaches and anarchists of all sorts. Why not follow the way of enlightened wisdom? If the socialists were permeated with spiritual truth, they would hold the world; they would continue the work of their predecessor, Jesus Christ, in the light and with the positive methods of modern science. The false gods invented by man, the legends, the superstitions, the errors, lies, and hypocrisies, are not necessary to secure a place in the educational