Our civilization and our Christianity have been made too much a matter of faith in, and devotion to, the unknowable, divorced from all human relations. We must first recognize and practice the brotherhood of man before we can be made to realize the Paternity of God, since “if we love not our brothers whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen?” Our religious teaching has been too much of punishment, and too little of love; too much of faith, too little of works; too much of sectarianism, too little of humanitarianism; too much of hell-fire arbitration, too little of inevitable law; and too much of self-righteousness, and too little of innate goodness. And here I cannot forbear to depart from the strict line of my subject to say a word regarding a doctrine, from the effects of which even this country is but slowly recovering—that of eternal damnation! I say, that a people who really believe in a God who could burn his own children in a lake of literal fire and brimstone, “where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched,” and from which there is no present escape nor future hope, for a single unrepented misdeed, and still profess to honor, love and worship a fiend so infernal as that would make Him, cannot be honest and conscientious, since they must mistake fear for love, and confound sycophancy with worship. It was such a belief that kindled the fires by which the early martyrs perished, by which the Quakers of Massachusetts were burned and the witches hanged, and which invented the terrible Inquisition, with its horrid racks and tortures. These are the legitimate results of such a belief; and if the people of to-day really believed what they profess in their creeds, they would do precisely the same things. And they would be justified, since it would be merciful in them to subject a person to a few moments’ torture, to induce him or her to escape the eternal tortures of Hell, the horrors of which all the ingenuity men can command could not invent a torture one-hundredth part as inhuman; and yet they say our Heavenly Father has prepared this for nineteen-twentieths of humanity. Thank Heaven, however, the day has come when such libels upon the name of God are rapidly merging into the gray twilight, to soon sink in blank, unfathomable oblivion. Thank Heaven, for its own approach earthward, to strike off the chains of superstition from humanity, and for the first faint glimmering of light shed upon us by its angels’ faces, proving to us that humanity, whether of earth or heaven, is: “One life for those who live and those who die— For those whom sight knows and whom memory.”