The dissemination of scientific knowledge in the last century has done more to break down religious caste and hatred than all other influences combined previous to that time. The authority of age has been appreciably lessened, the significance of miracles as certain proofs of divinity on the part of religious teachers has changed, the reasonableness or expediency of any system of vicarious atonement as a means of attaining either spiritual or moral "grace," and the realization of humanity in general that the individual expiates his physical crimes by bodily suffering, and his moral sins by the tortures of a guilty conscience, are all verifications of what has occurred in the spiritual and moral world recently. The enormous strides made in proselyting by monism within the last few decades, speak volumes upon this topic. The statement has recently been made, as the result of an ecclesiastical census conducted by one of the largest Christian denominations, that less than twenty-five per cent. of our people in this country regularly attend church service. The demand of the age for demonstration does not well accord with the credulity insisted upon by the powerful religious organizations of to-day. Religious beliefs are of necessity mere matters of superstition, and are based very largely upon the tendency of the human mind to bow down before authority, particularly, if it is insolent, and the power of a falsehood to put on the appearance of a truth, if it can but gain sufficient repetition. "Credidi propter quod, locutus sum." The brazenness of this in much of the literature of religious revelation, particularly in the Hebrew, Christian, and Mohammedan collections, is most readily apparent to the most cursory critic. In fact, no strictly religious literature at the time of the supremacy of the belief is free from it.