In Seventeen Hundred Ninety, there were only seventy-five post-offices in the country, and the whole extent of our post-routes was less than nineteen hundred miles; cheap postage was unheard of; so were envelopes; and had any one suggested the transmission of messages with lightning speed, he would have been thought insane. The microscope on the one hand and the telescope on the other were in their infancy as instruments of science; and geology and chemistry were almost unknown, to say nothing of the telephone and all the other various phones, and the X-rays, and hundreds of other new things. In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-two there were only six stagecoaches running in all England, and these were a novelty. A man named John Crosset thought they were so dangerous an innovation that he wrote a pamphlet against them. "These coaches," he wrote, "make gentlemen come to London upon every small occasion which otherwise they would not do, except upon urgent necessity. The conveniency of the passage makes their wives come often up, who, rather than come such long journeys on horseback, would stay at home. Then when they come to town they must be in the 'wade' [probably that is where the word _swim_ comes in now], get fine clothes, go to plays, and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love of pleasure that they are uneasy ever after." * * * * * We can all see how much improvement there has been in all things but _creeds_. Improvements can come, and old things go, but _creeds_ go on forever! A creed implies something fixed and immovable. In other words, it means you have a "heel-rope on." The word "creed" is from _credo_, "I believe." We have had a great deal of compulsion of belief, and a thousand years of almost absolute unanimity. Liberty was dead and the ages were dark. We call them the Middle Ages because they were the death between the life that was before and the life that came after. Then came a new birth of thought--a "Renaissance"--and after this, some reformation in the form of a Protestantism. Since then, the Protestants have continued to protest, not only against the old, but against each other. And this is the best thing they have done. Thus liberty has been saved, for each would have coerced its fellow organization, as did their infamous mother, the Roman Catholic Church, before them. From "creed" comes "credulous" and "credulity." And they have filled the world with their kind. In the United States alone, there are about one hundred forty types. Each is a system of credulity pitted against a hundred and thirty-nine others. They all rest on authority. They all denounce investigation--unless it has for its end the support of their authority.