I am perfectly aware that I have made a statement which challenges the sincerity of the Christian pulpit, but every one knows that there is not a minister in Christendom whose practise agrees with his preaching. While it is common to hear a clergyman in pious ecstasy exhaust the vocabulary of laudation in his praises of the beautiful morals of the "Sermon on the Mount," it is exceedingly rare to see one of these parsons sacrifice his commonsense to the nonsense of Jesus. We are learning that the theological morality of the Christian faith is not the right kind of morality to make manhood and womanhood. The great weakness of Christian morality is this: It depends upon the Christian idea of Jesus, and when the world has outgrown the superstition about this person, all of his moral precepts will lose their value and their splendor. Men and women of any intellectual penetration know that the New Testament story is founded upon unreliable tradition; that its heart is a myth. Where men live independent of the foolish faith of the Gospels, there is a character of self-reliance which towers like a mountain-peak above the dead level of Christian endeavor. The person who accepts the Christian theology is no more in sympathy with the best thought of the age than is the man who wanders about the streets, begging his food and sleeping wherever he can, in harmony with the highest comforts of our civilization. There is a nobler purpose in a train of cars carrying grain and produce across the continent than in a conference of clergymen trying to keep alive a theology which teaches that God was born of a Jewish maiden who lived and died in Palestine, and devising ways to make the people believe the ridiculous superstition. Truth is born where men are allowed to think and speak their thoughts. Error can not be maintained where man is permitted to ask questions. The only way to preserve Christianity is to put it in a tin can and have it hermetically sealed. We are getting a new examination of the universe as a basis for our philosophy. The telescope has afforded man visions far beyond the seventh heaven of the Apocalypse. The genesis of things is found to lie millions of years back of the Genesis of the Bible. The chaos out of which this world was made has been discovered to be a previous state of existence. Science is laying the new foundation for our faith, and knowledge is building the new temple of the mind. Men and women everywhere are stating their opinions, and the world recognizes that there is to be a religious controversy upon this earth which will shake to its base everything that is not true. Not one stone of falsehood will be left standing upon another. Every dogma of superstition must find a grave, and truth alone be reverenced by man. * * * * *