How any intelligent person can believe that the teachings of Christ as practised to-day, and I emphasize the word "practised," furnish such a philosophy or a system of ethics, transcends my understanding. The chief branch of the Christian religion stands for dogma to-day just as firmly as it did before the Renaissance, and it pretends the humility of Christ while maintaining the imperiousness of Cæsar. There is scarcely a minister of the Protestant church who is not selling his birthright for a mess of pottage by not daring to get up in his pulpit and tell his flock that they must live up to the basic principles of Christ's teachings. These ministers are just as cognizant as I am that their branch of the Christian church has lost its hold upon the people except in so far as its alleged teachings are reconcilable with their pleasurable conduct in private and in public affairs. I do not mean to say that there are not many wholly sincere and devout believers in these churches who feel the inspiration of the teachings of Christ. But because they are paid workers in the vineyard of the Lord they dare not jeopardize their existence and take no heed for the morrow, and they dare not insist that those to whom they minister should conform their conduct to Christ's commandments, because it would hazard their very existence and provoke the starvation of their children. Do the meek inherit the earth? Have they inherited it? Does any one rejoice and be exceeding glad when men revile him and persecute him and say all manner of evil against him falsely? Is there any clergyman to-day who is teaching and insisting that if any one shall break any one of these least commandments and shall teach men to do so he shall be called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven? Suppose we grant that the Sermon on the Mount is not to be taken literally, but symbolically, of what are these mandates symbolical? "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee." Why does one not give the same heed to these commands as he does to "Thou shalt not kill; thou shall not commit adultery"? The reason is that he who kills or commits adultery is liable to be punished by the law, and he is deterred by the fear of such punishment or of the social ostracism to which he would be subject. Christ referred to the fact that "It hath been said that whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement, but I say unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery." But the present-day mandates of Christianity are in no way in keeping with this.