The most ignorant and backward parts of this great country, the localities where Congress is asking for better and more secular schools to be established as a means of safety to the state, are situated in the very States where orthodoxy holds absolute sway. In those states a man is looked upon as a very dangerous character if he questions the accuracy of that story about those three hot-house plants, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Yes, the people of that pious region would be afraid of a man who was wicked enough to laugh at that yarn; and yet do you believe there is a man in this city who could make you believe it? And you don't look dangerous either; and I don't think that I do. It seems that when they used to run ashore for big scare-stories, they just poked up the fire and went into the blastfurnace business--here and hereafter. But--seeing that a furnace--a real one--heated seven times hotter than it takes to melt iron, did not injure those three tropical innocents--did not even singe their eye-brows--it does look a little as if we should stand a pretty fair show with the spiritual fuel they now promise us hereafter. Still I must say I don't believe I should like the climate. Speaking of Bible arguments, I must tell you of a new one I heard recently. A gentleman acquaintance of mine asked a colored woman, who had applied to him for money to help build a colored people's church, whether she thought God was black or white. She replied that the Bible implied that he was black--that it said, "And His wool shall be whiter than snow;" and that _white men don't have wool!_ WHAT YOU MAY THINK. Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of belief and faith around its members, and you will show me a collection of hopeless mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out. They object to being fossilized. They decline to go down to history as physical members of the nineteenth century, and mental members of the third. I would rather have the right to put on my monument, "She was abreast of her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the feathered tribes chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said of me, "She was a good woman because she had a pure heart," than to have this record: "She was a Christian. She was afraid of hell. She cast her burdens on the Lord, and went to heaven." You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord." Rather let us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives." But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by what you believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate a thinker. It proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by means of brains large enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I cannot, and you shall not outgrow the past. The measure of my capacity shall be the limit of your attainment."