A clergyman of Chicago, one of our leading, popular, successful, talented, and respected preachers--one who has had phenomenal success as a minister of the Gospel, and who addresses the largest Christian audiences in the country, speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, declared that "this earth would have been a hell if Christ had not died on Golgotha." There must be something of the nature of a blight in a creed that can force from the lips of an educated and benevolent man such unlovely words. And there is. It is so self-centered, so intolerant, so exclusive, that in its eyes the whole world, except its own little corner, is nothing but "a hell." To intimate that the world which gave us our republic, the world which gave us our constitution--our jurisprudence, our law courts--the world which has crowded our galleries with works of imperishable beauty, and our libraries with immortal poetry, literature and philosophy--which has given to our universities their classical curriculum--which created Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, Seneca, Cicero and the Antonines--a world whose ruins are more wonderful than anything we possess, whose dead are more immortal than our living--to suggest that this pre-Christian world as well as the non-Christian countries to-day, was "a hell," takes my breath away. I never imagined that this fearful Asiatic creed could smite or sting an otherwise wholesome soul into such a contortion. What is there in this Palestinian Jew whom our famous preacher worships as his god that can tempt a man to bear even false witness for his sake? Heavens! How can a man with the example of heroic Japan fresh and fragrant before him, think of this earth as a hell without his "shibboleth?" Victor Hugo says "It is a terrible thing to have been a priest once;" it is not less terrible to be an orthodox protestant preacher to-day. And why? Because for the preacher there is something higher than the truth--his creed.