In a state of society so vitiated by falsehood and crime (created by an abandonment of Nature) as to be almost wholly made up of moral evil, is it at all wonderful that a vast portion of mankind should pursue the most criminal courses to obtain a bare and wretched existence? Can we then imagine any lengths to which a hireling clergy would not go in their routine of deception to secure for life riches, honors, ease and luxury? The knowledge of this truth alone ought to be sufficient to rouse men from their sottish lethargy, for it requires nothing but inquiry to make it appear that error and falsehood reduced to a system forms the groundwork of that overwhelming scheme of delusion which procures the above blessings for all priesthoods, who are hired and prostituted to defend deceptions which enrich them and impoverish industry. Could you, without an aberration of mind, expect truth from men who, in order to secure all the good things the world affords, make you their victims by forcing false notions upon your weak and pliant understandings in childhood? Well may they cry out, "Train up a child in the way he should walk, and when he is old he will not depart from it."* This is a correct aphorism, and is equally true whether applied to good or bad training, for if the mind be as it were mortgaged, or sacrificed to the priest in childhood,**-- * The spirit of priestianity may be, and is, repressed by science and philosophy; but it is utterly unchangeable. The children educated by the Druids to recruit their own ranks were secluded in woods and caverns, and denied all intercourse with their parents till after they had attained fourteen years of age. By this mental monopoly it was evidently meant that the esprit du corps, its secret ways and interests, should be so indelibly fixed upon the mind as to be ever afterwards proof against every natural affection. ** The more outrageous against Nature and reason the false notions instilled in childhood are the more difficult it seems to be to eradicate them. "It was said of an Arab, who was a man of sense, an arithmetician, a chemist, and, what is still more strange, a skilful astronomer, that nothing could induce him to give up the belief that Mahommed put half of the moon in his sleeve. The reformers of England had more difficulty in giving up the 'Real Presence' in the Sacrament, than in parting with any other dogma in Popery." The impossible and the absurd are indispensable pre- requisites with all religionists. "Ere yet their minds, through tender age, can choose What's for their good, or for their harm refuse. Before their natures, and their wills are strong, Justly to think, or judge of right and wrong; Or how th' affections with the body grow, The self-denying doom they undergo.