In blooming youth and innocence betrayed To cursed altars, thus are victims made." Hardly one in ten thousand of such victims will escape mental slavery for life. Moreover, men dedicated to sacerdotal delusion, are bound by strong necessity to maintain their deceptions, or else give up not only their ease and luxury, but their very means of subsistence. Once enlisted in the cause, they must defend it; for should anyone of them, prompted by convictions from impartial research and rational experience, honestly avow opinions hostile to the national superstition, or decline to administer in the usual manner to your nursery-conceived prejudices and errors, would you not abandon him to obloquy and starvation? These things duly considered, you may ask yourselves whether you are not more likely to meet with truth from men who neither seek your money nor court your favor--who are actuated by no other motive or interest than that which the love of the principle of truth excites--who are unprostituted by hire--who, under the armour of reason, can resist and despise the venomous calumny which is cast upon every exposure of priestcraft; and who, having discharged a duty, feel it as a matter of indifference whether you shall be pleased or offended by the truth. You complain that the contemner of your religious opinions, at once tortures your feelings and arraigns your judgment; but has any judgment proceeding from your impartial investigation of that subject, ever had anything to do in the matter? Did you not fall heir to those absurd whims which you are pleased to call religious opinions, in right of your mother and other relations; and if these had happened to be followers of Mahommed, would not your blind zeal for the prophet of Mecca, have been as great as it now is for his alleged predecessor of Palestine?* Your answering this question in the negative would be the highest proof of folly and stupidity. Having sadly experienced for more than half a century the obstinate and angry nature of superstition, we are prepared to expect anything but your approbation when we repeat to you, that your faith has no other basis than traditional fables, legends, and allegories--that your attempt to prove their literal truth by prodigies and violations of Nature's laws, is far more inadmissible than the fables themselves; and that your understanding is so obscured by the pestilential fogs raised by these theological absurdities, that the rational truths of Nature can find no admittance.