There are many books of the _Moral Philosophers_, who make a _Science_ of certain movements of mind, and call it _Ethical_. But these books are to our habits useless or absurd--sometimes positively hurtful. The idolatries and superstitions colour and distort--distinctions are confounded, and a rational morality wanting. A merely Jewish ordinance from the _Sacred Writings_ is made as important as a plain moral precept. The human conscience is overloaded with arbitrary and unreasonable matters taken from the _Superstition_, and, bewildered, despairs of well-doing. To offend in some priestly _dogma_, is more terrible than to break an established law of honesty. Disobedience in the false demoralises the conscience as much as disobedience in the true, when both are received as true. In fact most of the _moral_ books are merely books written to uphold the great Superstition, and the morality is debased by its injurious connection. By what strange perversion could the cultivated mind ever be brought to announce a principle like this, to say; "Belief alone saves man from eternal Hell; morality without it is only a snare of the Devil." _Belief_ means an undoubting acceptance of all the pretensions of the _Superstition_ (as explained elsewhere). What must be the effect of teaching so false and presumptuous an enormity? The Sovereign Lord will not deign to look with pity. He is a consuming fire! Heart and hands pure--a life of disinterestedness--worship warm, grateful. Nothing worse. First, BELIEVE--in the most monstrous thing which the diseased human imagination ever created--the Jew-Jah theology and worship!