“Is it strange that so many live in vice and sin, when their salvation is made so easy, by getting in a priest at the last moment? How can honest men, as clergymen, bolster up such a flattering delusion? If it is criminal to deceive men about things in this life, how much more so when it is about that which affects their eternal life? If the parsons cannot keep a man from sinning, or make him lead a good life here, how can they, in the hour of death, save him from Hell or fit him for Heaven, when his body is racked with pain and his senses are benumbed? Is it not a gross deception to teach that, when a man becomes so feeble from his vices, that he can enjoy nothing more on earth, neither of its good or evil, and has nothing left but its dregs, that he can take communion, and reach Heaven? “Colley Cibber wrote of Nell Gwynn, the notorious profligate mistress of Charles the Second: ‘She received the last consolations of religion. Her repentance in her last hours appeared in all the contrite symptoms of Christian sincerity.’ “This is only one instance of thousands of similar statements. How can a person’s death-bed be illumined by the holy consolations of religion, after a whole life spent in the meanest kind of wickedness? What sacrilegious rubbish! “My idea of Heaven is this—that it is a condition of the soul, and is made by ourselves, with God’s help always—by conquest, the conquest of self, the subjugation of all thoughts, feelings and acts, everything that is unheavenly, and by building up the soul with pure thoughts and deeds of rightness. We make a heaven for ourselves by subduing and improving. The farmer clears the ground and destroys the weeds to give place to the seed, and then by cultivation, produces a harvest. He does not expect a crop without labor; by some chance, or prayer, or miracle. Why should we expect a spiritual crop of good without working for it? Our diseases, are in no sense, accidents or mysteries, but the necessary and legitimate results of the violations of laws. A man who violates the laws of his physical being to his own injury is a criminal in regard to himself, just as he would be a criminal in breaking the laws of the state. “Government does not accept the plea of ignorance of the laws, for to be ignorant is a part of the crime, so no one should be excused for not knowing or obeying the laws of his own being.