If human testimony could establish anything, there has never been an error but could be made an apparent fact by any number of witnesses. Probably hundreds of thousands could be found to testify to miracles at Lourdes, and to any number of so-called miracles elsewhere, and here in India millions of people could be got to affirm the reality of events as improbable. Before science was known every mystery was a miracle. Miracles are not required to prove a truth. Facts need no authority. Yet a belief in a personal devil and a literal hell seems to be a necessity to restrain and influence those who could be reached in no other way. As ghost stories are used to frighten children to be quiet, so a belief in hell seems to be required for a certain class of people of infantile mental capacity, or of vicious propensities and habits, that no refined, moral instruction could reach. They are below philosophy, art or science, and must be cudgeled or frightened into decent behavior. To the poor, who have never had a shilling ahead in their lives, a heaven paved with gold is the greatest thing to be desired. To those who have spent their lives in a one-roomed hut, a heavenly mansion of many rooms is their notion of comfort. To those whose lives have been filled with weeping and sorrow, a hereafter, where there shall be no more trouble or tears, is a hope of greatest bliss. To a Greenlander, a hell of fire would be heaven. One who has no intellect or capacity of thought, and hence no conscience, could not appreciate a spiritual condition of the soul as heaven or hell, and must be reached through his body, his material nature, which makes up ninety-nine hundredths of his being. He can realize no other than a hell of fire, a gehenna of physical torture. For such people a real, live demon of a devil, and a real hell fire, is an ecclesiastical necessity. Uneducated people, like children, must be kept in order by bugbears. Said Dr. Johnson, “Sir, I would be a Catholic if I could, but an obstinate rationality prevents me.” Strip Christianity of its mythology and its doctrines are simplicity itself. The moral law is as plain and simple as the multiplication table. Tell a child that two and two make four, and it needs no argument to make him believe it. The laws of God, either in the religious, moral or scientific world, are self-evident. Thou shalt not commit sin. Everybody, even the most illiterate savage, knows what it is to sin. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. This every one can readily comprehend. These two facts are enough, without any of the mumble of mysticism or any ecclesiastical trickery.