“Ye have taken away the key of knowledge!” The crime of crimes, the unforgiveable sin! In this indictment that He brings against professional hair-splitters and obstructionists, selfishly standing in the way of human progress, the Christ gives divine sanction to Man’s efforts to satisfy the irresistible craving in his soul for light, ever more light, in the darkness through which he gropes. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is not, as in the old Eden legend, accursed, but is proclaimed by the Savior as food essential to that spiritual growth without which there could be no hope for our race. The late Andrew D. White, in his great book dealing with the obstacles against which Science has had to struggle in its effort to enlarge the diameter of Man’s knowledge, paints a vivid picture of the tragic effects wrought by various forms of censorship upon the pathetic, heroic, Christ-sanctioned efforts of the human race to employ freely the key of knowledge to the end that we may always use “our dead selves as stepping-stones to higher things.” Prison, the stake, massacre, war—what weapon has not been used by the foes of enlightenment that they might check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which the ancient, unhallowed prerogatives of a few reactionaries could not survive? And always, in some form or other, censorship has been the most serviceable weapon, both in times of war and times of peace, by which relentless unprogressives could break the spirit of those who strove to loosen the shackles of ignorance from the human spirit. The marvel is not that Man knows so much to-day as the fact that he has won what he knows against almost insuperable odds. There came to New York from somewhere in the West a year or so ago a loquacious fanatic who loudly asserted that the earth is flat. The metropolis refused to take this peripatetic crank seriously, gave him a passing glance and laugh, and went on its busy way, momentarily astonished, perhaps, at the amazing stubbornness displayed by outworn errors in refusing to remain dead and buried. It is seldom, of course, that the call of the past, the urge to ignorance and reaction, is so blatantly and audaciously sounded, but Dowie of Zion City differed only in degree and not in kind from those frequently well-intentioned but always misguided busybodies who believe that the screen can be kept decent not by public opinion and commercial common-sense, but only by groups of three, or five, or seven individuals wielding the arbitrary power of censorship.