Poor tramp and vagrant! How you are "persecuted for righteousness' sake!" Men despise you; the farmer drives you from his door; the social economist racks his brain to devise a plan for your suppression; state governments legislate against you; everywhere you are treated as an outcast--and all because, taking the Bible for your guide, you endeavor faithfully to conform to its teachings. Ignorance. I refuse to accept the Bible as a moral guide because it condemns the use of reason and the acquisition of knowledge. "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it" (Gen. ii, 17). "She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened" (iii, 6, 7). "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden" (23). "He that believeth not shall be damned" (Mark xvi, 16). For partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, our parents were banished from Paradise; for obeying the dictates of reason, we are consigned to hell. Education, physical, moral, and intellectual, is discouraged. Bodily exercise profiteth little.--Paul. Be not righteous overmuch.--Solomon. Neither make thyself over wise.--Solomon. Choice mottoes, the above, to hang up on the walls of the school-room! "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy" (Col. ii, 8). "Knowledge puffeth up" (1 Cor. viii, 1). "Thy wisdom and thy knowledge it hath perverted thee" (Isa. xlvii, 10). "I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly; I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" (Ecles. i, 17, 18). "If any man be ignorant let him be ignorant" (1 Cor. xiv, 38). "The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" (1 Cor. iii, 19). "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Prov. i, 7). The fear of the Lord is the beginning of ignorance. This fear has kept the world in intellectual bondage. It is a flaming sword that priestcraft has placed in every highway of learning to frighten back the timid searchers after truth. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions," says Buckle, "have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived." The Bible, and the religion emanating from it, are the fruitful parents of ignorance and idiocy. They demand a sacrifice of the very attribute which exalts the man of sense above the idiot; they bid him pluck out the eyes of Reason, and in their place insert the sightless balls of Faith. "Reason should be destroyed in all Christians," says Luther (L. Ungedr. Pred. Bru., p. 106). "One destitute of reason," is a phrase employed by Webster to define the word "fool." "We are fools for Christ's sake," exclaims Paul (1 Cor. iv, 10). CHAPTER XXXII.