"What do you conclude from all this? I conclude from it that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; that they all refer to the physical object of man's preservation; that nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; that we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; that it only requires to be developed that we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; and that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization:--Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; live for thy fellow-men, that they may live for thee." The Bible moralist would have us believe that from this book all morality has been derived; that God is the author and the Bible the revelation and sole repository of moral laws. But it is not from Gods and Bibles that these laws have come. In the words of Tyndall, "Not in the way assumed by our dogmatic teachers has the morality of human nature been propped up. The power that has molded us thus far has worked with stern tools upon a rigid stuff.... That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hands when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers--hunger, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe--such were the forces, the interaction and adjustment of which during the immeasurable ages of his development wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will be effectual to the end." Accepting the Bible--not for what it is claimed to be, the word of God, but for what it is, the work of man--I can excuse, in a degree, the crude ideas of right and wrong and the laxity of morals that prevailed among the people whose history it purports to record. The age in which they lived, the circumstances that surrounded them, must palliate, to some extent, their deeds and theories. But it is humiliating to think that in these better times, illuminated by the light of a glorious civilization, there are those who spurn the robes of virtue that Reason in the loom of grave Experience has woven, and who from the dark and musty closets of the past drag forth for use the soiled and blood-stained garments that barbarians wore.