were never wrought. The history of no other nation mentions them, not even the three years of drought; yet Christ speaks of it, and indorses it with all its impossibilities and all its bad consequences, which is an evidence of his ignorance of natural law. As these stories, by their stultifying absurdities, do violence to our reason, and also to our moral faculties, on account of the cruelty, injustice, bloodshed (for it shows both prophets were murderers), we hold, from these considerations, that the influence of these stories is demoralizing, and that they should not be put into the hands of the heathen, as they are every year by the thousand. CHAPTER XXXII.--PROGRESSIVE IDEAS OF DEITY. IDOLATRY: ITS CHARACTER, USES, HARMLESSNESS, AND PRIMARY ORIGIN. There is no act, no species, of human conduct, nothing recognized as a sin within the lids of the Christian Bible, which is perhaps more fearfully or more frequently condemned, or denounced with more awful and terrible penalties, than that of idolatry. Those who practiced it are ranked with murderers and liars (Rev. xxii. 15); and it is declared, "They shall not inherit The kingdom of God" (1 Cor. vi. 9), but "shall have their portion in the lake of fire and brimstone" (Rev. xxi. 8). Now, we propose to bestow a brief examination upon the origin, character, and practical moral effect of this ancient practice, that we may learn the nature of the custom which is thus placed at the head of the list of the acts of human depravity, and regarded as the blackest and most infamous crime ever perpetrated by sinful man. We find it manifested under various forms, the original or most primitive aspect of which, so far as disclosed by the light of history, is known as _Fetichism_,--the worship of inanimate objects. Stretching the imagination far away in the rearward of time,--far back along the receding pathway of human history, over a series of many thousands, not to say millions, of years,--we arrive at a period in which man is found occupying a plane of mere animal, sensorial existence, connected with which was an imperfect development of perception and reflection. In this era of his mental growth he began to perceive and recognize the motions of objects around him. He observed bright and shining bodies rolling over his head,--one by day, and ten thousand more by night. At least he observed that they changed positions,--being in one locality in the morning, and in the opposite direction in the evening. What conclusion from these observations could be more natural, more childlike (for, bear in mind, this was really the childhood of the race), or more reasonable, than that these bodies possessed life,--that they inherently possessed the power of locomotion, the same ability to move that he did himself,--just as the infant, now gazing out upon the sky from the lap of its mother, fancies the darting meteor to be a bird or an animal? Wherever the ignorant, illiterate, primitive inhabitants of our globe