Some of them manifest a tenacity in holding on to musty and antiquated dogmas equal to that of the butcher's dog in the army which seized a slaughtered ox by the caudal appendage, with the intention of monopolizing the meat, and held on with a "manly grip" till limb after limb had been torn off, and piece after piece had been cut away from the body by the hungry soldiers, and nothing was left but the tail and the backbone; and then his canine majesty growled at passers-by, as much as to say, "I am master of the situation." The fossilized clergy are "masters of the situation," while the old orthodox carcass is now minus every part but the tail and naked backbone, to which they cling with a deathly grasp worthy of a better cause. They remind us of the hotel-keeper in Vermont, who, in answer to the interrogatories of some travelers, stated that he did not keep any kind of food for either men or horses. "What in the name of God, then, do you keep?" inquired one of the hungry guests. He replied, "I keep Union Hotel." The stand-still clergy still keep the old theological hotel minus any spiritual food, or supplied only with old salt junk handed down from the camp of Moses or Father Abraham. A word more with respect to the origin of evil: Is it not strange that Christians should deny their God to be the author of evil, when it is expressly so declared in their Bible? "I make peace, and _I create evil_. I Jehovah do all these things." Here is the positive declaration that God is the author of evil; and, if it were not thus unequivocally taught, we could prove that the Bible teaches this doctrine _indirectly_ by various texts If "God made every thing that was made," then he either made evil or the author of evil, whether that was a devil or a serpent or a fallen angel; and this is substantially the same thing as originating evil,--to originate the author of evil. We challenge refutation of the proposition. But a philosophical analysis of the question will show there is no such thing as evil in either the _abstract or absolute_ sense. Good and evil are but relative terms, like heat and cold, light and darkness, &c. There is no distinct line of demarkation between any of these correlative terms. It is impossible to tell where one ends, and the other begins. And then there is no act but that may become either right or wrong under different circumstances. The Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill." But the man who should see an assassin pointing a pistol to the head of his wife, or a dagger to her breast, and refrain from killing him as the only means of saving her life, would be virtually himself a murderer. "Thou shalt not steal" (Exod. xx.); and yet stealing would become a _moral right_, as well as a physical necessity, to avoid starvation. And so of all other acts called crime and sin: they may become _absolute virtues_. How foolish, therefore, to erect inflexible standards for human action or conduct! And then it should be noted that what is