And the practical lives of Christian professors, from the earliest establishment of the Church, furnishes proof of the demoralizing influence of such texts as these upon the readers of the Bible. These injunctions to murder and slaughter have been faithfully obeyed; and the effect has been to submerge Christendom in a sea of blood. Look, for proof, at the war among the churches for many years about the doctrine of the Eucharist, which resulted in the destruction of three hundred thousand lives; the fight about images, in which fifty thousand men, women, and children were murdered; the war of a dozen churches against the sect of the Manicheans in the ninth century (A.D. 845) about some trivial doctrine of the Christian creed, and which left on the battle-field no less than a hundred thousand murdered human beings; the Church schism, in the time of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, followed by the war of the Hussites, which resulted in a bloody slaughter of a hundred and fifty thousand fellow-Christians; the war known as "The Holy Inquisition," established in the year 1208, made a record in its history of human butchery of two hundred thousand Christian professors who had to atone in blood for assuming the liberty to differ from the popular creed; and, finally, the Thirty Years' war which strewed the earth with bloody corpses to the frightful number of five millions of human beings, The whole makes a sum total of eighteen millions, a large portion of which were Christian professors,--all the work of Christian hands and Christian churches, professed followers of the "Prince of peace." But, if the text quoted above means any thing (requiring his followers to buy swords), he appears also to have been the Prince of war. All the bloody tragedies cited above, which form but a small number of the cases which indelibly stain the records of the Christian Church,' show how faithfully Christian professors have lived out the demoralizing injunctions of their Bible, and prove that the Book has been a powerful lever for evil as well as for good. Even the _shocking cruelties_ displayed in the execution of these bloody tragedies finds a warrant in the Bible. In their efforts to carry out the Bible injunction to exterminate heretics, no species of cruelty was left untried as a punishment for the honest dissenter from the faith. The sword of the Church was unsheathed, and plunged with a fierce and relentless ferocity into the bosoms and bowels of their neighbors and fellow-Christian professors, whose only offense was that of believing and worshiping God according to the dictates of their consciences. With a burning hatred for heretics, stimulated by reading the Bible injunction to put them to death in a cruel manner, they leaped upon them with the ferocity of tigers, and tortured them to death with every species of cruelty their ingenuity could invent. They tied them to the whipping-post, or chained