Why is it that in modern times there has arisen great complaint in all the orthodox churches about the rapid inroads of infidelity into their ranks? It is simply because, that while the people are beginning to assume the liberty to do their own thinking, the churches refuse to recognize the great principle of universal progress as applicable to their religion, which _would_ and _should_ keep their doctrines and precepts improved up to the times. Instead of adopting this wise policy, they try to compel their members to be content with the old stale _salt_ junk of bygone ages, in the shape of dilapidated, outgrown creeds and dogmas; but it will not do. It is as difficult to keep great minds tied down to unprogressive creeds as it would be to keep grown-up boys and girls in baby-jumpers. Enlightened nations are as capable of making their own religion as their own laws; that is, of making its tenets conform to the natural outgrowth of their religious feelings as they become more expanded and enlightened. And it is a significant historical fact, that great minds in _all_ religious nations have wholly or partially outgrown and abandoned the current and popular religions of the country. It is only moral cowards, or the ignorant and uninformed, who throw themselves into the lap of the Church, and depend upon the priest to pilot them to heaven. Moses, Jesus Christ, Mahomet, Martin Luther, John Wesley, Emanuel Swedenborg, George Fox, Elias Hicks, and many other superior minds, strove hard unconsciously to rise above the religion in which they were educated; and all succeeded in making some improvement in its stereotyped doctrines or practices. The implied assumption of the churches, that their doctrines and precepts are too perfect to be improved and too sacred to be investigated, and their Bible too holy to be criticised, is contradicted both by history and science; and this false assumption has already driven many of the best minds of the age from their ranks. Theodore Parker declared that all the men of great intellects had left the Church in his time, because, instead of improving their religion to keep it up to the times they bolt their doors, and hang curtains over their windows to keep out the light of the age. There could not be one inch of progress made in any thing in a thousand years with the principle of non-progression in religion adopted by the churches; for, if it will apply to religion, it will apply with still greater force to every thing else: and hence it would long ago have put a dead lock upon all improvement, had it not been counteracted by outside counter-influences. It is because a large portion, and the _most enlightened portion_, of the community have assumed the liberty and moral independence to _think_ and _act for themselves_, that society has made _any_ progress either in science, morals, or religion. A religion which sedulously opposes its _own improvement_ can do nothing essential