The principles of that religion are revealed in the monitions of our normal instincts, and have never been wholly effaced from the soul of man, but for long ages the consciousness of their purpose has been obscured by the mists of superstition and the systematic inculcation of baneful delusions. The first taste of alcohol revolts our normal instincts; nature protests against the incipience of a ruinous poison-vice; but the fables of the Bacchus priests for centuries encouraged that vice and deified the genius of intemperance. Vice itself blushed to mention the immoralities of the pagan gods whose temples invited the worship of the heavenly-minded. Altars were erected to a goddess of lust, to a god of wantonness, to a god of thieves. That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to abdicate, but only to yield their throne to a celestial Phalaris, a torture-god who cruelly punished the gratification of the most natural instincts, and foredoomed a vast plurality of his children to an eternity of horrid and hopeless torments. Every natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful. Every natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise. Mirth is the sunshine of the human mind, the loveliest impulse of life’s truest children; yet the apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the gloomy world-despiser. “Blessed are they that mourn.” “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.” “Be afflicted, and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness.” “Woe unto you that laugh.” “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” The love of health is as natural as the dread of pain and decrepitude. The religion of Antinaturalism revoked the health laws of the Mosaic code, and denounced the care even for the preservation of life itself. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” “Bodily exercise profiteth but little.” “There is nothing from without a man that, entering him, can defile him.” The love of knowledge awakens with the dawn of reason; a normal child is naturally inquisitive; the wonders of the visible creation invite the study of every intelligent observer. The enemies of nature suppressed the manifestations of that instinct, and hoped to enter their paradise by the crawling trail of blind faith. “Blessed are they that do not see and yet believe.” “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” “He that believeth not is condemned already.”