impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT. Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics. Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive. “Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.