Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men. CHAPTER XII. TRUTH. A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT. The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming influence of theological education. The baseness of the “unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;” and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.