“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated. “They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,” confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately hinted that they could tell it every time.” Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators, as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author, who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the fairness of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has succeeded in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his adversaries. For similar reasons our “Christian” temperance societies can date their triumphs only from the time when they frankly repudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who hoped to reconcile the lessons of science with the teachings of the alcohol-brewing Galilean. For truth prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth. C.—PERVERSION. Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to renounce the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the promptings of his physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of ludicrous sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever irreconcilable principles: Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements, Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements— and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance, and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life subverted the basis of physical health. God is paid when man receiveth; To enjoy is to obey;