says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into disease or candor into hypocrisy. The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on mental prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and inculcating the merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly blow at the instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations actually succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental constitution of their victims. “The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the seventeenth century, every mental disposition which philosophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.... In a word, there is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth and scarcely a rule which reason teaches as essential for its attainment that theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive to the Almighty.” And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the wretched superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of witches and tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the evidence of his own senses and was naturally driven to complete his mental degradation by an absolute surrender of common sense to dogma. The history of Christian dogmatism is the history of an eighteen hundred years’ war against Nature and Truth. D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT. The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.