"Their hands behind their backs he bound whom he had destined A sacrifice unto the ghosts, and on whose flames to shed Their blood he purposed."--_AEnead._ Some ignorant infidels seem at a great loss to understand why the Lord should order the groves and altars of the heathen destroyed. (Again and again their groves were cut down.) The children of Israel were to make no offerings in the groves. If infidels will only exercise common sense inside of the history of the worship of Priapus and Berecynthia, they will cease fretting over the destruction of those beautiful forests. Those groves were the most corrupt places upon the earth, places of retirement from the altar into prostitution, carried on as a matter of worship pleasing to Priapus. Here, on account of becoming modesty, the half can not be told. The removal of nuisances in our own country is conducted upon the same principles upon which groves were destroyed by the Israelites. Lycurgus dedicated an image to laughter, to be worshiped as a god, and this is said to be "the only law he ever made pertaining to religion." While his great object was to make warriors, he ordained some things noted for the education of youth. He ordained other laws so much in favor of lust and all carnality of the worst kind, that it might justly be said he made his entire commonwealth ludicrous. He instituted wrestlings, dances and other exercises of boys and girls naked, to be done in public at divers times of the year, in the presence both of young and old men. Adultery was also approved and permitted by the laws of Lycurgus. Plato and Aristotle advocated community of women, of goods and possessions, to the end that no man should have anything peculiar to himself, or know his own children. This was ordained by Plato, in order to establish in the commonwealth such a perfect unity that no man might be able to say, that is thine, or this is mine. Aristotle, in the second book of his "_Politiques_," sets forth many other detestable things. Lactantius, in the third of his Divine Institutions, shows that Plato's community of property and women took away frugality, abstinence, shamefacedness, modesty and justice itself. Plato, like Lycurgus, ordained that young men should, for the increase of their physical strength and agility of body, at certain times exercise themselves naked; that girls and servant-maids should dance naked among the young men; that women in the flower of their youth should dance, run, wrestle and ride with young men naked as well as they, which, says Plato, "whosoever misliketh understandeth not how profitable it is for the commonwealth."