It is time that such warfare as this should be aggressive; that such books as the present should be part of the food of our children. Our truest feelings and our tenderest years have been enslaved to blind faith, unreasoning credulity and degrading fear; our infant lips have been trained to link in loving accents the gentle and holy names of Mother and of Father with that of a God of jealousy, of vengeance, and brutality; our growing mind has been warned to look to a Hebrew ascetic as the noblest type of the divine, and to a Hebrew profligate and murderer as the highest type of the human. As the opening thought of youth has striven to turn to the light of reason, it has been constantly threatened back and thrust back into the dark of superstition. It has been told that eternal misery is the doom of those who leave the paths of dogma; and it has been falsely and persistently taught that Free-thinkers are evil and unclean, men without care for right, scoffers at every good thing. But it is not scoffers who wage this war of the rational against the supernatural: let none deceive themselves with that vain thought, or perpetuate the incorrect assertion. Of such books as the present, such writings as the present, some at least are the words of men and women who have been born to, and striven toward a godly life, with intense effort, with groanings not to be uttered: who, nursed in the bosom of the Church, and partakers in all her most sacred ordinances, crushed down as unholy the first and the repeated breathings of doubt and of reasoning their minds; who held to the falseness of their early teachings,--till there came that final struggle, when they wrestled with God,--to hold him,--not to lose him; gasping with fevered lips and shut teeth and scalding eyelids, "I will not let thee go ": and who won a blessing they knew not of in that they proved the Jehovah of Hebraism, the God of Christianity, to be an Apollyon of Superstition: who cast him off in disgust, in loathing, in half despair; who lay faint and bleeding through a night of darkness: but to whom, with the dawn, has come the free and bracing air of reason, and then the deep warm glow of true life, and humanity, and universal love,--love given this time not to a fetish, but to every fellow being, to man and beast, to tree and moss, to stone and star. With a great price obtained we this freedom, and we will that our Sons and that our Daughters be free born. To such a liberator as Robert G. Ingersoll the thanks of present parents are lovingly offered; his name will be cherished by our children, and his memory hallowed in the gratitude of generations yet unborn. B. E. Rudyard: 9th Month, 1881. BOUQUET GARNI. It is the curse of England that its intellect can see truths which its heart will not embody. --Laurence Oliphant