“‘Submit,’ it seems to say, ‘to the religious order about you, accept the common beliefs, or at least behave as if you accepted them, and live habitually in the atmosphere of feeling and sensation which they have engendered and still engender; surrender your feeling while still maintaining the intellectual citadel intact; pray, weep, dream with the majority while you think with the elect; only so will you obtain from life all it has to give, its most delicate flavor, its subtlest aroma.’” Against such a _sham_ the writer heartily protests, as against the villainous maxim, quoted from memory, accredited to Aristotle: “_Think_ with the sages and philosophers, but _talk_ like the common people.” Come what may, let us cease to profess what we have ceased to believe. “The two learned people of the village,” says Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, telling of his fanciful Arrowhead Village, “were the rector and the doctor. These two worthies kept up the old controversy between the professions which grows out of the fact that one studies nature from below upward, and the other from above downward. The rector maintained that physicians contracted a squint which turns their eyes inwardly, while the muscles which roll their eyes upward become palsied. The doctor retorted that theological students developed a third eyelid—the _nictitating membrane_, which is so well known in birds, and which serves to shut out, not all light, but _all the light they do not want._” The Presbyterians have provided for a _revision_ of their creed, though they have stultified themselves by certain restrictions, _shutting out the light they do not want!_ Let us hope that the time will soon come when men will be honest enough and brave enough to follow the truth wherever it may lead. Let there be perfect veracity above all things, more especially in matters of religion. It is not a question of courtesies which deceive no one. To profess what is not believed is immoral. Immorality and untruth can never lead to morality and virtue; all language which conveys untruth, either in substance or appearance, should be amended so that words can be understood in their recognized meanings, without equivocal explanations or affirmations. Let historic facts have their true explanation. CHAPTER II. SACERDOTALISM IMPEACHED _“The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.”—Micah 3: 11._ _“Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’ offices, that I may eat a piece of bread.”—1 Sam. 2: 36._ THE cognomens priest, prophet, presbyter, preacher, parson, and pastor have certain things in common, and these titles may therefore be used interchangeably.