such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl those who refuse to degrade nature to the level of primitive Judaism.” “Religion,” he also elsewhere writes, “arising like all other knowledge out of the action and interaction of man’s mind, has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism, Polytheism, of Theism or Atheism, of Superstition or Rationalism; and if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past; not because it has renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but it begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man’s emotions by worship, ‘for the most part of the silent sort,’ at the altar of the _unknown and unknowable_”... “If a man asks me what the politics of the inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply that I know not, that neither I nor any one else have any means of knowing, and that under these circumstances I decline to trouble myself about the subject at all, I do not think he has any right to call me a skeptic.” Again: “What are among the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to a readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism a sin; and there are many excellent persons who still hold by these principles.”... “Yet we have no reason to believe that it is the improvement of our faith nor that of our morals which keeps the plague from our city; but it is the improvement of our natural knowledge. We have learned that pestilences will only take up their abode among those who have prepared unswept and ungarnished residences for them. Their cities must have narrow, un watered streets full of accumulated garbage; their houses must be ill-drained, ill-ventilated; their subjects must be ill-lighted, ill-washed, ill-fed, ill-clothed; the London of 1665 was such a city; the cities of the East, where plague has an enduring dwelling, are such cities; we in later times have learned somewhat of Nature, and partly obey her. Because of this partial improvement of our natural knowledge, and that of fractional obedience, we have no plague; but because that knowledge is very imperfect and that obedience yet incomplete, typhus is our companion and cholera our visitor.” CHAPTER III. THE FABULOUS CLAIMS OF JUDAISM “Not giving heed to Jewish fables.”—Tit. 1: 14. “Neither give heed to fables.”—1 Tim. 1: 4. “But refuse profane and old wives’ fables.”—1 Tim. 4: 7.