at last, but they should teach him wherein true knowledge consists, anticipating the physical science, physical power, and physical well being of our own times, nay, even unfolding for our benefit things that we are still ignorant of. The discussion of subjects, so many and so high, is not outside the scope of a work of such pretensions. Its manner of dealing with them is the only criterion it can offer of its authority to succeeding times.”[A] How unlike this is our asserted Sacred Book, with its fables, its myths and legends, its deadly texts that have scourged mankind. By its pretension of divine authority, carrying forward into our civilization superstitions, that otherwise would have melted away under the light of knowledge; putting a limit to learning, obstructing it, and denouncing it, in many of its branches; paralyzing thought, and substituting in its stead a blind faith, instituted and cultivated by ecclesiasticism, to bring men under its control; holding up as an example of divine favor, the low moral standard of barbaric times; recounting murders, incests, adulteries and obscenities, that would have banished the book long since from the regions of refinement and civilization, but for its assumed origin, and which serve, by their easy and undenied access to young minds, as a stimulation to destructive pruriency; sanctioning human slavery, and encouraging bloodshed by battle; setting an example of extortionate tithes for the support of ecclesiasticism; uttering the most heart-rending curses, as coming directly from the Almighty, for failure to comply with his assumed commands, and which have been made the example, authorizing the horrible cruelties inflicted upon mankind by the churches, literary models as they are of those anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications, by which the older church terrorized humanity for fifteen hundred years. “I will also do this unto you, I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart, and ye shall sow your seed in vain; for your enemies shall eat it.” “I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, and your highways shall be desolate.” “For they went and served other gods, and worshiped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them; and the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book.” “Do not I hate them O Lord that hate thee, yea I hate them with a perfect hate.” “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” “A man, also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death.” “And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.” Solely on the authority of such deadly texts as these, and the book is full of them, the world has been overspread in blood. It was