these that gave Spain a pretended sanction of the Lord to exterminate fifteen millions of people in Mexico and Peru, with a better and higher civilization than itself, and to rob them of their wealth and possessions. It was these, and such as these, that authorized and instigated the Inquisition, which from 1481 to 1808, put to torture and horrible death by burning, 340,000 human beings. It was these that induced the massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 30,000 victims of fire and sword; the English persecutions under Bloody Mary, in which three hundred fellow-creatures perished; the almost total annihilation of the Albigenesis in the south of France. This war was carried on with more ferocious cruelty than any ever recorded in history; the fanatical fury of the soldiers was stimulated by the exhortations of the clergy. At the storming of Baziers, when it was proposed to spare the Catholics, a monk exclaimed, “Kill all, God will recognize his own,” and the atrocious precept was but too well observed. The war terminated by the complete devastation of the country, and the almost complete extermination of its inhabitants. Following along in the bloody path of these barbaric scriptural commands, we have to record the witch burnings of Europe and America, during the term of Christian supremacy, calculated in the hundreds of thousands; the Crusades, and purely religious wars since the time of Constantine, whose victims are beyond computation; and all this to no other purpose or end, but that the world should be forced into the belief of, what is known to be, the theological system of a low social development; this the terrible cost to humanity, for the adoption and systematic retention by the churches, of the ancient Jewish beliefs and modes of thought; this the infliction, that ecclesiasticism might prevail, using the sermon on the mount to capture the consciences of men, and scourging them with the mandates, curses and punishments of a Hebrew divinity, to bring them into line for its purposes. In taking these Jewish annals to its heart, making them a part of itself, as objects of example and worship, has not Christianity retarded the advance of mankind? Has it not, by them, obstructed knowledge, prevented a greater expansion of human sympathy, and prolonged the betterment of social conditions?