With a moral code, every provision of which plainly indicates the method of a better social state, these religious societies have indissolubly associated in their teachings certain doctrinal beliefs, originating in a semi-barbarous age, and laden with its superstitions, with that fatal assumption of divine authority which demands their acceptance every where and for all time. Beliefs of such unbending rigidity, impossible adaption or amendment, and intolerance of dissent, on account of their pretended sacred character, that the world has been kept in a turmoil discussing them since their introduction, and the more salutary lessons of morality and spiritual hope have been outranked and submerged by these vain and profitless discussions. These beautiful and attractive lessons of love, kindness, and charity, exemplified and taught through a personality, whose gift of genius was to see, above all other men, the needs of humanity, have attracted men and women into these religious societies as the hungry are attracted by stores of food. Once within their lines, and imbued with the doctrines there found, they see but little abroad in the outside world but the evil spirit of Sheol. To them, its shadow rests upon much of the business of life, and with increased obscurity, upon many of its pleasures. It even shows to them among those humanities which are without their direction and cue. It is only however among the many who openly deny their doctrines and authority that the evil spirit is seen by them in all its hideous and malevolent personality, and their especial mission is to give battle in that direction. Between he who doubts, no matter how respectfully, and these religious societies, are drawn their lines of kindness and charity, and with their sermons of love, and their protestations of good will to mankind fresh upon them, they are at any time, transformed, so far as their relations with a doubter are concerned, into a band of hostile and relentless savages, with inflictions of punishment, measured in degree by surrounding enlightenment, from the actual barbaric torture of the savage, to mere social ostracism and avoidance.