Your peculiar religious beliefs have so shaped and moulded your character that we have observed, what you are not likely to see of yourselves, certain traits or inclinations which are not promising as factors in your ultimate regeneration. Your churches, with the shrewd purpose of rendering their services invaluable, have given you to believe that your natural tendencies are evil, and that the unavoidable misfortunes and sorrows of your lives are but penalties for your many misdeeds. The general acceptance of this belief has lowered your pride, and given you, to some extent, that character of dejection and submissiveness which is entirely subversive to the attainment of any destiny to be reached by yourselves. There is a quality of mind which we acknowledge as, above all others, the one which has assisted us to our present very desirable social condition, and that is the feeling to resist the perpetration of a mean or bad act, on account of the sense of degradation it inflicts upon the feelings of the doer. This motive of conscience, so plainly the offspring of self-esteem, and growing out of a cultivation of the mind alone, without any regard whatever to creed influences or teachings, is totally ignored, either as a promoter of virtue or preventive of vice, by all the religions that have existed upon your planet. The reason for this is easily explained. Under the knowledge that a cultivation of the mind and conscience, without creed influence, was capable of doing for you a better service in the advancement of your morals than your churches have performed, it has been made a part of their doctrine to belittle and abuse your purely intellectual faculties, under the unwarranted and unreasonable imputation that the free exercise of your reason was an assumption beyond your right. And all this, too, in face of the overwhelming evidence about you, that the most corroding and dangerous of your vices germinate and seed themselves only in places where the mind lies in fallow.