There comes to us from our remote ages, through tradition and history, an account of some superstitious beliefs, but it has been our good fortune never to have had them built up into a system so overbearing and harmful as yours has been. It cannot be said of us that we ever denounced honest intellectual efforts in any direction, or that we ever regarded the expression of opinions founded on the dictates of reason as crimes, and your punishment of such, with all its atrocious and heart-rending details, serves as a lesson for the whole universe of worlds never to put trust in the smooth tongues and insinuating ways of the seers, for the spirit of fairness and truth is not in them. Your restrictions and punishments of the free expression of thought, inaugurated by the corporate organization of your present religion, and maintained with more or less rigor to the present, has left its blighting effects upon your society by encouraging some of the meanest of your vices. The assumption that one of you shall not have the right to convey to another his opposing convictions upon any religious question is so outrageously unjust, that it never could have been carried out in any other way than by the general belief that it was in accordance with the wishes and purposes of the Almighty. Such a denial of the natural right of mankind could only be enforced when a majority of the multitude became converts to the doctrines which favored it. The leaders of religious persecution, during the centuries of church control, were merely carrying out the wishes of this majority. The spirit of intolerance, once abroad, became the parent of those habits of concealed thought, moral cowardice and hypocricy, which even to the present, so rule among you, that sincerity in expressing religious belief is not universal. In deference to the lingering opinion among a large body of your people that a dissension from old modes of religious thought is displeasing to the Almighty, and dangerous to society, many of you are constantly led to veil their thoughts on these questions, in dread of the social consequences which would follow their frank avowal. Many of skeptical tendencies are thus induced to hide their convictions in fear of disturbing their safe and comfortable positions in society. By silently working the penalty of withholding their political and social support, your great illogical multitude backed by their vigilant church organizations still maintain a terrorism over you. Consequently, your writers are guarded in their lines, your public speakers in their language, your teachers in their instruction, and your statesmen in their legislation, that each shall not get beyond the soundings of orthodox religious belief, while with the knowledge of your time, most of them are conscious in their inner thoughts that they are trimming to avoid truth, in the full knowledge, that to this day upon the earth, the surest human preferment is only for those who