To postulate that a supreme being is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving, and then to assume that he inflicts disease on his children as punishment for sin is a sadistic mental aberration. In his omniscience he full well knows beforehand what each of his children will do. He foreordains their sins and then punishes his children for sins that he wills them to commit. It is just as if a syphilitic father should punish his syphilitic child because the child has that congenital disease for which the father is responsible. If the theist insists that his deity is all that he claims him to be, then it is only logical that instead of man asking his god for forgiveness, what actually should be is that God should ask the forgiveness of man for his bungling and error. Christianity has attempted from its inception to eradicate the sexual instinct and in so doing has antagonized an instinct that is as fundamental as that of self-preservation. All it has accomplished is a distortion. The church, by claiming that it alone was privileged to regulate sexual desires, has done one of two things to each of its adherents. It has either made him a hypocrite or driven him insane. Much of the insanity in this country could be overcome were religion and sex permanently divorced; and an immediate amount of inestimable good could be accomplished when one considers that fifteen per cent of all mental disease is caused by syphilis. Physical disease having been considered as a malicious trick of Satan, it was but natural that the disease of the mind was also attributed to satanic intervention. The conception that insanity was a brain disease, and that gentleness and kindness were necessary for its treatment, was throttled by Christian theology for fifteen centuries. Instead the ecclesiastic burdened humanity with a belief that madness was largely possession by the Devil. Hundreds of thousands of men and women were inflicted with tortures both physical and mental. It was not until 1792 that the great French physician Penel, and William Tuke in England, placed the treatment of mental disease on a rational and scientific basis. And this, in spite of such ecclesiastical attacks as were seen in the _Edinburgh Review_ of that period. These two men, Penel and Tuke, were the first acknowledged victors in a struggle of science for humanity which lasted nearly two thousand years. The clergy resisted Jenner when he introduced vaccination, and yet the application of this measure of defense against disease has probably saved more lives than the total of all the lives lost in all wars. The clergy maintained that "Smallpox is a visitation from God, and originates in man, but Cowpox is produced by presumptious, impious men. The former, heaven ordained, the latter is perhaps a daring and profane violation of our holy order."