"Theology is a science, religion a life. The one is a fact, the other an analysis after the fact. The stage-coach yielded to the limited, the sailing craft to the ocean greyhound, but we are told that the only age that ever knew the truth, or had the right to express it, was the age which burned witches, executed dumb animals as criminals, whipped church bells for heresy, held chemistry a black art and electricity a manifestation of the devil or the Shekina of God. "The men to whom I speak have seen New York grow from a town of three hundred thousand on the lower end of Manhattan Island to be the imperial metropolis of the New World with four millions within her golden gates. "Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with their flag-staffs in the clouds. "Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution established. "The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world made. "Steam and electricity have been applied to travel and speech, and the earth transformed into a whispering gallery. The cylinder press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned the brow of humanity with a coronet of light. "But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods are the methods of their fathers--a solecism, stupid, irrational, immoral. "The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt, rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of life. "Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to be the friend of publicans and harlots. "Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty and blood, flame, sword, thumb-screw, rack and torch. The blackest pages in the story of the martyrdom of man have been written by their hands. They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or the piteous cry of expectant motherhood. "The Bible they made a bludgeon with which to brain heretics, forged its word into chains, and with its leaves kindled martyr fires. "They have arraigned the reason, the heart and the knowledge of the race against Jesus Christ and His religion. They stretched Galileo on the rack for inventing a telescope which gave new beauty to the psalm, 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.'