To the average thinker the inconsistency of advocating Ethics as the supreme good, on the one hand, and on the other, of maintaining a deliberate silence on the demonstrably false teaching of the church which makes belief the greatest of all virtues, has only to be pointed out to be comprehended. And it is Kant, the patron-saint of the American Ethical lecturers, who set them the example of inconsistency. With a rigour which even in a dogmatist of the theological schools would be considered excessive, Emanuel Kant argued that so imperative was the duty to tell the truth that, even to save one's self or another from murder, there must be no departure from it. If you saw an assassin with a drawn dagger running after a man or a woman, and he asked you, "which way the fugitive ran," if you answer him at all, insists Kant, you must tell him the truth. And yet this same philosopher encouraged openly the Lutheran clergy of his day to go on deceiving the people with beliefs which they themselves had discarded, on the score that _populus vult decipi_, and that the clergy are excused by their profession for playing a false part. Is it then from policy or from principle that the Ethical lecturers, starting as they did, by denouncing the supernatural as the destroyer of character, later on came to ignore altogether the existence even of degrading superstitions, and were content to be a moral improvement association merely, somewhat after the pattern, as Marie-Jean Guyau states, of a Christian Temperance Society? * * L'Irréligion de L'Avenir. The battle of progress is to be fought in the mind. An intellectual awakening must precede all real and permanent moral improvement of the world. On the tree of enlightenment alone can ripen the fruit of righteousness and peace. And there can be no enlightenment under the church. Even as the light of the sun can not enter a dungeon, the light of knowledge can not penetrate the mind which it has been the aim of the church to keep shut. The condition of the spread of knowledge as of the sunlight is the same--freedom. Yet freedom is anathema where there is a Revelation. A thousand Ethical Societies could not help Russia unless she began by striking, without sparing or wavering, at the teachings of the Greek church. The new edifice cannot rise side by side with the old--it must rise on the ruins of the old. Can there be any real moral advance in a community in which the following is accepted and taught as a divinely revealed truth: "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works and deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort." * * No. XI. of the Articles of the Church of England. All the other Christian churches teach to young and old the same doctrine.