There is no more comparison between a tottering man leaning upon his wooden crutches, and a religion claiming to appeal to the intellect of man, than there is between a watch and a universe, to quote Paley's famous argument for the existence of a God. But, at any rate, is it not cruel to knock an old man's crutches from under him? Let us see. If the old man with the crutches represents the feeble-minded believers, the question to be answered is, how did they come to depend upon the use of crutches in the first place? Was it not more cruel to teach them to depend upon crutches? Are not those who prevent the healthy development of the limbs to enhance the sale of crutches even more cruel than those who despise their use? To bring a man to a state of dependence; to terrorize him into fear; to fetter his faculties so that he cannot train them into service; to arrest his evolution; to keep him a dwarf, clinging like a scared child to the apron strings of his lords; to place in his hands an icon or a crucifix as his only hope--and then to denounce the teachers who rob these poor people of their crutches, is an argument which is bound to recoil with fearful force upon the venders of such artificial helps. It is like depriving a man of house and goods, and then providing a tattered tent for his shelter, and then saying to us: Would you be so cruel as to pull down the only thing that protects his poor head from the elements? Yes! in order that we may awaken in him a sense of the wrong and the oppression and the deprivation of which he is the unconscious victim. Sir Henry Main, in his Popular Government, says, that, if it had been put to a vote whether machinery, when it was first invented, should be introduced into the factories, there would have been recorded an overwhelming vote against its use. It was taking away from the poor man his crutches to compel him to compete with the iron and steel. And, actually, laborers of the time, suffered much and were driven to the wall, by the invention of machinery. But the temporary mischief caused by the introduction of machinery has been fully compensated by its lasting benefits to all classes. Likewise, this or that believer may fall and hurt himself when his theological crutches have been taken away from him, but if thereby his children and the future race can be taught to dispense with the use of so clumsy a contrivance, altogether--who would hesitate to knock them off? Was man meant to be an invalid all his life? Must all the generations of the future limp and hobble, to support the crutch industry?