But it would be unreasonable to continue to preserve and propagate these religions at great cost to the people, and also at the detriment of more important interests--on the ground that at one time, when man was but a child, they were of service to him. Our ancestors before the age of iron used tools made of stone. Shall these still be given the preference despite the better and more useful implements of modern times--because, forsooth, they started our race in its career of progress? Shall the candle light be permitted to prejudice us against electricity; the stagecoach against the locomotive; the cave of the savage against the sanitary dwellings of modern cities; or the primitive forms of communication against the wonderful wireless? Why, then, should Moses or Mohammed or Jesus stand in the way of the science of the twentieth century? If we may discard our mother's hut or the rag she clothed herself with at one time, why not also her religion? True enough both hut and rag served a purpose and marked a stage in the evolution of man, but the purpose they served was to fit us for something better, that is to say, to make us discontented with and rebellious against the hut and the rag forever. The day of faiths is over. They belong to the furniture of the past. The glorious reign of Science has begun. Thought like a fruit on the tree of evolution has at last ripened. The glow of the sun, and the tints of the sky are upon her. The countries which were the first to replace faith by knowledge have invariably been the first also in civilization. While Palestine remained a desert, Greece became the garden of the world. Whatever of beauty there is in our lives today, we owe it to the immortal Greeks. Truth and goodness flourish in all their glory only among a free and intelligent people. Where there is an infallible faith there can be no liberty of thought, and without liberty of thought there is no mind, and without mind man is not different from the brute. End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of My Mind, by M. M. Mangasarian