What has the church done? It taught the awful doctrine of witchcraft. It filled the darkness with demons--the air with devils, and the world with grief and shame. It charged men, women and children with being in league with Satan to injure their fellows. Old women were convicted for causing storms at sea--for preventing rain and for bringing frost. Girls were convicted for having changed themselves into wolves, snakes and toads. These witches were burned for causing diseases--for selling their souls and for souring beer. All these things were done with the aid of the Devil who sought to persecute the faithful, the lambs of God. Satan sought in many ways to scandalize the church. He sometimes assumed the appearance of a priest and committed crimes. On one occasion he personated a bishop--a bishop renowned for his sanctity--allowed himself to be discovered and dragged from the room of a beautiful widow. So perfectly did he counterfeit the features and form of the bishop, that many who were well acquainted with the prelate, were actually deceived, and the widow herself thought her lover was the bishop. All this was done by the Devil to bring reproach upon holy men. Hundreds of like instances could be given, as the war waged between demons and priests was long and bitter. These popes and priests--these clergymen, were not hypocrites. They believed in the New Testament--in the teachings of Christ, and they knew that the principal business of the Savior was casting out devils. What has the church done? It made the wife a slave--the property of the husband, and it placed the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life--to take the veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead--made them believe that they were the brides of Christ. For my part, I would as soon be a widow as the bride of a man who had been dead for eighteen hundred years. The poor deluded girls imagined that they, in some mysterious way, were in spiritual wedlock united with God. All worldly desires were driven from their hearts. They filled their lives with fastings--with prayers--with self-accusings. They forgot fathers and mothers and gave their love to the invisible. They were the victims, the convicts of superstition--prisoners in the penitentiaries of God. Conscientious, good, sincere--insane. These loving women gave their hearts to a phantom, their lives to a dream.