It will not do, in this age and time, to account for unbelief in this deformed and dislocated way. The exact opposite must be true. Ignorance and credulity sustain the relation of cause and effect. Ignorance is satisfied with assertion, with appearance. As man rises in the scale of intelligence he demands evidence. He begins to look back of appearance. He asks the priest for reasons. The most ignorant part of Christendom is the most orthodox. You have simply repeated a favorite assertion of the clergy, to the effect that man rejects the gospel because he is naturally depraved and hard of heart--because, owing to the sin of Adam and Eve, he has fallen from the perfection and purity of Paradise to that "impaired" condition in which he is satisfied with the filthy rags of reason, observation and experience. The truth is, that what you call unbelief is only a higher and holier faith. Millions of men reject Christianity because of its cruelty. The Bible was never rejected by the cruel. It has been upheld by countless tyrants--by the dealers in human flesh--by the destroyers of nations--by the enemies of intelligence--by the stealers of babes and the whippers of women. It is also true that it has been held as sacred by the good, the self-denying, the virtuous and the loving, who clung to the sacred volume on account of the good it contains and in spite of all its cruelties and crimes. You are mistaken when you say that all "the faults of all the Christian bodies and subdivisions of bodies have been carefully raked together," in my Reply to Dr. Field, "and made part and parcel of the indictment against the divine scheme of salvation." No thoughtful man pretends that any fault of any Christian body can be used as an argument against what you call the "divine scheme of redemption." I find in your Remarks the frequent charge that I am guilty of making assertions and leaving them to stand without the assistance of argument or fact, and it may be proper, at this particular point, to inquire how you know that there is "a divine scheme of redemption." My objections to this "divine scheme of redemption" are: _first_, that there is not the slightest evidence that it is divine; _second_, that it is not in any sense a "scheme," human or divine; and _third_, that it cannot, by any possibility, result in the redemption of a human being.