These terrible instructions were given to an army of invasion. The men who were thus ruthlessly murdered were fighting for their homes, their firesides, for their wives and for their little children. Yet these things, by the clergy of San Francisco, are called acts of sublime mercy. All this is justified by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The Old Testament is filled with anathemas, with curses, with words of vengeance, of revenge, of jealousy, of hatred and of almost infinite brutality. Do not, I pray you, pluck from the heart the sweet flower of pity and trample it in the bloody dust of superstition. Do not, I beseech you, justify the murder of women, the assassination of dimpled babes. Do not let the gaze of the gorgon of superstition turn your hearts to stone. Is there an intelligent Christian in the world who would not with joy and gladness receive conclusive testimony to the effect that all the passages in the Bible upholding and sustaining polygamy and concubinage, political tyranny, the subjection of woman, the enslavement of children, establishing domestic and political tyranny, and that all the commands to destroy men, women and children, are but interpolations of kings and priests, made for the purpose of subjugating mankind through the instrumentality of fear? Is there a Christian in the world who would not think vastly more of the Bible if all these infamous things were eliminated from it? Surely the good things in that book are not rendered more sacred from the fact that in the same volume are found the frightful passages I have quoted. In my judgment the Bible should be read and studied precisely as we read and study any book whatever. The good in it should be preserved and cherished, and that which shocks the human heart should be cast aside forever. While the Old Testament threatens men, women and children with disease, famine, war, pestilence and death, there are no threatenings of punishment beyond this life. The doctrine of eternal punishment is a dogma of the New Testament. This doctrine, the most cruel, the most infamous of which the human mind can conceive, is taught, if taught at all, in the Bible--in the New Testament. One cannot imagine what the human heart has suffered by reason of the frightful doctrine of eternal damnation. It is a doctrine so abhorrent to every drop of my blood, so infinitely cruel, that it is impossible for me to respect either the head or heart of any human being who teaches or fears it. This doctrine necessarily subverts all ideas of justice. To inflict infinite punishment for finite crimes, or rather for crimes committed by finite beings, is a proposition so monstrous that I am astonished it ever found lodgment in the brain of man. Whoever says that we can be happy in heaven while those we loved on earth are suffering infinite torments in eternal fire, defames and calumniates the human heart. THE PLAN OF SALVATION. XII.