One by one the fetters fell; the gratings disappeared, the sunshine smote the roof, and on the floors of stone, light streamed from open doors. He realized the darkness and despair, the cruelty and hate, the starless blackness of the old, malignant creed. The flower of pity grew and blossomed in his heart. The selfish "consolation" filled his eyes with tears. He saw that what is called the Christian's hope is, that, among the countless billions wrecked and lost, a meagre few perhaps may reach the eternal shore--a hope that, like the desert rain, gives neither leaf nor bud--a hope that gives no joy, no peace, to any great and loving soul. It is the dust on which the serpent feeds that coils in heartless breasts. Day by day the wrath and vengeance faded from the sky--the Jewish God grew vague and dint--the threats of torture and eternal pain grew vulgar and absurd, and all the miracles seemed strangely out of place. They clad the Infinite in motley garb, and gave to aureoled heads the cap and bells. Touched by the pathos of all human life, knowing the shadows that fall on every heart--the thorns in every path, the sighs, the sorrows, and the tears that lie between a mother's arms and death's embrace--this great and gifted man denounced, denied, and damned with all his heart the fanged and frightful dogma that souls were made to feed the eternal hunger--ravenous as famine--of a God's revenge. Take out this fearful, fiendish, heartless lie--compared with which all other lies are true--and the great arch of orthodox religion crumbling falls. To the average man the Christian hell and heaven are only words. He has no scope of thought. He lives but in a dim, impoverished now. To him the past is dead--the future still unborn. He occupies with downcast eyes that narrow line of barren, shifting sand that lies between the flowing seas. But Genius knows all time. For him the dead all live and breathe, and act their countless parts again. All human life is in his now, and every moment feels the thrill of all to be. No one can overestimate the good accomplished by this marvelous, many-sided man. He helped to slay the heart-devouring monster of the Christian world. He tried to civilize the church, to humanize the creeds, to soften pious breasts of stone, to take the fear from mothers' hearts, the chains of creed from every brain, to put the star of hope in every sky and over every grave. Attacked on every side, maligned by those who preached the law of love, he wavered not, but fought whole-hearted to the end. Obstruction is but virtue's foil. From thwarted light leaps color's flame. The stream impeded has a song.