No wonder that the warmest hearts and brightest intellects are leaving you. Upon your walls they read the fateful words that met the terrified gaze of Babylon's sinful king. Your devotees are looking forward to a millennium when your power on earth shall be supreme. Delusive phantom! your millennium has come and gone. That dark blot on the page of history--that withering pall stretching across the centuries from Constantine to Luther--that constitutes the thousand years of Christian rule foretold in the Apocalypse. But that has past, and your power is vanishing, never to be restored again. From the ashes of that dauntless hero, Giordano Bruno, young Science, phoenixlike, arose, and in the soil prepared by Luther, sowed the seed whose harvest is your death. Even now I hear your death-knell ringing; even now I gaze into a sepulchre where soon must lie your Bible and your creeds--your stakes, your gibbets and your racks--your priests, your devil and your God! And when the last have been entombed, then gather up the crumbling bones of the one hundred million human beings who have perished at your hands, and let this ghastly pile remain, a most befitting monument to your unbounded cruelties and crimes! It is a pleasing thought to know that bigotry is fading from the earth. It can flourish only in the malarial swamps of ignorance and superstition, and the poisonous vapors arising from these loathsome regions are being fast dispelled by the sun of science. An incident in the life of Nicholas I. of Russia furnishes a fitting parallel to what the bigots of our time are now experiencing. Among the many admirers of that other great Deist, Voltaire, was the Empress Catharine, who ordered a statue of him from the leading sculptor of Europe. When it arrived Catharine was dying, and for years it lay untouched in the box in which it had been shipped. At length Alexander caused it to be set up in a room of the imperial palace, where it remained until Nicholas ascended the throne. Nicholas was a most admirable type of the religious bigot; he was ignorant and intolerant, and the character of Voltaire was the object of his especial hatred. Hardly had he donned the imperial robes before he began to realize "How uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."