The dogma of Biblical infallibility has been the most uncom promising of slave-masters. Those which this dogma held in servitude to its absurd claims did not dare to make known discoveries of the highest importance and usefulness, in fear of the dungeon, the rack or the stake. Consequently these discoveries were postponed and their benefits lost for centuries.

Medicine, surgery, anaesthetics, agriculture, the fanningmill, the census, life insurance, the art of printing, gravitation, the rotundity of the earth, the heliocentric system, geography, the use of steam and electricity, have all been interdicted by the church.

Astronomy, geology, biology, palæontology, evolution, all have incurred the most bitter and persistent opposition of the church, and even to-day she contests every inch of ground upon which the investigators of science would advance.

The dogmas of the church have proved and are proving the most despotic and despicable of tyrants, and those it succeeds in enslaving are the most unreasoning, fear-stricken and debased of creatures.

The Church not only holds in bondage the dupes of its dogmas, but it exercises a tyranny of opinion over those who reject its creeds, but who dare not oppose its imperious sway. This accounts for so much legislation in the interest of Christianity. The exemption of church property from taxation, the donating of money for religious purposes, the payments from the government treasury for the maintenance of chaplains in the army, navy and public institutions, the introduction or religion in our public schools are all accomplished through fear of opposition to ecclesiastical domination.

Max Nordau says: "The greatest evil of our times is the prevailing cowardice. We do not dare to assert our opinion to bring our outward lives into harmony with our inward convictions; we believe it to be worldly policy to cling outwardly to relics of former ages, when at heart we are completely severed from them."

Our Sunday laws are enacted at the dictation of Christian zealots, who are the abject slaves of a superstitious reverence

for a day, the observance of which is without the slightest authority-even from the Christian standpoint-a day which Luther and other reformers declared to be no more sacred than any other, and the observance of which Bishop Potter and others of the clergy have said is utterly without warrant.

These tyrannical laws are enacted in violation of that principle of justice which gives equal rights to all; are in contravention of the grand American idea of separation of church and state, and are in decided conflict with both the spirit and letter of constitutional law.

Think of it, that in this enlightened age and in a country, the proudest boast in which is that the liberty of not even the meanest citizen shall be abridged; at the dictation of these autocratic Christian fanatics, honorable persons are forbidden to pursue their legitimate occupations and that many estimable people are fined and lodged in jail. Here are not only willing Christian slaves, but those who protest against this outrage, are held unwilling captives.

If there ever were laws which called for a William Lloyd Garrison to inaugurate a movement toward abolition, the arbitrary laws compelling the religious observance of Sunday are such.

Must we continue to submit to this wrong, as we did to slavery at the south, until "emancipation" is accomplished only by the clash of arms and the sacrifice of treasure and of life?

Atrocious as is physical slavery, mental slavery is even more atrocious.

Do all the evils of physical slavery combined, in all ages of the world, compare with the enslavement of the mind by the church, which caused Christian fanatics for three centuries, in nine distinct crusades, to war upon unoffending people, entailing indescribable misery and the sacrifice of twenty millions of human lives?

Does the history of physical slavery record a more degrading spectacle than the subjugation of the reasoning faculties which was experienced in the instance of Henry IV of Germany,

crossing the Alps in mid-winter, standing before the castle of Canossa, barefooted and in sack-cloth, for three days and three nights, exposed to most inclement weather, in order to crave forgiveness from Gregory VII, whose mastery over the mind of the potentate was thus shown to be absolute?

Can physical slavery show results more saddening, more sickening, more immoral, more brutal, than "the despotic resolve of the church to rule the minds and consciences of men through its Popes and priesthood" and which resulted in the "Thirty Years' War," with its "eight millions slain and twelve millions surviving to meet horrors worse than death?" Physical slavery has never displayed a tithe of the inhumanity which has been shown in the mental slavery with which a despotic, intolerant and cruel church has held those who did its bidding in its relentless warfare upon those martyrs for opinion's sake who fed the flames of Seville, Smithfield, Geneva and Salem.

It has been said that "thought is the mightiest thing in the universe." It has indeed a potency before which morality, philosophy, sociology, economics, politics and all national forces are compelled to succumb. It leads in every reform. It is the herald of all progress. It is the pioneer which clears the forests of superstition, of tradition, of legend and of fable, and plants in their stead the seeds of truth. It is the advance guard in its contest with ignorance. And this mighty agent, this great boon to man, ecclesiasticism seeks to enslave and to silence!

There can be no more important work than that of educating people to be freethinkers; to strike for and maintain that freedom of opinion which the Christian Church has ever denied. Let the proclamation of intellectual emancipation resound throughout the world and coming generations will call "blessed" the Freethinkers' Magazine and all other agencies which have striven to give "liberty to the captive" mind.

But, let him whose auroral flashes of thought irradiate the intellectual sky; whose genius has given beauty to words, as nature gives beauty to the flowers; of whom it can be said—

as Dryden said of Shakespeare-" He was the man who had the largest and most comprehensive soul; to whom all the images of nature were present;" him, who is the grandest of all the lovers of liberty of any age; not only of liberty for the body, but (transcending this) liberty for the mind; the story of whose vigorous and uncompromising conflict with theological tyranny will live so long as history records noble and self-sacrificing acts, and to whose imperishable name pæons of gratitude, by the mentally emancipated, in the ages to come, will be sungthe matchless INGERSOLL; let him give a suitable and brilliant ending to the thoughts which the topic here selected has suggested, by the citation of his sublime Apostrophe to Liberty:

"Oh, Liberty, thou art the god of my idolatry! Thou art the only Deity that hates the bended knee. In thy vast and unwalled temple-beneath the roofless dome, star-gemmed and luminous with suns-thy worshippers stand erect! They do not cringe or crawl or bend their foreheads to the earth. The dust has never borne the impress of their lips. Upon thy altars mothers do not sacrifice their babes, nor men their rights. Thou askest naught from man except the things that good men hate-the whip, the chain, the dungeon key.

"Thou hast no popes, no priests, who stand between their fellow-men and thee. Thou carest not for slavish forms, or selfish prayers. Thou hast no monks, no nuns, who, in the name of duty, murder joy. At thy sacred shrine Hypocrisy does not bow, Fear does not crouch, Virtue does not tremble, Superstition's feeble tapers do not burn; but Reason holds aloft her inextinguishable torch, while on the ever-broadening brow of Science falls the ever-coming morning of the everbetter day."

THE

FUTURE PUNISHMENT.

HE doctrine of punishment in a future state, to which the theology of Christianity has consigned—not those who have been guilty of immoral acts-but those who have dared to question that theology, or who have been disrespectful enough to Christianity to doubt its authority, is the most unfounded, the most repulsive, and (it may perhaps be added) the most unbelievable, or unbelieved, of all the absurd doctrines with which the Christian church has attempted to fetter the brains of its disciples. Of all the teachings of the Christian religion, this is the most preposterous and monstrous. It has no basis in common sense; for the punishment to be inflicted is not by reason of the commission of any crime, but only and simply because of the exercise of the reasoning faculties. This doctrine is the outgrowth of that superstitious fear, which has always existed among the ignorant and credulous and though a belief in it is professed by many intelligent persons, such belief (or profession of belief) is undoubtedly in consequence of the absence of intelligent thought on the subject. There are indications that the church itself is becoming ashamed of this doctrine, for there are comparatively few who now acknowledge belief in it. What is known as the "higher criticism" has exposed its presumptuous claims and it is hoped that the day is not far distant when this most horrible of all the component parts of an unreasoning theology will be among the things that were.

The efforts of late made to substitute for the harsh, Saxon, word "Hell," the more mild, Hebrew, word Sheol, or the more mystic, Greek word, Hades, is another indication of a desire to soften the asperity of what so grates on the ear of benevolence.