religious books sent me by friends within a week or two.
One is Mr. Brownson's; he is as fair and square as Euclid; a real honest,
strong thinker, and one that knows what he is talking about,--for he has
tried all sorts of religions, pretty much. He tells us that the Roman
Catholic Church is the one 'through which alone we can hope for heaven.'
The other is by a worthy Episcopal rector, who appears to write as if he
were in earnest, and he calls the Papacy the 'Devil's Masterpiece,' and
talks about the 'Satanic scheme' of that very Church 'through which
alone,' as Mr. Brownson tells us, 'we can hope for heaven'

"What's the use in our caring about hard words after this,--'atheists,'
heretics, infidels, and the like? They're, after all, only the cinders
picked up out of those heaps of ashes round the stumps of the old stakes
where they used to burn men, women, and children for not thinking just
like other folks. They 'll 'crock' your fingers, but they can't burn us.

"Doctors are the best-natured people in the world, except when they get
fighting with each other. And they have some advantages over you. You
inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no
children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them.
It did n't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people
to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what
it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will
take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so
many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.

"Besides, though our libraries are, perhaps, not commonly quite so big as
yours, God opens one book to physicians that a good many of you don't
know much about,--the Book of Life. That is none of your dusty folios
with black letters between pasteboard and leather, but it is printed in
bright red type, and the binding of it is warm and tender to every touch.
They reverence that book as one of the Almighty's infallible revelations.
They will insist on reading you lessons out of it, whether you call them
names or not. These will always be lessons of charity. No doubt,
nothing can be more provoking to listen to. But do beg your folks to
remember that the Smithfield fires are all out, and that the cinders are
very dirty and not in the least dangerous. They'd a great deal better be
civil, and not be throwing old proverbs in the doctors' faces, when