compensate. He is, for the most
part, condemned to live in a mental jungle where his arm will soon be
too feeble to clear away the growths that enclose him, and his eyes too
weak to find the light." The man who has allowed his mental capacities
to clear his way through the dense underbrush of religious dogma finds
that he has emerged into a purer and healthier atmosphere. In the
bright light of this mental emancipation a man perceives the falsities
of all religions in their historic, scientific, and metaphysical
aspects. The healthier mental viewpoint holds up to scorn and discards
the reactionary religious philosophy of morals, and the sum total of his
conclusions must be that religion is doomed; and doomed in this modern
day by its absolute irrelevance to the needs and interests of modern
life. And this not only by the steadily increasing army of freethinkers,
but by the indifference and neglect of those who still cling to the fast
slipping folds of religious creeds--- the future freethinkers.

It was Spinoza who remarked that, "The proper study of a wise man is not
how to die but how to live." Religious creeds can but teach how man
should live, so that when he dies, he may be assured of salvation; and
the important thing is not what he does to help his fellow men while he
is living, but how closely he lives in conformity to a reactionary code
of dogmas. Religion has always aimed to smooth the sufferer's passage to
the next world, not to save him for this world.

Freethought has dethroned the gods from the pedestal, and has replaced,
not an empty idol, but an _ideal_, the ideal of a man who is his own
god.

It has become increasingly apparent that what men have hitherto
attributed to the gods are nothing but the ideals they value and grope
for in themselves. The ideal of the freethinker, the conception that
places the supreme worth of human life in the expanding horizon of man's
usefulness to man, is forever menaced by the supernaturalism of the
theist which manifests itself in the multifarious religious sects that
are the most active and constant menace to civilization and to mankind
today. That religion in the past has produced suffering incalculable and
has been the greatest obstacle in the advance of secular knowledge is a
fact too well attested to by history to be denied by any sincere and
unbiased intelligent man. That today it constitutes a cultural lag, an
active menace to the best interests of humanity and