ny of you
think of the physician who should consult with an individual organism with
a view to taking that organism's opinion as to what course he (the
physician) had best pursue in order to cure him (the organism) of
scrofula, complicated with every other bodily disease to which flesh is
heir?... Evidently, church and state management require art and skill
infinitely superior to what 'supernaturalism' and its legitimate child
monarchism, or its bastard issue, caucus-and-ballot-boxism, are capable
of. From the dissecting-room, the chemical laboratory, the astronomical
observatory, the physician's and physiologist's study--in fine, from all
the schools of science and arts should human law be _declared_, instead of
being 'enacted' in legislative halls by those who in every respect besides
political trickery, fraud and 'smartness,' are perfect ignoramuses." How
is all this to be reconciled with the ideas of self-government set forth
by this author and copied in this article? Who are to be the doctors, and
who are to be the patients? When _popular_ discussion is confined to art
and science, only as it may be used in order to keep it out of religious
and state affairs, who are to be the _popular_ free disputants? When
legislative halls are done away, along with their _progenitors_, elective
franchise and representation, and law emanates from all the schools of
science and art by "declaration," will men be more ready to obey?
Give the sore-headed, politically gangrened, conscienceless, virtueless,
Godless applauders of Tom Paine what they ask, and it will simply amount
to abandoning our posterity to the lowest, vilest sensualism known in
Pagan geography along the line or borderland of a foul lust-gratifying,
brutalizing _hell_. May all Christian people, and every lover of our
humanity, wake up to the importance of giving these wide-mouthed, blatant
infidels, who are traveling over our country howling about "liberty of
man, woman and child," a wide berth. They would like to be the "doctors,"
and treat the "orthodox" people so as to purge "_popular_ free discussion"
out of them, and at the same time have their own stomachs crammed full of
that grace, and so "steal heaven's livery to serve the devil." The above
_infidelism_ is copied _verbatim_ from the "concluding application" of the
life of Thomas Paine by Calvin Blanchard, published in 1879, and being now
peddled over our country. What do our infidel friends mean by so much ad
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