rposes to suspend, in isolated cases, the
operation of those laws by which the universe is eternally governed.
But these doubts are not directed against religion, but against the
form in which religion is presented to us.

Christianity has raised the world from barbarism to civilization. Its
influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled
work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity. But was it dogma that
brought these blessings? It is possible to avoid misunderstandings
with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human
conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought
and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the
extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years' War, to the
scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this
fighting? The same differences of opinion as ever.

We may accept the doctrines of religion, as we accept the assurance of
a trusty friend, without examination, but the kernel of all religions
is the morality they teach, of which the Christian is the purest and
most far-reaching.

And yet men speak slightingly of a barren morality, and place the form
in which religion is presented before everything else. I fear it is
the pulpit zealot, who tries to persuade where he cannot convince,
that empties the church with his sermons.

After all, why should not every pious prayer, whether addressed to
Buddha, to Allah, or to Jehovah, be heard by the same God, beside whom
there is none other? Does not the mother hear her child's petition in
whatever language it lisps her name?

Reason is nowhere in conflict with morality, for the good is always
finally identical with the rational; but whether our actions shall or
shall not correspond with the good, reason cannot decide. Here the
ruling part of the soul is supreme, the soul which feels, acts, and
wills. To her alone, not to her two vassals, has God entrusted the
two-edged sword of freewill, that gift which, as Scripture tells us,
may be our salvation or our perdition.

But, more than this, a trusty councillor has been assigned us, who is
independent of our wills, and bears credentials from God Himself.
Conscience is an incorruptible and infallible judge, whom, if we will,
we may hear pronounce sentence every moment, and whose voice at last
reaches even those who most obstinately refuse to listen.

The laws which human society has imposed upon itself ca