punishments. For the infraction of most of their laws, death
was the penalty--death produced by stoning and by fire. Sometimes,
when man committed only murder, he was allowed to flee to some city of
refuge. Murder was a crime against man. But for saying certain words, or
denying certain doctrines, or for picking up sticks on certain days, or
for worshiping the wrong ghost, or for failing to pray to the right one,
or for laughing at a priest, or for saying that wine was not blood,
or that bread was not flesh, or for failing to regard ram's horns as
artillery, or for insisting that a dry bone was scarcely sufficient to
take the place of water works, or that a raven, as a rule, made a poor
landlord:--death, produced by all the ways that the ingenuity of hatred
could devise, was the penalty.

Law is a growth--it is a science. Right and wrong exist in the nature
of things. Things are not right because they are commanded, nor wrong
because they are prohibited. There are real crimes enough without
creating artificial ones. All progress in legislation has for centuries
consisted in repealing the laws of the ghosts.

The idea of right and wrong is born of man's capacity to enjoy and
suffer. If man could not suffer, if he could not inflict injury upon his
fellow, if he could neither feel nor inflict pain, the idea of right
and wrong never would have entered his brain. But for this, the word
conscience never would have passed the lips of man.

There is one good--happiness. There is but one sin--selfishness. All
law should be for the preservation of the one and the destruction of the
other.

Under the regime of the ghosts, laws were not supposed to exist in the
nature of things. They were supposed to be simply the irresponsible
command of a ghost. These commands were not supposed to rest upon
reason, they were the product of arbitrary will.

The penalties for the violation of these laws were as cruel as the laws
were senseless and absurd. Working on the Sabbath and murder were both
punished with death. The tendency of such laws is to blot from the human
heart the sense of justice.

To show you how perfectly every department of knowledge, or ignorance
rather, was saturated with superstition, I will for a moment refer to
the science of language.

It was thought by our fathers, that Hebrew was the original language;
that it was taught to Adam in the Garden of Eden by the Almighty, and
that consequently all languages came from