_. In your lecture on Voltaire you made a remark about
the government of ministers, and you stated that if the ministers
of the city of New York had to power to make the laws most people
would prefer to live in a well regulated penitentiary. What do
you mean by this?

_Answer_. Well, as a rule, ministers are quite severe. They have
little patience with human failures. They are taught, and they
believe and they teach, that man is absolutely master of his own
fate. Besides, they are believers in the inspiration of the
Scriptures, and the laws of the Old Testament are exceedingly
severe. Nearly every offence was punished by death. Every offence
was regarded as treason against Jehovah.

In the Pentateuch there is no pity. If a man committed some offence
justice was not satisfied with his punishment, but proceeded to
destroy his wife and children. Jehovah seemed to think that crime
was in the blood; that it was not sufficient to kill the criminal,
but to prevent future crimes you should kill his wife and babes.
The reading of the Old Testament is calculated to harden the heart,
to drive the angel of pity from the breast, and to make man a
religious savage. The clergy, as a rule, do not take a broad and
liberal view of things. They judge every offence by what they
consider would be the result if everybody committed the same offence.
They do not understand that even vice creates obstructions for
itself, and that there is something in the nature of crime the
tendency of which is to defeat crime, and I might add in this place
that the same seems to be true of excessive virtue. As a rule,
the clergy clamor with great zeal for the execution of cruel laws.

Let me give an instance in point: In the time of George III., in
England, there were two hundred and twenty-three offences punishable
with death. From time to time this cruel code was changed by Act
of Parliament, yet no bishop sitting in the House of Lords ever
voted in favor of any one of these measures. The bishops always
voted for death, for blood, against mercy and against the repeal
of capital punishment. During all these years there were some
twenty thousand or more of the established clergy, and yet, according
to John Bright, no voice was ever raised in any English pulpit
against the infamous criminal code.

Another thing: The orthodox clergy teach that man is totally
depraved; that his inclination is evil; that his tendency is toward
the Devil.