caps, tiaras, mitres,
crooks and holy toys. Catholics have an infallible man--an old
Italian. Protestants have an infallible book, written by Hebrews
before they were civilized. The infallible man is generally wrong,
and the infallible book is filled with mistakes and contradictions.
Catholics and Protestants are both enemies of intellectual freedom
--of real education, but both are opposed to education enough to
make free men and women.

Between the Catholics and Protestants there has been about as much
difference as there is between crocodiles and alligators. Both
have done the worst they could, both are as bad as they can be,
and the world is getting tired of both. The world is not going to
choose either--both are to be rejected.

_Question_. Are you willing to give your opinion of the Pope?

_Answer_. It may be that the Pope thinks he is infallible, but I
doubt it. He may think that he is the agent of God, but I guess
not. He may know more than other people, but if he does he has
kept it to himself. He does not seem satisfied with standing in
the place and stead of God in spiritual matters, but desires temporal
power. He wishes to be Pope and King. He imagines that he has
the right to control the belief of all the world; that he is the
shepherd of all "sheep" and that the fleeces belong to him. He
thinks that in his keeping is the conscience of mankind. So he
imagines that his blessing is a great benefit to the faithful and
that his prayers can change the course of natural events. He is
a strange mixture of the serious and comical. He claims to represent
God, and admits that he is almost a prisoner. There is something
pathetic in the condition of this pontiff. When I think of him,
I think of Lear on the heath, old, broken, touched with insanity,
and yet, in his own opinion, "every inch a king."

The Pope is a fragment, a remnant, a shred, a patch of ancient
power and glory. He is a survival of the unfittest, a souvenir of
theocracy, a relic of the supernatural. Of course he will have a
few successors, and they will become more and more comical, more
and more helpless and impotent as the world grows wise and free.
I am not blaming the Pope. He was poisoned at the breast of his
mother. Superstition was mingled with her milk. He was poisoned
at school--taught to distrust his reason and to live by faith.
And so it may be that his mind was so twisted and tortured out of
shape that he now real