e yet living and thrown into their faces; their bodies
were quartered and their heads were set on pikes above the gates
of the city. Yet there was a hundred times more treason then than
now. Every time a man was executed and mutilated and tortured in
this way the seeds of other treason were sown.

So in the church there was the same idea. No reformation but by
punishment. Of course in this world the punishment stopped when
the poor wretch was dead. It was found that that punishment did
not reform, so the church said: "After death it will go right on,
getting worse and worse, forever and forever." Finally it was
found that this did not tend to the reformation of mankind. Slowly
the fires of hell have been dying out. The climate has been changing
from year to year. Men have lost confidence in the power of the
thumbscrew, the fagot, and the rack here, and they are losing
confidence in the flames of perdition hereafter. In other words,
it is simply a question of civilization.

When men become civilized in matters of thought, they will know
that every human being has the right to think for himself, and the
right to express his honest thought. Then the world of thought
will be free. At that time they will be intelligent enough to know
that men have different thoughts, that their ways are not alike,
because they have lived under different circumstances, and in that
time they will also know that men act as they are acted upon. And
it is my belief that the time will come when men will no more think
of punishing a man because he has committed the crime of larceny
than they will think of punishing a man because he has the consumption.
In the first case they will endeavor to reform him, and in the
second case they will endeavor to cure him.

The intelligent people of the world, many of them, are endeavoring
to find out the great facts in Nature that control the dispositions
of men. So other intelligent people are endeavoring to ascertain
the facts and conditions that govern what we call health, and what
we call disease, and the object of these people is finally to
produce a race without disease of flesh and without disease of
mind. These people look forward to the time when there need to be
neither hospitals nor penitentiaries.

--_New York World_, August 5, 1888.

WOMAN'S RIGHT TO DIVORCE.

_Question_. Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, the great Agnostic, has
always been an ardent defender of the sanctity of the