men with good ones--and so the great world stumbles along.

--_The Blade_, Toledo, Ohio, June 4, 1891.

CREEDS.

There is a natural desire on the part of every intelligent human
being to harmonize his information--to make his theories agree--in
other words, to make what he knows, or thinks he knows, in one
department, agree and harmonize with what he knows, or thinks he
knows, in every other department of human knowledge.

The human race has not advanced in line, neither has it advanced
in all departments with the same rapidity. It is with the race as
it is with an individual. A man may turn his entire attention to
some one subject--as, for instance, to geology--and neglect other
sciences. He may be a good geologist, but an exceedingly poor
astronomer; or he may know nothing of politics or of political
economy. So he may be a successful statesman and know nothing of
theology. But if a man, successful in one direction, takes up some
other question, he is bound to use the knowledge he has on one
subject as a kind of standard to measure what he is told on some
other subject. If he is a chemist, it will be natural for him,
when studying some other question, to use what he knows in chemistry;
that is to say, he will expect to find cause and effect everywhere
--succession and resemblance. He will say: It must be in all
other sciences as in chemistry--there must be no chance. The
elements have no caprice. Iron is always the same. Gold does not
change. Prussic acid is always poison--it has no freaks. So he
will reason as to all facts in nature. He will be a believer in
the atomic integrity of all matter, in the persistence of gravitation.
Being so trained, and so convinced, his tendency will be to weigh
what is called new information in the same scales that he has been
using.

Now, for the application of this. Progress in religion is the
slowest, because man is kept back by sentimentality, by the efforts
of parents, by old associations. A thousand unseen tendrils are
twining about him that he must necessarily break if he advances.
In other departments of knowledge inducements are held out and
rewards are promised to the one who does succeed--to the one who
really does advance--to the one who discovers new facts. But in
religion, instead of rewards being promised, threats are made.
The man is told that he must not advance; that if he takes a step
forward, it is at the peril of his soul; that if he thin