hat during the thirty years
he has been married there have been fifteen to twenty of his
relatives under the same roof, but never had there been in his
family a death or a night's loss of sleep on account of sickness.

"The Lord has been pretty good to you," suggested Marshall Wade.

"Well, I've been pretty good to him," he answered.]

_Question_. I have heard people in discussing yourself and your
views, express the belief that way down in the depths of your mind
you are not altogether a "disbeliever." Are they in any sense
correct?

_Answer_. I am an unbeliever, and I am a believer. I do not
believe in the miraculous, the supernatural, or the impossible.
I do not believe in the "Mosaic" account of the creation, or in
the flood, or the Tower of Babel, or that General Joshua turned
back the sun or stopped the earth. I do not believe in the Jonah
story, or that God and the Devil troubled poor Job. Neither do I
believe in the Mt. Sinai business, and I have my doubts about the
broiled quails furnished in the wilderness. Neither do I believe
that man is wholly depraved. I have not the least faith in the
Eden, snake and apple story. Neither do I believe that God is an
eternal jailer; that he is going to be the warden of an everlasting
penitentiary in which the most of men are to be eternally tormented.
I do not believe that any man can be justly punished or rewarded
on account of his belief.

But I do believe in the nobility of human nature. I believe in
love and home, and kindness and humanity. I believe in good
fellowship and cheerfulness, in making wife and children happy.
I believe in good nature, in giving to others all the rights that
you claim for yourself. I believe in free thought, in reason,
observation and experience. I believe in self-reliance and in
expressing your honest thought. I have hope for the whole human
race. What will happen to one, will, I hope, happen to all, and
that, I hope, will be good. Above all, I believe in Liberty.

--_The Blade_, Toledo, Ohio, January 9, 1892.

MUST RELIGION GO?

_Question_. What is your idea as to the difference between honest
belief, as held by honest religious thinkers, and heterodoxy?

_Answer_. Of course, I believe that there are thousands of men
and women who honestly believe not only in the improbable, not only
in the absurd, but in the impossible. Heterodoxy, so-called,
occupies the half-way station between superstition and reason. A