asses of people instead of individuals. If a thing is
true, let us all believe it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. If
a thing is untrue, let us all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women,
and children. Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to
be whispered over rose-water after dinner when the ladies are gone away.

"Even in those whom I would most reverence, who would shrink with horror
from such actual deception as I have just mentioned, I find traces of
a want of faith in man. Even that noble thinker, to whom we of this
generation owe more than I can tell, seemed to say in one of his
posthumous essays that in regard to questions of great public importance
we might encourage a hope in excess of the evidence (which would
infallibly grow into a belief and defy evidence) if we found that life
was made easier by it. _As if we should not lose infinitely more by
nourishing a tendency to falsehood than we could gain by the delusion of
a pleasing fancy_. Life must first of all be made straight and true;
it may get easier through the help this brings to the commonwealth. And
Lange, the great historian of materialism, says that the amount of false
belief necessary to morality in a given society is a matter of taste. _I
cannot believe that any falsehood whatever is necessary to morality_. It
cannot be true of my race and yours that to keep ourselves from becoming
scoundrels we must needs believe a lie. _The sense of right grew up
among healthy men and was fixed by the practice of comradeship. It has
never had help from phantoms and falsehoods, and it never can want any_.
By faith in man and piety toward men we have taught each other the right
hitherto; with faith in man and piety toward men we shall never more
depart from it."

If religion decided and produced the civilization of a people, what sort
of civilization would exist to-day among the Jews? All Jews would be
bigamists, and murder would be their pastime. No people would be free
from their rapine, no woman safe from their lust. But fortunately they
have followed their scientific and political leaders instead of their
Prophets, and the consequence is that they are so far above and
superior to their religion and their Bible, that only in its trivial and
immaterial dictates is it their guide and law to-day.

And we, building upon the same foundation, with an added story to our
edifice, modify, to suit legislation and a higher public sentiment and