n the days of my orthodoxy, but I
will let you judge for yourself after reading the following confession
of faith:

My early life was blighted as the result of the premature death of my
father by the Civil War and the consequent breaking up of his family and
my bondage to a German who made a slave of me, broke my health by
overwork and exposure, and, worst of all, kept me in ignorance, so that
when, at the age of twenty-one, I began my education, I was assigned to
the fourth grade of a public school.

The prime of my life has been wasted in preaching as truths the dogmas
of the Christian theology, the representations of which I now believe,
with the overwhelming majority of educated people, to be at best so many
symbols and at worst superstitions.

But though I do not now and probably never shall again believe in the
existence of a conscious, personal god, a knowledge of and obedience to
whose will is necessary to salvation, yet an injustice is done me by
those who say I have abandoned god and religion.

Every one who desires and endeavors to fulfill the requirements of a law
which is independent of his will and beyond his control has a god and a
religion. I desire and endeavor this in the case of two such laws and so
have two gods and two religions. Both of my divinities are trinities.
One is in the physical realm and the other in the moral one.

In the physical realm my triune god is: matter, the father; force, the
son, and motion, the spirit.

In the moral realm, my triune god is: fact, the father; truth, the son,
and life, the spirit.

For me the triune divinity of Christianity is a symbol of these
trinities and it is my desire and effort to discover and fulfill what
they require of me, in order that I may make my own physical, psychical
and moral life as long, happy and complete as possible and help others
in doing this for themselves. This desire and effort is at once my
morality and religion, my politics and patriotism, and they are
spiritual realities.

On account of the first of these sets of spiritual virtues (morality and
religion) I claim to be a Christian of the highest type, and that any
accusation which is raised against me because of alleged disloyalty to
any essential of Christianism is an injustice.

On account of the second of these sets of spiritual virtues (politics
and patriotism) I claim to be an American of the highest type, and that
any accusation which is raised against me because of