ry door was shut, every
knife was open. To shelter him from the wild storm, to give him a
crust of bread when dying, to put a cup of water to his cracked and
bleeding lips; these were all crimes, not one of which the church ever
did forgive; and with the justice taught of God his helpless children
were exterminated as scorpions and vipers.

Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to
principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once required to be
an infidel, to brave the church, her racks, her fagots, her dungeons,
her tongues of fire--to defy and scorn her heaven and her devil and her
God? They were the noblest sons of earth. They were the real saviors
of our race, the destroyers of superstition and the creators of
science. They were the real Titans who bared their grand foreheads to
all the thunderbolts of all the gods. The church has been, and still
is, the great robber. She has rifled not only the pockets but the
brains of the world. She is the stone at the sepulcher of liberty; the
upas tree in whose shade the intellect of man has withered; the gorgon
beneath whose gaze the human heart has turned to stone.

Under her influence even the Protestant mother expects to be in heaven,
while her brave boy, who is fighting for the rights of man, shall
writhe in hell. It is said that some of the Indian tribes place the
heads of their children between pieces of bark until the form of the
skull is permanently changed. To us this seems a most shocking custom,
and yet, after all, is it as bad as to put the souls of our children in
the straight-jacket of a creed, to so utterly deform their minds that
they regard the God of the bible as a being of infinite mercy, and
really consider it a virtue to believe a thing just because it seems
unreasonable? Every child in the Christian world has uttered its
wondering protest against this outrage. All the machinery of the
church is constantly employed in thus corrupting the reason of
children. In every possible way they are robbed of their own thoughts
and forced to accept the statements of others. Every Sunday-school has
for its object the crushing out of every germ of individuality. The
poor children are taught that nothing can be more acceptable to God
than unreasoning obedience and eyeless faith, and that to believe that
God did an impossible act is far better than to do a good one yourself.
They are told that all the religions have been simply th