ch. In this way a great reserved fund of
merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure
they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in
place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve
them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread
machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale,
heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But
whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive
the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the
priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those
who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost,
by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby
typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and
ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as
alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to
conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history
through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of
an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which
affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty
pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the
exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is
incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates
forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere
accident of time

11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.

and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their
acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical
hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of
their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One
is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man
ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that
the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life,
but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to
Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion,
the notorious robber, be better after death than that of
Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It
is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper
appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross
mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the
bad and the good, as if moral qualities were n