wide and
fertile subject. To gain a comprehensive survey of its boundaries
and a compact epitome of its contents, it will be well to consider
it in these two lights and divisions, all the time trying to see,
step by step, what justice, and what injustice, is done: first,
the dominant motive forces animating the disbelievers; secondly,
the methods and materials they have employed.

At first thought it would appear difficult to tell what impulses
could move persons to undertake, as many constantly have
undertaken, a crusade against a faith so dear to man, so ennobling
to his nature. Peruse the pages of philosophical history with
careful reflection, and the mystery is scattered, and various
groups of disbelievers stand revealed, with earnest voices and
gestures assailing the doctrine of a future life.1

One company, having their representatives in every age, reject it
as a protest in behalf of the right of private judgment against
the tyranny of authority. The doctrine has been inculcated by
priesthoods, embodied in sacred books, and wrought into the
organic social life of states; and acceptance of it has been
commanded as a duty, and expected as a decent and respectable
thing. To deny it has required courage, implied independent
opinions, and conferred singularity. To cast off the yoke of
tradition, undermine the basis of power supporting a galling
religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a
generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail
to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the
present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings
and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core
of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and
futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over
them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended
interests of a future life.2 The true way to secure the real
desideratum corruptly indicated in this movement is not by denying
the reality of a future life, but by removing the adjustment of
its conditions and the administration of its rewards and penalties
out of the hands of every clique of priests and rulers. A
righteously and benignly ordered immortality, based in truth and
adjudicated by the sole sovereignty of God, is no engine of
oppression, though a doctrine of heaven and hell irresponsibly
managed by an Orphic association, the guardians of a Delphic
tripod,