d to be everlastingly
inflicting on mankind, who could raise a protest against them? Shall
man be juster than his God? This perverse Christian morality is
responsible for the worst cruelties which have tormented the human race
since the days of ecclesiastical domination. If the Deity is inhuman,
why should man be otherwise? Therefore, inhuman tortures will be
inflicted on prisoners. The rack and thumb-screw will be used to
extract secrets. Men will be immured alive within narrow walls and
allowed to perish by inches. The Austrian prisons in the northern
Italian provinces will be so constructed that the miserable victim can
neither sit nor lie down nor see the light of day. Floggings and
scourgings will be universal, _lettres de cachet_ an institution. Why
not? Where the god has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in
the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or
have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The god does worse
than all this. He keeps his victims alive for the sole purpose of
glutting his ire and satiating his insatiable vengeance. Nay, things
are so ordered that the very happiness of the elect is enhanced, not
only by the knowledge, but by the sight, of the appalling, unavailing
anguish of the lost, and we have seen such a philosopher as Aquinas
representing the Deity as conducting the "elect" in troops and droves
to the heavenly shores and giving them "a glimpse of hell" by way of
stimulating their enjoyment of the celestial beatitude. Why not? I
ask again. My only wonderment is how we ever got rid of it. Picture
the world under the universal dominion of this foul superstition. It
reigns on the thrones of kings, in the cabinets of statesmen, it is
preached in the pulpits, taught in the schools, it is the earliest
lesson that trembles on the lips of innocent children. The most
ingenious, subtly contrived, widespread and all-pervading influence is
especially created to propagate it everywhere in the shape of the
Christian Church--a Divine institution, possessed of the keys of life
and death, of heaven and hell--the sole representative of the Deity on
earth. How, we ask, in wondering gratitude, did the world ever escape
the tyranny of such superstition? This fact alone--this
deliverance--is enough to make one believe that there is a "Power, not
ourselves, which makes for righteousness