FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   >>  
I felt at hearing such youthful and innocent lips speak of the absurdity of religious forms, ceremonies, and creeds. She regarded my belief in them as a species of barbarism. But she had not convinced me. _I was resolved not to be convinced._ I believed she was in error. Surely, I thought, a country so far advanced in civilization, and practicing such unexampled rectitude, must, according to my religious teaching, have been primarily actuated by religious principles which they had since abandoned. My only surprise was that they had not relapsed into immorality, after destroying church and creed, and I began to feel anxious to convince them of the danger I felt they were incurring in neglecting prayer and supplication at the throne to continue them in their progress toward perfection of mental and moral culture. I explained my feelings to the Preceptress with great earnestness and anxiety for their future, intimating that I believed their immunity from disaster had been owing to Divine sufferance. "For no nation," I added, quoting from my memory of religious precepts, "can prosper without acknowledging the Christian religion." She listened to me with great attention, and when I had finished, asked: "How do you account for our long continuance in prosperity and progress, for it is more than a thousand years since we rooted out the last vestige of what you term religion, from the mind. We have had a long immunity from punishment. To what do you attribute it?" I hesitated to explain what had been in my mind, but finally faltered out something about the absence of the male sex. I then had to explain that the prisons and penitentiaries of my own land, and of all other civilized lands that I knew of, were almost exclusively occupied by the male sex. Out of eight hundred penitentiary prisoners, not more than twenty or thirty would be women; and the majority of them could trace _their_ crimes to man's infidelity. "And what do you do to reform them?" inquired the Preceptress. "We offer them the teachings of Christianity. All countries, however, differ widely in this respect. The government of my country is not as generous to prisoners as that of some others. In the United States every penitentiary is supplied with a minister who expounds the Gospel to the prisoners every Sunday; that is once every seven days." "And what do they do the rest of the time?" "They work." "Are they ignorant?" "Oh, yes, indeed;
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   >>  



Top keywords:
religious
 

prisoners

 

immunity

 

penitentiary

 

progress

 
Preceptress
 
explain
 

convinced

 
country
 

believed


religion

 

finally

 
faltered
 

exclusively

 
vestige
 

attribute

 
occupied
 
civilized
 

prisons

 

penitentiaries


absence

 

punishment

 

rooted

 

hesitated

 

reform

 

minister

 

supplied

 

expounds

 

Gospel

 

States


United

 
generous
 

Sunday

 

ignorant

 

government

 
crimes
 

majority

 
twenty
 

thirty

 
infidelity

differ
 

widely

 
respect
 
countries
 

inquired

 

teachings

 
Christianity
 

hundred

 
precepts
 

actuated