ll infidelity. It
exposed Genesis and put Moses out of court. It destroyed all special
creation, showed man's kinship with other forms of life, reduced Adam
and Eve to myths, and exploded the doctrine of the Fall. Darwin was for
years treated as Antichrist, and Huxley as the great beast. All that is
being changed, thanks to the sceptical spirit. Darwin's corpse is buried
in Westminster Abbey, but his ideas are undermining all the churches and
crumbling them into dust.

The gospel of Freethought brands persecution as the worst crime against
humanity. It stifles the spirit of progress and strangles its pioneers.
It eliminates the brave, the adventurous and the aspiring, and leaves
only the timid, the sluggish and the grovelling. It removes the lofty
and spares the low. It levels all the hills of thought and makes an
intellectual flatness. It drenches all the paths of freedom with blood
and tears, and makes earth the vestibule of hell.

Persecution is the right arm of priestcraft. The black militia of
theology are the sworn foes of Freethought. They represent it as the sin
against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness in this world
or the next. When they speak of the Holy Ghost they mean themselves.
Freethought is a crime against _them_. It strips off the mystery that
invests their craft, and shows them as they really are, a horde of
bandits who levy black mail on honest industry, and preach a despot in
heaven in order to main-tain their own tyranny on earth.

The gospel of Freethought would destroy all priesthoods. Every man
should be his own priest. If a professional soul-doctor gives you wrong
advice and leads you to ruin, he will not be damned for you He will see
you so first. We must take all responsibility, and we should also take
the power. Instead of putting our thinking out, as we put our washing,
let us do it at home. No man can do another's thinking for him. What is
thought in the originator is only acquiescence in the man who takes it
at secondhand.

If we do our own thinking in religion we shall do it in everything else.
We reject authority and act for ourselves. Spiritual and temporal power
are brought under the same rule. They must justify themselves or go. The
Freethinker is thus a politician and a social reformer. What a Christian
_may_ be he _must_ be. Freethinkers are naturally Radicals. They are
almost to a man on the side of justice freedom and progress. The Tories
know this, and hence