It is astonishing how long the priest has carried on his trade. Here is a man who claims to deal in the affairs of another world for which he demands pay in this world, but he does not show that he carries out his part of the agreement. Men have been paying the priest for thousands of years, for doing what it is impossible to prove has been, or can be, done. Can anything more stupid than this be imagined? The business of saving man's soul is a cheat, a fraud. Every priest and minister who preaches that man can be saved from hell hereafter by believing in Jesus, or anybody else, is preaching what they know nothing about, and they are doing it for the money in it. The church is cheating man, defrauding him, practicing upon his ignorance, his superstition, his fear. Religion, as far as it relates to any other life than this, has no foundation. Its God no one knows anything about; its heaven and hell no one has ever seen, nor does anyone know where they are; its whole business is run on fictitious capital.
The only thing that the church has saved so far is itself.
The strong should be gentle to the weak. The rich should not oppress the poor. The prosperous should be generous to the unfortunate. The self-reliant should give a hand to the helpless. The educated should pity the ignorant. The virtuous should not be cruel to the vicious. The beautiful should be kind to the plain.
Which shall it be, Christianity or the Republic? It is apparent that the Christian church under a purely secular government, where justice is granted to all and where favors are allowed to none, cannot long survive. The Christian church in this country to-day is the worst foe of our free republic that exists within its borders. If the state survives it is plain to us that the church must perish, and the church can only flourish on the ruins of free institutions. We may have Christianity with a certain form of human government in America, but if the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the rights implied in the national constitution are to survive, then we cannot have Christianity in this land.
The next conflict in our nation is to be between secularism and ecclesiasticism, between men who love liberty and priests who uphold tyranny, between the lovers of our republic and the foes of secular institutions. This conflict is nearer than the public imagines; in fact, it is already going on, and the growth of sentiment in the next generation in favor of human freedom and human rights will determine whether secularism will be upheld in our nation, or whether the reign of ecclesiasticism is to be dethroned.