incomprehensible dogmas, and his comprehensible hell to enforce him, has made the layman the unthinking and conventional imbecile that he is. The priest has caught hold of man's tenderest and holiest emotions in order to drag him thereby unto ruin and death.
By dint of the figment of God and his Book he has persuaded man that he is an heir of eternal misery. Then he has produced a redeemer to stand between him and this misery, and he appeals on behalf of this redeemer to man's noblest gratitude. The method of this appeal is sensational. It points to this redeemer leaving, for man's sake, glory and splendour for ignominy and squalor. It points, with melodramatic force, over the chasm of the centuries to a tree on Calvary's hill, and the Creator and Lord of the universe voluntarily nailed to it to save man from everlasting sufferings; in the realms of the Infernal. A crown of thorns envelopes the bleeding brow of God. A sponge dipped in vinegar is raised on a reed to the dry and pain-writhing lip of Omnipotence. Blood trickles down in crimson drops from where the spikes have been hammered through the feet and hands of the Man of Sorrows. Down on the uncovered head, down on the naked and quivering limb, the Syrian sun bursts fiercely over the hill-top, over the cross—every ray cutting like a flaming sword and drying up in torment the protruding, parched, and swollen tongue and the limbs from which the gore has dripped to allow them the more readily to shrivel up in agony. Then Death comes—his avatar a terrible cry, at which the world shudders. The side is gashed to the bowels with a Roman hasta. The earthquake rends the globe, the mouldered dead leap from their graves, and the gloom of preternatural darkness falls upon the naked and white corpse and upon the lonely hill. The priest has forced down Humanity's throat this goblet of fire, and, in the interests of the priest, Humanity has gone delirious.
