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inherited convictions of fallible tradition, and such tradition as practically reduced their postulated Deity to their own mental standard of capricious attributes, and partial judgment.

The language employed by Jesus is never vituperative until he comes to attack theistic professors; and then indeed he exhausts every form of expression denoting indignant scorn, abhorrence, and contempt, for the hypocrisy, rascality, and miserable perversion of truth, leavening the religion of that day.

The cry of preceding prophets had been, away with your religious formulas and rites; cease from psalm-singing and fiddle playing, don't weary me with your ceaseless round of sabbatical cant; be off with your load of peace and burnt offerings; I never required these things of you, for the sacrifice of self-will is my true sacrifice, and my accepted worshipper is the man who performs my will in active duty. These withering rebukes of the Hebrew prophets are repeated by Jesus of Nazareth, who singled out the same priests as were likened by Ezekiel to "foxes in the desert;" and he shews these clergy, scribes, and pharisees to be as selfdeceiving, hollow-hearted, bragging, bullying, tyrannical, narrow-minded, and bigoted set of fellows as could be found in the wide world.

The protest of these Hebrew prophets is the pleading of modern atheists, which is, that the conventional worship of Deity is a gigantic delusion; that man's assumed knowledge of Deity and the structure of theology is a huge mistake; that the character and attributes assigned to God by theologians are derogatory to his attributes of infinite justice and truth; and finally, that the entire system of religious education is a usurpation of the true sovereign power of God, manifested in natural processes; and thus conventional theology is really and truly an artificial system, that cramps and emasculates the intellectual power of the human race.

To return to the New, or Greek Testament, we find there, that the Apostle Paul speaks of eternal punishment as everlasting destruction from the presence of God. Now, the presence of God being everywhere, it follows, that destruction

from this omnipresence cannot mean preservation for punishment in eternal misery; but it must imply a literal and absolute annihilation. Paul speaks of eternal or self-existent life not as a disembodied or immaterial ghost, but life in an immortalized body, not sustained by blood that requires bread, but in an organization that exists by the 'flux of magnetic or electric force, pulsating from the paternal element in the universe. When Paul pleads against the sadducean error, that was creeping into the minds of some of his converts, he argued, that if Jesus of Nazareth was not living, then all those who had been quickened by the electric vibration of his living voice were dead, that is, had perished just as the brute-beasts perish; and he draws a wide distinction between that temporary withdrawal from mortal eye, which may be called hybernation or sleep, and that exit which is actual annihilation.

The Apostle Peter speaks of certain vile, low-minded, coarse-mannered men as fellows whose ideas were little elevated above "natural brute-beasts ;" and like them made for eternal destruction. He makes use of the expression"who shall utterly perish in their own corruption." He would certainly never have used strong language like this if he had been teaching the doctrine of these men being immortal souls.

Peter's idea of the assumed free-will of man does not bear out the dogmatic assertion of theologians, for he says"While they promise them liberty (free-will?) they them"selves are servants (slaves?) of corruption, for of whom a "man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage."

Jude speaks also of dirty, low-minded men, who know naturally, like brute beasts, certain beastly and obscene practices, and filthy anecdotes, with which blackguard ideas and habits they pollute themselves, "To whom," he says "is "reserved the blackness of darkness for ever."

When the great body of theological palaver is dissected and analysed, it is at once seen how utterly inconsistent, illogical, and self-stultifying it is. It is contended by its professors that the death spoken of by the writers in the

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Bible does not mean actual death in its natural sense, but death in a theological sense, that is to say, that natural death means theological life, which is preternatural life. All theologians despise and ignore natural phenomena, and fall back upon this assumed knowledge of that absolute which transcends all relative or natural phenomena and common or natural sense; thus their only stand-ground is the super or contra-natural, which they postulate for the occasion; like the conjurer Sidrophel in Hudibras, whose conclusions were but logical deductions from gratuitously assumed hypotheses transcending common sense. In all sacerdotal glossaries of scriptural writings, death means life, and everlasting death and destruction means everlasting life and preservation; in other words, theological death means supernatural death, which is another term for supernatural life, and this supernatural life is divided into two great compartments, the first of which is life in happiness, and the second is life in pain or punishment; so that if a man is not theologically saved for happiness, he is theologically damned to die a life as a disembodied immortal, or self-existent evil spirit, a sort of wandering, melancholy, woe-begone ghost, in a comatose state, swooned in iniquity, or in a syncoptic existence of preternatural life, shivering or perspiring with hell-fire, cursing its Author, howling and blaspheming, an eternal witness of everlasting damnation, an imperishable monument of the victorious power of evil over the goodness and mercy of an all-powerful, an all-wise, and benevolent God!

Life and death, therefore, mean the same thing in theological palaver, with this difference, however, that the former is life in heaven, and the latter life in hell; and this, be it remembered, in the very teeth of that revelation which asserts that heaven is not a locality at all, but is a change of condition in the natural constitution of man himself. The promise of another world is limited to extended existence on this planet, for the promise recorded is, "The just shall "inherit the earth." Whereas theologians make of heaven a particular place, located somewhere, but leave this somewhere to go wandering through space, like their own illogical

ideas. In precisely the same way, they attempt to make hell a locality by delocalizing it! They disinter it from the grave, where it is a tangible place, and having acted the part of resurrectionists, they theologize the bodies into space. Hell-fire, they say, only burns for preservation, but does not burn for consumption, overlooking the fact that the metaphor of fire used to portray hell in the Bible, is a consuming, not a preserving flame, and the fire that burns, as well as the maggot that destroys, operate upon tangible materials, and are used to convey the idea of final and absolute decomposition or annihilation. The dead are likened in the Bible to hay, straw, mutton fat, and other inflammable and combustible materials, which are burnt up and for ever destroyed by the electro-chemical action of decomposing fire. Thus eternal punishment is everlasting death, not everlasting life.

It is quite true that isolated or disjointed texts prove nothing conclusive, unless they are corroborated and sustained by the context. If the context positively contradicts any particular passage that has been selected, then this text so selected must be abandoned or modified accordingly. When, however, the general tenor of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures have been comprehensively studied, it will be found that prophet follows prophet, and one note of truth follows another, as though the different writers had been engaged in composing a grand fugue in music, each taking his part, and the whole vibrating with the measured beat of a metronome, until the piece is fully rehearsed.

To support the theological hypothesis of the immortality of the human soul, it is asserted that the mind of man is homogeneous with the supreme creative reason, but this is flatly contradicted by the Bible. Isaiah asserts that the thoughts and ways of God are as much superior to man's puny ideas as the starry hosts are beyond the orbit of this little animated globule, the earth; and speaking by and for his Father, the prophet says, "My thoughts are not your "thoughts, neither are my ways your ways." Again he asserts, "All the nations before him are nothing, and less than "nothing, to whom will you liken me or shall I be equal?"

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Now this question is evidently addressed to theologians, who have in all time past asserted, that the power which generated vital force, and the human mind which is merely phenomenal, or a mode of that force, are mutually convertible the one into the other.

To assert that intelligence is the cause of human intelligence, is to limit the procreative energy of Deity to human ideas, that is, to man's standard of perfection, which is manifestly absurd. A bumpkin might as reasonably say, that the cause of mind, and of all natural phenomena, is "gumption," inasmuch as gumption is the perfection of intelligent action. Every known effect is produced by the union of two generating a third and intermediate effect. So that there is really no more warrant for the dogmatic assertion, that mind is the cause of mind, than for the analogous hypothesis that the cause of tom cats is the incessant operation of metaphysical or immaterial caterwauling, which, if cats could succeed in making known their intuitive convictions to mankind, no doubt would be their standard of Divine perfection.

Therefore the theological assertion that the human mind is immortal, or self-existent, like the great paternal source of life in the universe, is an impudent piece of sacerdotal dogmatism, evidently as ridiculous as it is mendacious, and in flat contradiction of the Bible, which asserts, with marvellous iteration, that all mankind are as perishable as the ephemeral grass and flowers in the fields, the words are, "All flesh "is grass, and the glory thereof as the flowers in the field." Again

"God alone hath immortality, and dwells in a light to "which man cannot approach."

To maintain, as theologians do, that the cause of intelligence is intelligence, and that no cause but intelligence could have produced human intelligence, is as much as to say, that a father's grasp of intellect is like the unconscious cerebration of a foetus that has never seen the day light. If man were an immortal, he would be self-existent, whereas it is patent, that the human mind, or intelligence, is only phenomenal, or the quality of a particular mode of organized life.

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