cruellest tortures, and puts to the most horrible deaths, the wisest, the bravest and the best of men. This doctrine, joined with benevolence and pious zeal in monarchs, gives birth to religious wars and wholesale slaughters. It instigated the cruelties of the Huguenots towards the Catholics, and the cruelties of the Catholics towards the Huguenots. It deluged the Netherlands with blood. And we owe it to the prevalence of a secular, worldly, skeptical spirit, pervading the governments and the nations of the earth, that we do not witness in the present day the millions of our race destroying each other for the salvation of men's souls. The selfish and hypocritical among the clergy find this doctrine of eternal torments a fit and effectual means of keeping people in ignorance, and making them the tools of their avarice, their spite, or their ambition. Despotic rulers find it a powerful help in riveting on their subjects the chains of civil and political bondage. The priests preach hell to rebels and reformers, and the tyrants protect and pay the priests, and both join together to perpetuate the ignorance, the degradation, and the misery of mankind. This doctrine causes an infinite amount of misery to the young and timid. They are told that unless they believe certain strange and revolting doctrines, they will be eternally damned; and they try, though reluctantly, to believe them. But they find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to believe them heartily. They are afraid, therefore, that they will have to suffer for ever the bitter pains of hell. This tortures them-maddens them. Night and day they are full of the most horrible fears, and torn with the most terrible anxieties. They can neither enjoy the bright and cheerful day, nor the peaceful and silent hours of night. The day, in truth, is no longer bright and cheerful to them; it is always sad and gloomy. All nature is gloomy, and all seasons sad. Life is a weariness; existence a curse; yet death is full of terrors. They curse the day that they were born. Gladly would they relinquish existence; but that, they are taught, is impossible. Hence their agony is extreme. I lately read the story of Miss Beecher's experience, in her work, entitled-" The Bible and the People." It is horrible. A cheerful, happy, innocent creature is tortured first into madness or hypocrisy, her mental powers perverted, and her whole existence turned into a curse, both to herself and others, by this horrid fiction of an eternal hell. And multitudes have thus suffered. Suppose the believers in hell hopefully converted, their troubles are not at an end. They may not be quite so anxious about themselves-though the best must work out their salvation with fear and trembling-but how troubled they must be on account of fathers. Their fathers, where are they? Are they saved? And what will become of their children? "Who can resolve the doubt that tears our anxious breasts? Will they be with the damned cast out, or numbered with the blest? Which shall it be? Alas! they can find no satisfactory answer to the terrible question. Their children must live amid a world of snares. Reason may shake their faith, science may undermine it, or affection destroy it. Is it to be wondered at if parents, brothers, sisters, wives, unhappily believing the horrid doctrine, lose all the comforts of life, and sink into hopeless melancholy, pine away in cureless grief, or, whirled to madness, end their days in the most pitiable and appalling ravings? Dr. Pinel informs us, that on consulting the records of Bicetre, a French Asylum, he found many priests and monks, as well as country people, who had been terrified. into insanity by the anticipation of hell torments; but not one instance of a naturalist, a physician, a chemist, or a geometrician. Cowper, the poet, is a terrible instance of the influence of this doctrine. He became the subject of religious melancholy early in life, believing he had committed the unpardonable sin, and that his doom was therefore fixed. So terrible were his agonies, that life became unendurable, and he attempted self-destruction. This terrible affliction, with occasional alleviations, clung to him through the whole of his wretched existence. Shakspere, with his usual unerring philosophy, links lunacy, devils and hell together. The doctrine of eternal torments is immoral in its tendency. It tends to harden men's hearts and make them cruel. We have it on the authority of Esquirol, that the impulse to murder and suicide are to be greatly feared in those who are in dread of eternal damnation, and he refers to cases recorded by Sauvages, Forestus, and Pinel.Sweetser, on Mental Hygiene, page 299. I knew a pious youth, who thought Herod did a good deed in killing the Innocents, though his motive was bad; and he added, that if God would give him permission, he would kill every child on earth. He believed that all who died in infancy went to heaven; but that of those who lived to be men and women, the greater part were damned. This pious youth died young, or who can tell how soon his zeal might have ripened into ungovernable insanity, or how many children he might have baptised in their own blood, and sent prematurely to glory. Naturalists, philosophers, are as seldom found among criminals as maniacs. Most of those who are doomed to the gallows for murder, are believers in eternal torments. And why should they make much of a few murders, if God makes so little of the damnation of countless multitudes. Out of 2000 prostitutes of the city of New York, it was ascertained that 1949 had believing parents, and were brought up religiously, and 1909 of them asserted their continued belief in the creed of their parents. Of those born in America, the greatest numbers were from the most Puritanical States. While Illinois sent 1, Kentucky 2, and Wisconsin and Iowa none, Connecticut sent 42, Maine 24, Massachusetts 71, New Jersey 69, Pennsylvania 77, Vermont 10, and even little Rhode Island 18. So that all kinds of crimes, pious crimes and profane crimes alike, are found to flourish under showers of fire and brimstone. Even Lot and his family were not much improved by divine exhibitions of fire and brimstone, if we may believe the Bible. The clergy may consume intellect, virtue and health, by scattering fire and brimstone in the name of God, but they cannot check the growth of crime. The only way in which crime and immorality can be extirpated is by the cultivation of the intellect and affections, and to this mental freedom is necessary. Fear of hell renders the development of the intellectual and moral faculties impossible. The rigor and violence of religious education, originating in dread of God and fear of hell, is an unspeakable curse. "The proper way to educate children for lives of usefulness, honor and happiness-the most effective plan to secure the desired end-is to cultivate their affections and reason, instead of repressing the one and fettering the other. But parents must educate themselves before they can hope to train their children wisely; and they must lead a life in conformity with the principles they teach, if they expect beneficial results from their endeavors. Above all, parents should win the confidence of their children. Their hearts pine for sympathy. If they are in trouble, encourage them to reveal their perplexities to you. Sigh with them when they are sad, and rejoice with them when they are happy. Consult their innocent tastes, and encourage their innocent pleasures, and they will follow in the paths of knowledge and virtue with delight." NOAH'S FLOOD, 5 CENTS. NOAH'S FLOOD. A LECTURE BY JOSEPH BARKER. The Bible account of the Flood is one of the most monstrous stories ever fabricated. It is one unmixed mass of improbabilities and impossibilities from beginning to end. 1. We are first told that all mankind had become utterly corrupt; that every imagination of the thoughts—or, as the margin expresses it-every desire and every purpose, as well as every imagination, of every human being on earth, was evil, only evil, and that continually. Can any intelligent human being believe this? To us it seems one of the most outrageous falsehoods ever uttered. For ourselves, we do not believe that there ever was a single human being thus utterly corrupt. There are certainly none so now. Those who have made it their business to go among the more depraved, such as thieves and prostitutes, assure us that they meet with none wholly bad. They find affection and generosity among the most degraded of women, and remains of honor and honesty among the most abandoned of men. If we are to judge from facts, an utterly depraved human being is an impossibility. How utterly impossible, then, that all mankind should be utterly corrupt! Besides, the race could not exist if all were utterly corrupt. Suppose all were only idle-that none would work-how long would it be before all died of hunger? But suppose, instead of being idle, they were all busy doing mischiefall hard at work burning houses, destroying cattle, and poisoning one another, how long would the race exist? Suppose all were utterly corrupt now-suppose every desire, every purpose, every imagination, of every heart, were evil, only evil, and that continually-suppose every mother bent on destroying her children, and every child bent on destroying its parents, and every wife bent on destroying her husband, and every husband bent on destroying his wifehow long would it be before all the husbands and wives, all the parents and children perished? Nay, suppose every man, woman and child bent on destroying themselves only, the race would perish in a day. Talk of God having to cover the whole earth with a flood to get rid of a race of beings utterly corrupt! The thing is ridiculous. They would save him the trouble. The story is as foolish as it is false. 2. The cause assigned for this total degeneracy of our race is as foolish as the story of the degeneracy itself. It was caused, according to the Bible, by intermarriages between the sons of God, or, as the Hebrew has it, sons of the gods, and the daughters of men. "It came to pass, we are told, "when men began to multiply and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of the gods saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose." The result was, according to the story, that giants were born, and the earth was filled with violence. Here we are taught first, that there was formerly quite a number of gods; second, that the gods had children-young gods; third, that these young gods were so charmed with the daughters of men, that they preferred them for wives to the young goddesses. But who believes these things now? Not even Christians themselves. They believe things as foolish about the Trinity, the eternal sonship, the miraculous conception, and the perfect godhead and manhood of Jesus; but they do not believe in those regular intermarriages of young gods and fair young women in the days of Noah. It is no longer fashionable to believe such things. Infidelity has made faith in such stories discreditable. Science has not only thrown doubt on the existence of a multitude of gods, each having his family of young gods and goddesses, but has led men to the conclusion that an intermixture of races so different as gods and men is a physiological impossibility. Besides, supposing gods and women to intermarry and have offspring, why should their offspring be more wicked than the offspring of parents who were both human? We might expect them to be only half as heavy as common children, supposing the gods to be all spiritual; but why should they be more vicious? We can easily imagine that the daughters of men would have worse children if they intermarried with devils; but how intermarriage with gods should make them have worse children is more than we can comprehend. It ought to make them have better children, according to the Bible. It had this effect in the case of the Virgin Mary, we are told. God chose to be the father of Jesus, on purpose, according to the common theory, to secure a pure and perfect child. Why should the arrangement in one case make the offspring better, and in the other worse? And why should the offspring of those mixed marriages be so prone to violence? Jesus was not a man of violence, was he? The thing is very mysterious. In other words, it is infinitely absurd. But now we are told that the passage does not mean that |