your brothers who do not believe in your creed "vile," has about it the unmistakable air of cant and hypocrisy. Is it any wonder that the "heathen" distrust the Christian nations of Europe and America?

A clergyman of Chicago, one of our leading, popular, successful, talented, and respected preachers—one who has had phenomenal success as a minister of the Gospel, and who addresses the largest Christian audiences in the country, speaking to the Young Men's Christian Association, declared that "this earth would have been a hell if Christ had not died on Golgotha." There must be something of the nature of a blight in a creed that can force from the lips of an educated and benevolent man such unlovely words. And there is. It is so self-centered, so intolerant, so exclusive, that in its eyes the whole world, except its own little corner, is nothing but "a hell." To intimate that the world which gave us our republic, the world which gave us our constitution—our jurisprudence, our law courts—the world which has crowded our galleries with works of imperishable beauty, and our libraries with immortal poetry, literature and philosophy—which has given to our universities their classical curriculum—which created Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pericles, Seneca, Cicero and the Antonines—a world whose ruins are more wonderful than anything we possess, whose dead are more immortal than our living—to suggest that this pre-Christian world as well as the non-Christian countries to-day, was "a hell," takes my breath away. I never imagined that this fearful Asiatic creed could smite or sting an otherwise wholesome soul into such a contortion. What is there in this Palestinian Jew whom our famous preacher worships as his god that can tempt a man to bear even false witness for his sake? Heavens! How can a man with the example of heroic Japan fresh and fragrant before him, think of this earth as a hell without his "shibboleth?" Victor Hugo says "It is a terrible thing to have been a priest once;" it is not less terrible to be an orthodox protestant preacher to-day. And why?

Because for the preacher there is something higher than the truth—his creed.

But the proposition that there can be no morality without God—that the earth would be a hell without Christ, in its final analysis means this: People will not be moral without the belief in a future life. It is the hope of future rewards which gives to the God idea its value. St. Paul himself admitted that if the Christians believed in Christ for this life only "they were of all men the most miserable." Were the clergy to tell their flocks this morning that although they felt sure of the existence of God, they had their doubts about another life, how many of them would return to worship on the following Sunday? Yes, it is the mingled hope and fear of the future which gives the belief in a God its importance. If there were no death—if men could live here forever, they would not much concern themselves about spirits and invisible beings. It is the idea that when we die we fall into the hands of God, the idea that it is a terrible thing, as the Bible says, to fall into the hands of the living God—it is this idea which lights the altars, bends the knee, and builds churches. To placate the deity that he may reward us in the future is, frankly, the object of all religious ceremonies. If this be true, then the proposition that without God there can be no morality amounts to this: Without future rewards and punishments no man will live a moral life.

This doctrine leads to the following conclusions: First, man is naturally immoral, and the only way he can be arrested in his career of vice and crime is to promise him future rewards if he will behave himself, and to menace him with hell fire if he will not. Secondly, the proposition implies that morality per se is not desirable, that no one could be virtuous enough to desire virtue for its own sake, and that without great and eternal rewards morality would go a-begging. And this is religion! What then is atheism?

Why do people desire health? Certainly not for any postmortem rewards. The health of the body is cultivated for its own beautiful sake. Health is joy, it is power, it is beauty, it is strength. Are not these enough to make it sacred to all men? But if the health of the body does not need the prop of future rewards to commend itself to us, what good reason have we to think that morality, which is the health of the mind, is a wretched investment if there be no other life? Morality is temperance. How can our ideas about the unseen world change the nature of temperance so that instead of being a virtue it would become a stupid and irksome restraint? If it is good to be temperate in the pursuit of pleasure or wealth, or in the gratification of desire, why should our speculations about the hereafter alter our attitude toward the value of temperance and self-control in everything? God or no God, a future life or no future life, is not temperance better than intemperance? To ask why a man should practice temperance even if it be granted that it is better than intemperance is to go back to the terrible charge that man is by nature a monster, and that he will not behave well unless he is promised enormous returns in the shape of eternal rewards—palaces, mansions, crowns, thrones, in the next world.

Well, if the preachers are right it is a serious question whether so depraved a creature as man deserves to be saved at all. To have created so contemptible a creature was a great enough blunder, but think of perpetuating his race forever and ever!

Let us see how much truth there is in the preacher's estimate of human nature. Take the example of a father who is devoted to his little motherless girl. He lives for her, cares for her, protects her, and provides for her future that she may feel his blessing long after he has passed away. Will this father be less a father without the belief in future rewards? But to love and care for one's child is only natural morality, replies the clergyman. Of course it is. And that is why it is genuine, sweet, spontaneous, and untainted with expectations of a reward. It never enters his mind that he is going to be paid big wages for being good to his motherless child. He loved her, and that was heaven enough for him. It is artificial morality that pines for rewards and sickens and dies when the expected reward is questioned. If there is no future glory, who will abstain from meat on Friday, or sprinkle his children, or read the Bible or listen to sermons? But the natural virtues will spring up like flowers in the human soil. Men and women will love, will sacrifice, will perform heroic deeds of devotion, whatever may be their theories concerning the hereafter.

Let us take another case. Why is an employer of labor good to his men? Is it because he expects to be rewarded for it in the next life? Analyze his motives and you will find that if he treats his hands well it is because he believes it to be the best way to get along with them, to earn their good will, to keep his own self-respect, and to merit the approval of the community in which he lives. He is not going to change his conduct toward his employees, nor will the motives which now influence his conduct lose their force immediately after he finds out that there is nothing coming to him in the next world for being good and just to his workmen.

The theologians appear to labor under the impression that morality being irksome and undesirable, it would be an injustice not to reward the people who put up with it with a paradise of some kind. They think that the man who did not rob his neighbor, beat his wife and children, or get drunk, ought to be rewarded. Certainly he ought—if it is for a future reward that he does not do these things. If we have an influence at all we shall see that these people who have denied themselves the pleasure of cutting their neighbors' throats, or of leading an intemperate, dishonest and brutal life, shall receive their reward.

There is no doubt that some people are kept