The cylinder
press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned
the brow of humanity with a coronet of light.
"But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods
are the methods of their fathers--a solecism, stupid, irrational,
immoral.
"The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to
the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe
of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt,
rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of
life.
"Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to
be the friend of publicans and harlots.
"Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty
and blood, flame, sword, thumb-screw, rack and torch. The blackest
pages in the story of the martyrdom of man have been written by
their hands. They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with
fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was
drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons
and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning
plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from
limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or
the piteous cry of expectant motherhood.
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