“It is awful to reflect that not a thought, or word, or deed is ever forgotten, and that each one makes his own doomsday book, in which all is written with such exactness that there are no erasures or corrections, and to be forever carried as a part of the soul, a perpetual, eternal witness for or against himself. The soul, disrobed, naked, and seeing itself in that fearful light where there can be no deception or the least concealment—what need of any judge or any record but the memory of the soul? The memory keeps an everlasting account of all that ever comes to it,—‘Where I do see the very book indeed where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself.’
“The great mistake is, I think, in making religion wholly a supernatural thing, something to be accepted by faith only, in somebody’s statement, and clothing it with mystery, and placing it before our reason. True religion is as much a science as mental philosophy, or chemistry, and should be investigated by the same methods.
“Says Webster: ‘Science is the understanding of truth or facts; it is an investigation of truth for its own sake, and a pursuit of pure knowledge.’
“Sir William Thompson says: ‘Science is bound by the everlasting law of honor to face fearlessly every problem which can fairly be presented to it.’
“‘Conviction,’ says Bacon, ‘comes not through arguments, but through experiments.’
“Says a French philosopher: ‘I have consumed forty years of my pilgrimage seeking the philosopher’s stone called truth. I have consulted all the adepts of antiquity, and still remain in ignorance. All that I have been able to obtain is this: chance, is a word void of sense. The world is arranged according to mathematical laws.’
“The relation of cause with effect, heat with cold, light with darkness, sweet with sour, positive with negative, is not more or less definite in the natural sciences than that of good with evil, vice with virtue, pure with foul, or rewards with punishments in moral or religious science. Why invent a devil to be the author of evil any more than to imagine some demon to be the creator of darkness, or another as the devil of cold in the arctic regions, or another as the devil of heat here in India?
“Once, conversing with a Roman Catholic priest, he said, ‘Your theory may do very well for you, but for the masses of ignorant people, sunken in vice and sin, a literal hell of fire and a devil are an actual necessity.’
“Bobby Burns says:
‘The fear of hell’s a hangman’s whip,