Another matter which must have attention is the sweeping away of that jeu d’esprit, our courts of justice, by making all kinds of contracts stand upon the honor and capacity of the contracting parties. All individual matters must be settled by the individuals themselves without appeal to the public. Our present system of enforced collection of debts costs every year more than is realized, and besides maintains a vast army of lawyers, constables and court officers in unproductive employ. All this is wrong, entailing almost untold exactions upon the producing community, who in the end are made to pay all these things.

Further, our system of oaths and bonds must be abolished. This swearing people to tell the truth, and binding them to perform their duty, presupposes that they will lie and neglect their duty. People are always placed upon the side of force and compulsion—never upon that of personal rectitude and honor. The results are what might be expected. It plunges us into the very things we would avoid. There is a philosophy, too, in all these things; since in freedom only can purity exist. Anything that is not free is not pure. Anything that is accompanied by compulsion is no proof of individual honesty.

The new government must also take immediate steps for the abolition of pauperism and beggary. It is an infamous reproach upon this country that there are hundreds of thousands of people who subsist themselves upon individual charity. I do not care whether this is from choice or necessity. I say it is a burning shame, requiring immediate curative steps. The indigent and helpless classes are just as much a part of our social body as the protected and the rich are, and they are entitled to its recognition. Society must no longer punish and compel suffering and death for its own wrongs. It must evolve such a social system as shall leave no single member of the common body to suffer. When one member of the body suffers, the whole body sympathizes. So, also, when a member of the social body suffers, does the whole body suffer. And yet we have pretended philanthropists and Christians who have never grasped that truth.

Our civilization and our Christianity have been made too much a matter of faith in, and devotion to, the unknowable, divorced from all human relations. We must first recognize and practice the brotherhood of man before we can be made to realize the Paternity of God, since “if we love not our brothers whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen?” Our religious teaching has been too much of punishment, and too little of love; too much of faith, too little of works; too much of sectarianism, too little of humanitarianism; too much of hell-fire arbitration, too little of inevitable law; and too much of self-righteousness, and too little of innate goodness.

And here I cannot forbear to depart from the strict line of my subject to say a word regarding a doctrine, from the effects of which even this country is but slowly recovering—that of eternal damnation! I say, that a people who really believe in a God who could burn his own children in a lake of literal fire and brimstone, “where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched,” and from which there is no present escape nor future hope, for a single unrepented misdeed, and still profess to honor, love and worship a fiend so infernal as that would make Him, cannot be honest and conscientious, since they must mistake fear for love, and confound sycophancy with worship. It was such a belief that kindled the fires by which the early martyrs perished, by which the Quakers of Massachusetts were burned and the witches hanged, and which invented the terrible Inquisition, with its horrid racks and tortures. These are the legitimate results of such a belief; and if the people of to-day really believed what they profess in their creeds, they would do precisely the same things. And they would be justified, since it would be merciful in them to subject a person to a few moments’ torture, to induce him or her to escape the eternal tortures of Hell, the horrors of which all the ingenuity men can command could not invent a torture one-hundredth part as inhuman; and yet they say our Heavenly Father has prepared this for nineteen-twentieths of humanity.

Thank Heaven, however, the day has come when such libels upon the name of God are rapidly merging into the gray twilight, to soon sink in blank, unfathomable oblivion. Thank Heaven, for its own approach earthward, to strike off the chains of superstition from humanity, and for the first faint glimmering of light shed upon us by its angels’ faces, proving to us that humanity, whether of earth or heaven, is:

“One life for those who live and those who die—

For those whom sight knows and whom memory.”

The Jews would not accept Christ since he came not with temporal power. But Christ will come in the power of the spirit, and shall baptise all humanity. Already His messengers begin to herald the “glad tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people.” Already the music of the approaching harmonies are heard from the hill-tops of spirituality singing the approaching millennium. Already its divine notes have pierced some of the dark places of earth, making glad the hearts of their oppressed children, shedding light and truth and joy into their souls. The prophecies of all ages converge upon this, and for their fulfillment, Christ, with all his holy angels, will come to judge the world, and to erect upon it that government already inaugurated in Heaven and long promised Earth, for

“Decrees are sealed in Heaven’s own chancery,