“Are you blind?  Can you not see that Christianity was intended by God to be something better and nobler, superimposed, as an after-birth of time, on the brutality of the elder world?  Does not the great doctrine of Evolution, in which you believe, preach this gospel?  If man rose from a brute form, then advanced to human and savage life, yet a robber and a murderer; then reached civility and culture, and philanthropy; can you not see that the fingerboard of God points forward, unerringly, along the whole track of the race; and that it is still pointing forward to stages, in the future, when man shall approximate the angels?  But this is not your doctrine.  Your creed does not lead forward; it leads backward, to the troglodyte in his cavern, splitting the leg-bones of his victim to extract the marrow for his cannibalistic feast. He would have enjoyed your sermon!” [Great excitement in the congregation.]

“And your gospel of Love.  What is it but beastliness?  Like the old Greeks and Romans, and all undeveloped antiquity, you deify the basest traits of the fleshly organism; you exalt an animal incident of life into the end of life.  You drive out of the lofty temples of the soul the noble and pure aspirations, the great charities, the divine thoughts, which should float there forever on the pinions of angels; and you cover the floor of the temple with crawling creatures, toads, lizards, vipers—­groveling instincts, base appetites, leprous sensualities, that befoul the walls of the house with their snail-like markings, and climb, and climb, until they look out of the very windows of the soul, with such repellent and brutish eyes, that real love withers and shrinks at the sight, and dies like a blasted flower.

“O shallow teacher of the blind, do you not see that Christianity was a new force, Heaven-sent, to overcome that very cruelty and heartlessness of Nature which you so much commend?  Nature’s offspring was indeed the savage, merciless as the creed you preach.  Then came God, who breathed a soul into the nostrils of the savage.  Then came One after Him who said the essence of all religion was man’s love for his fellow man, and for the God that is over all; that the highest worship of the Father was to heal the sick, and feed the hungry, and comfort the despised and rejected, and lift up the fallen.  And love!—­that was true love, made up in equal parts of adoration and of pity!  Not the thing you call love, which makes these faces flush with passion and these eyes burn with lust!”

I had gotten thus far, and was proceeding swimmingly, very much to my own satisfaction, when an old woman who stood near me, and who was dressed like a girl of twenty, with false rubber shoulders and neck and cheeks, to hide the ravages of time, hurled a huge hymn-book, the size of a Bible, at me.  Age had not impaired the venerable woman’s accuracy of aim, nor withered the strength of her good right arm; and the volume of diluted piety encountered me,