terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.'

"That is addressed to a child six years of age.

"'I have known,' the book continues, 'poor children who concealed their
sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were tormented
with remorse, and if they had died in that state they would certainly
have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.'" . . .


Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen time
after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in their
preaching. It is a distinct lust. Much nobility and devotion there are
among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of real worship,
lives no man may better; this that I write is not of all, perhaps not
of many priests. But there has been in all ages that have known
sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; priestcraft and priestly
power release an aggressive and narrow disposition to a recklessness of
suffering and a hatred of liberty that surely exceeds the badness of any
other sort of men.



8. THE CHILDREN'S GOD


Children do not naturally love God. They have no great capacity for
an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God. While they are still
children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy for them to
feel any great need of God. All things are still something God-like. . . .