it. In a voice of thunder they say, "Upset him!" It sought to
annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious
cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious,
heartless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: "The
kirk holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy." And
this same Scotch kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the
moral grandeur to say, "The world is my country, and to do good my
religion." And this same kirk abhorred the man who said, "Any system of
religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a true system."

At that time nothing so delighted the church as the beauties of endless
torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling
in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century a boy by the name of
Thomas Aikenhead was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for having denied
the inspiration of the scriptures, and for having, on several occasions,
when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm.
Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was found
guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of the
scaffold and covered with stones, and though his mother came with her
face covered with tears, begging for the corpse, she was denied and
driven away in the name of charity. That is religion, and in the velvet
of their politeness there lurks the claws of the tiger. Just give them
the power and see how quick I would leave this part of the country.
They know I am going to be burned forever; they know I am going to
hell, but that don't satisfy them. They want to give me a little
foretaste here.

Prosecutions and executions like these were common in every Christian