necessitating further alterations of the scriptures, the righteous were
promised "eternal life" in the Paradise of God beyond the stars; and,
While consigning great sinners to "everlasting punishment" in the
Tartarian fires of the under world, the less venial were to expiate
their crimes in the same old Purgatory. Thus, having invented an
endless heaven and an endless hell for purely spiritual souls, and
neglecting to expunge the doctrines of the resurrection of the body,
the setting up of the kingdom of heaven upon a reorganized earth and
other materialistic teachings of the ancient religion, they made of the
creed and scriptures such a conglomeration of "things new and old"
that, without the Astrological key, it would be impossible to determine
what they originally taught.

At the Reformation in the 16th century Luther and his coadjutors, while
projecting into the Protestant creed all the cardinal tenets of
Catholicism, excepting that of Purgatory, made no change in the
verbiage of the scriptures. Thus retaining the awful doctrine of
endless hell, the reformers constructed a creed which they intended for
the government of Protestants for all time; but, doing what had never
been done before in the history of the world, they gave the scriptures
to the laity, and, whether or not they secured the right of private
judgment or individual interpretation, it has been taken all the same;
and thus opening the door to investigation, it must ultimately result
not only in the abrogation of hell, but in the relegation to the limbo
of oblivion of the whole dogmatic element of religion.

As a fitting conclusion to this article, we again direct the attention
of our readers to the subject of the primary source of religious
dogmas. Prior to the establishment of Christianity as the state
religion of the Roman Empire, the philosophers who wrote against it