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Extracts.

So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth an such is not possible. The sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety, unmans the nature, and allows no thorough, calm thinking, no truly noble, disinterested feeling.—Westminster Reviewer.

We honour God before the Church; God's law in our hearts before any law in a book; a godlike man before an ungodlike priest. God, and virtue, and conscience are venerable primarily, in their own right. The Church, the Bible, the priest must prove themselves first to be God's Church, a true Bible, a virtuous priest, and then we will give them the secondary reverence they deserve from such relation. Just in proportion, and neither more nor less, that anything is united with God and goodness, in so far and no more, is it deserving of our reverence.—F. P. Cobbe.

He who would banish priests from the Church must first banish miracles from religion.—Strauss.

He who cannot reason is a fool; he who dare not reason is a coward; he who will not reason is a bigot; but he who can and dare reason is a man.—Dods.

We live in the midst ef religious machinery. Many mechanics at piety, often apprentices an I slow to learn, are turning the various ecclesiastical mills, and the creak of the motion is thought "the voice of God." You put into the hopper a crowd of persons, young and old, and soon they are ground out into the common run of Christians, sacked up, and stowed away for safe keeping in the appropriate bins of the great ecclesiastical establishment, and labelled with their party names. You look about in what is drily called "the religious world." What a mass of machinery is there, of dead timber, not green trees! What a jar and discord of iron clattering upon iron! Act ion is of machinery, not of life, and it is green new life that you want.—Theodore Parker.