Sir—Your church, professing to be the original one from which all the other so-called Christian sects have sprung, calls for my attention next. You claim direct authority as the Church of Christ from St. Peter. Well, as far as Peter is concerned, I will admit this, for I am aware the key, which you boast of having received from him, was the secret of spiritual power by which your Church in former times was enabled to perform acts which, to the uninitiated, appeared miraculous, and which it falsely claimed as such. This power is now lost to your Church, although it is almost universally manifested outside the pale thereof, but where did Peter obtain the authority to constitute your Church alone, with all its pomp and ceremonies, as Christ's special Church? No doubt you will reply—from Jesus himself. I deny it, and facts bear me out. Jesus had no Vatican, cathedrals, nor churches; no highly decorated and paid cardinals and priests; he encouraged no high mass nor grand ceremonial displays; no painted pictures of saints, martyrs, or their mothers; no long set forms of public prayers in a language unknown to most of his listeners; on the contrary, he told his followers to take no scrip nor money when they went forth to preach the simple truths he taught, and exemplified, saying, the laborer was worthy of his food, or, in other words, "don't make a trade of religion, and if the simple but grand truths I have taught you do page 11 not command from your hearers the voluntary supply of the necessaries of life, don't preach them to them, but shake the dust of their streets off your feet." You may plead that you have no fixed salaries like the clergy of other denominations. I maintain, however, that your Church is, and has been supported by a system of black mail levied upon its followers, by your holding out to them false hopes, and by intimidation, through credulity and fear, which you have at all times made a special point of cultivating. As for public prayers, are we not told that Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their long prayers printed or written on the borders of their garments, standing at the corners of the streets, and did he not say, "when ye pray enter into your closets, and pray in secret, and that God Who seeth in secret shall reward thee openly"? As for claiming to be Deity, did he not rebuke those who even called him Good Master? saying, there was none good save God. When asked how to pray, did he say My Father but your God which art in heaven? no, he said, "Our Father which art in heaven," also, "I go to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God." He also frequently stated he was the Son of Man, but in no place did he say he was the Son of the Holy Ghost, and if he were God, as you assume he was, he could not be the son of Mary, nor of any other woman. Did he mention anything in his beautiful sermon on the mount, as reported, about the wrath of our merciful Heavenly Father to be appeased by himself being murdered, or about the sins of those then living, and of countless millions yet unborn, being washed out by his blood, or that his followers were to be redeemed through his martyrdom? No! he had better sense; he knew that as an earthly parent forgives the errors of his children so our Heavenly Father is always more ready to forgive our sins than we are to ask or receive, otherwise we should not exist. He also knew that his crucifixion, or the crucifixion of all the world, would not alter either in this life, or in that which is to come, the fixed and certain law of effect following cause, no more than the sacrifice of a thousand bullocks on a thousand Jewish altars would affect or change any other of nature's laws. Jesus was the great exemplar of mankind, not the Saviour of man. It is by following out the beautiful example he set us in his life, not by trusting to the effects of his cruel murder upon our souls, that we shall raise ourselves to the position of being worthy to be called the sons of God, remember this—Jesus said, "For I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done," &c.—John xiii., 15. You must be well aware that Jesus taught none of the absurd doctrines, which are diametrically opposed to, and not in accordance with, his simple truths, that some of his biographers and followers afterwards ascribed to him, hard to be understood, as Peter truly remarked. The learned and energetic Saul of Tarsus, afterwards designated St. Paul, never saw Jesus in this life, he only saw him in a vision, which had the effect of converting him to Spiritualism, and he, like Swedenborg, and many of those professing to be Spiritualists at the present day, tried his hand at improving the communications he received, mixing up his early Jewish sacrificial teachings therewith, and spoiling thereby, the cause which he meant to support. Jesus is reported to have said, that love to God and man, comprised all the law and the prophets, supposing he was addressing rational beings he page 12 did not think it necessary to add and use the reason God has given you in all things, as he himself did and acted up thereto. This utilization of the divine gift, is a commandment very much wanted in the present day, especially when we see the superstitious nonsense of the dark ages taught, in this falsely called enlightened ago as the eternal truth of God, but in this I fear you will not have the candour and magnanimity to agree with me, although you must be fully aware of its truth and rationality as well as I am.

By what authority, I ask, Sir, "did the early Fathers of the Church of Rome" constitute themselves as God's arbitrators, selecting from a number of old manuscripts, which were, and which were not His writings. I maintain it was the very height of arrogance for a lot of fallible men to presume to pronounce by their ipse dixit which were fallible writings, and which were infallible. Allow me to tell you that there is only one infallible, the Great Creator, who has given all men reason, but which so few have made use of, owing to the superstitious nonsense they have been taught under the name of religion. There is no infallible book, for God has never inspired any man direct; there is no infallible man, and I maintain, any one who claims to be so, must be antechrist, for Jesus, as I have before written, said there was none good but God, and I think you even will admit that, were it possible that a man could be infallible, he would require first of all to be good. What say you? We are told that that mythical being, Satan, was expelled from heaven for trying to be equal with God. Is not the claiming to be infallible an attribute pertaining to God alone, very much similar to Satan's pretensions? Surely you would be sorry to hear of your Pope meeting a like fate to Satan in the next world. He had better at once renounce infallibility, if Satan's case can be relied on as genuine.

You are nearer the mark, I am aware, in your notions regarding the future life with respect to the purgatorial state, than the Protestants, with their arbitrary notion, of either perfect purity and entré into the immediate presence of God, or utter depravity and prompt ushering into the company of the mythical monster called the Devil; but I consider you outdo Barnum, Barnum himself in selling absolution and in the granting of special indulgences; how you must enjoy the joke, when drinking your convivial glasses of wine together, as you talk over the confessions of your various dupes. I think you should give up the impanation of Deity notion, as the national education scheme is making it too dangerous to continue this doctrine of God, in a bit of bread much longer; in fact I wonder how you manage to get them to swallow the wafer even now. Can you tell me who first concocted this transubstantiation doctrine? It was worthy of St. Paul, whom I believe was the first to conceive the monstrous notion of the incarnation of Deity in person. I observe some one in America, has started afresh the old doctrine which had died out, of the re-incarnation of the soul. By the way, won't this, if it becomes popular, make a mull of the resurrection of the body theory? Just fancy several resuscitated bodies, and only one poor soul to divide amongst the lot!

But to be serious, for it is beyond a joke to think that in the nineteenth century people otherwise rational and well-educated allow such page 13 imbecile barbaric notions to have a footing at all. Do not the downright absurdities which man has tagged on to the simple teachings of Jesus, and the monstrous cruelties which were practised by your Church, under the name of religion, demonstrate beyond the possibility of doubt, that wrath is not an attribute of the Almighty's, so falsely ascribed to Him in the Bible? Surely, if He were revengeful, the absurdities imputed to Him by man in his ignorance, and the tortures inflicted in His name, have been more than sufficient to raise the wrath of Him, who is represented as saying—"Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." I may here, however, remark that I had no fear of my earthly father, who was a good man in many respects (although the prefix Rev. was fixed to his name), for I had too much love for him; so in like manner I have no fear of my merciful Heavenly Father, for I have greater love for Him, and I have truly experienced, that perfect love casteth out fear, so that I can say, since I have, as is open to all, had revealed to me the knowledge of the eternal truth of God as opposed to that of men or sects; I fear neither God, man, nor devil, for I know the first that He is love, that the second cannot injure my soul, its immortality having been proved and demonstrated to me beyond the possibility of doubt, and that as for the third, the only Devil which exists, is in man's own evili maginations. The result is, the truth has made me free, which will explain the off-band manner I now treat those absurdities which I formerly looked upon with such superstitious awe and reverence. From your stand-point I may appear worse than an infidel, but this does not affect me. All reformers are veiwed in this light at first, but when you have gained a knowledge of the eternal truth you will think otherwise.