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"Is it?" said the old chap. "Well, if they will take the judgment in cattle, it is the easiest way I can pay it."

But they know no more about final judgments than they did about the lake of fire and brimstone which commenced to drain off in Columbus' day. Science has vaporized the notion of a future judgment by the same method it has that of a past Creation. From the facts, it has learned laws. But credulity is always half-hearted with facts. It does not know enough of truth to love it. It is ever glowing over and setting up as a dogma the little it knows, or assumes to know, of the truth of former times. It has no faith in the newly discovered, because it knows nothing of it.

Hence, age after age we see the spectacle of men who have not studied the science of their own day denouncing it in pulpit and councils; of men who have steeped themselves in the traditions of the past pronouncing shallow invectives against the demonstrations of (science) the present.

Many church people say immortality must be true, or the great majority would not believe in it. But do they? They do not talk or write as if they did. If language means anything, I think the majority believe in annihilation. Most people speak of the dead body of a man as though it were the man. They say, "He was buried at Greenwood," or, "She was cremated at Forest Hills." And we hear the "late" Mr. Smith left an immense fortune. If Mr. Smith still exists, why do they say the late Mr. Smith? If people didn't believe that the soul and body are one, and that life ceases and mind expires when the body dies, why do they say, "They were"? What little the Church has learned has been by main force so to speak.