Sunday, introduced by Constantine the Great as a subject for the Jewish Sabbath, is in a mendacious way identified with it, and takes its name,—­and this in order that the commands of Jehovah for the Sabbath (that is, the day on which the Almighty had to rest from his six days’ labor, so that it is essentially the last day of the week), might be applied to the Christian Sunday, the dies solis, the first day of the week which the sun opens in glory, the day of devotion and joy.  The consequence of this fraud is that “Sabbath-breaking,” or “the desecration of the Sabbath,” that is, the slightest occupation, whether of business or pleasure, all games, music, sewing, worldly books, are on Sundays looked upon as great sins.  Surely the ordinary man must believe that if, as his spiritual guides impress upon him, he is only constant in “a strict observance of the holy Sabbath,” and is “a regular attendant at Divine Service,” that is, if he only invariably idles away his time on Sundays, and doesn’t fail to sit two hours in church to hear the same litany for the thousandth time and mutter it in tune with the others, he may reckon on indulgence in regard to those little peccadilloes which he occasionally allows himself.  Those devils in human form, the slave owners and slave traders in the Free States of North America (they should be called the Slave States) are, as a rule, orthodox, pious Anglicans who would consider it a grave sin to work on Sundays; and having confidence in this, and their regular attendance at church, they hope for eternal happiness.  The demoralizing tendency of religion is less problematical than its moral influence.  How great and how certain that moral influence must be to make amends for the enormities which religions, especially the Christian and Mohammedan religions, have produced and spread over the earth!  Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no conception! think of the crusades, a butchery lasting two hundred years and inexcusable, its war cry “It is the will of God,” its object to gain possession of the grave of one who preached love and sufferance! think of the cruel expulsion and extermination of the Moors and Jews from Spain! think of the orgies of blood, the inquisitions, the heretical tribunals, the bloody and terrible conquests of the Mohammedans in three continents, or those of Christianity in America, whose inhabitants were for the most part, and in Cuba entirely, exterminated.  According to Las Cases, Christianity murdered twelve millions in forty years, of course all in majorem Dei gloriam, and for the propagation of the Gospel, and because what wasn’t Christian wasn’t even looked upon as human!  I have, it is true, touched upon these matters before; but when in our day, we hear of Latest News from the Kingdom of God [Footnote:  A missionary paper, of which the 40th annual number appeared in 1856], we shall