of physical supplies and, stifling the cries of passion, retires into a cave or cell, and into himself, thus totally ignoring all the necessary activities attending the development of this planet and of the human race.  He may thus reach a high altitude of purely spiritual perception; but it is, after all, a sublimated selfishness.  His example is of no benefit to the world’s workers.  He is not of those who think and feel, and who are in the way of divulging esoteric knowledges to the quest of the vast army of earnest seekers after light upon these underlying laws of human life.

For the control by man of the love, and the life of woman there is a cut-and-dried sentiment and an enforced law concerning the segregated exercise of a natural function.  By her acceptance, or rejection of this onesided “morale,” is woman judged pure or impure, blessed or cursed, as the case may be.  If this rule could be enforced equally upon both sexes, if there were not two distinct sets of moral laws, one for man, and quite another for woman, there would be no such injustice.  As it is, there is but one way left open for woman.  She must develop the power and will to be a law unto herself, regardless of the suspicion, and brutality of man, and with this also indifference to the foolness and the weak protest of her fellow slaves—­women.  These are “long, long thoughts.”  Ages must elapse ere the males of our kind will have evoluted up to a status where they will see that through justice to woman alone can they secure to themselves any degree of worthy, or lasting happiness, or satisfaction.

NATURAL CRUELTY OF THE UNDEVELOPED.

The most unaccountable phase of the minds of the leaders of religions has been their persistent effort to make their fellow beings wretched and miserable instead of glad and happy.  We expect savagery from the Comanchee Indians and other primitive tribes and races; but from self-styled Christians the history of their cruelties is astounding.  It is pure devil worship—­that is what it is—­if they but knew it.

One of the beautiful plans of theologians and priests for scaring half-witted people into their individual folds has been telling them that they were in danger of committing the most dreadful of all sins, the “sin against the Holy Ghost.”  The utterly “unpardonable sin” of all sins.  This blasphemous, fiendish proposition has frightened numbers of half-baked folks, and they have pestered their small modicum of brains over this mysterious say-so of priests and parsons even to the point of committing suicide, or of landing themselves in lunatic asylums.

THE WORST SIN.

The much speculated over “sin against the Holy Ghost,” the so-called “unpardonable sin” is the sin that men and women commit against themselves; for the most holy of all ghosts, or spirits, is that portion of God—­the universal Spirit—­embodied in their own separate personalities, and it is only “unpardonable” in that it sets the soul back from its possible and intended progress toward its ultimate perfection.