Page:The One Woman (1903).pdf/152

 "Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with their flag-staffs in the clouds.

"Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution established.

"The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world made.

"Steam and electricity have been applied to travel and speech, and the earth transformed into a whispering gallery. The cylinder press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned the brow of humanity with a coronet of light.

"But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods are the methods of their fathers—a solecism, stupid, irrational, immoral.

"The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt, rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of life.

"Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to be the friend of publicans and harlots.

"Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty and blood, flame, sword,