Article #18 - Means for Promoting Moral Rectitude?

   “What are the most efficient means for promoting moral rectitude?” To attempt an answer such as this question justly demands would be to enter upon a wide field of investigation. It would lay hold of some of the highly venerated usages of our fathers, and the equally popular institutions of our own times. It would arraign first the church – first because it ever stands formost [sic] in the affections of the people, and highest in its proffession [sic] of right. Who is there but feels the base tone of the popular theology that teaches that judgement is not executed

on this earth, that the good suffer and the evil triumph and which separates religion from practical

works of goodness and holding out the idea that man may by strict adherence to church ritual secure to himself salvation, separate and apart from his daily actions – well knowing, as we do, the power & strength of the religious sentiment, and the influence of the church upon the great mass of mind is not this of itself sufficient to open wide the floodgates of injustice and immorality – but men are wiser than they know – and they feel that underneath the accumulated dross of doubt, scepticism and speculative theology lies like a great strata of golden ore in their hearts the internal conviction of their moral accountability – to a great over reeling ?? power. Therefore as a means of promoting moral rectitude I would have the minds of children early and effectually imbued with this great principle of individual responsibiity – teach them to separate church organization from the living principle of truth in their own minds, that crime and punishment grow upon one stem – that the punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which conceals it. The miser feels too late that altho he has piled high his hoards of treasure he has beggered [sic]

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