CHAPTER VIII.
WE are in the torture department. I shall not describe its sickening details. It contains all the vile instruments devised by Christians for producing physical agony—considered by our ancestors so very essential in their conversion of persons to faith in the unreasonable. While reflecting upon the indisputable fact that hundreds of thousands so suffered rather than profess to believe what they could not—or belie their reason—my heart leaps at thought of their courageous truth! and a feeling of happy pride rushes into my mind, knowing that in Australasia human beings have never suffered such cruel tests by civilized laws, in the name of the Infinite!—Also at knowing that we are entering a region of thought that will bring benevolence into our minds. The real religion—a religion not needing dungeons and red-hot pincers, but born of reason and real reverence for the Great Mind—having sincerity for basis, with bright hope in the future for everyone.
Creeds built on unreason, savagery and hypocrisy can nowhere stand. They must away into the black past, with other outcomes of our tiger blood! Ponder well, oh myth-men all. The sooner you bow to truth, the sooner will you know a nobility of happiness at present so unknown to you.
We stop before a case labelled "Appliances for voluntary torture, used chiefly by women. Some families of notably small minds continued the practices even to the end of the twentieth century, when they were finally abolished—some
