Page:Prison-Life Thoughts.djvu/26

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PRISON-LIFE THOUGHTS.

face), are you valued by this barbarous, heathenish, degenerate, sectarian, and political age! Who dare gainsay my Progressive Christian doctrines?


I do love sincere and zealously pious people! There is nothing that can adorn the human temple, and make it beautiful, even to the blessed image of God, except genuine piety; but this kind of piety is not the same kind that is taught in fashionable and bigoted sectarian churches,—it is the piety which causes the disciple to return to truth, nature, God, and Christ.


If gossipers, sots, epicures, and usurpers go to heaven, then I pray to be permitted to go elsewhere; because they would generate such smells, sensations, and commotions that would, to me indeed, be worse than a decent hell!


Of all contemptible men, he who uses religion as a cloak to cover up his vices,