A Popular History Of Priestcraft In All Ages And Nations

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The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRIESTCRAFT IN ALL AGES. CHAPTER I. GENEBAL VIEW OF PBIE3TCSAFT. This unfortunate world has been blasted in all ages by two evil principles-Kingcraft and Priestcraft-that, taking advantage of human necessities, in themselves not hard-salutary, and even beneficial in their natural operation-the necessity of civil government, and that of spiritual instruction, have warped them cruelly from their own pure direction, and converted them into the most odious, the most terrible and disastrous scourges of our race. These malign powers have ever begun, as it were, at the wrong end of things. Kingcraft, seizing upon the office of civil government, not as the gift of popular choice, and to be filled for the good of nations, but with the desperate hand of physical violence, has proclaimed that it was not made for man, but man for it-that it possessed an inherent and divine right to rule, to trample upon men's hearts, to violate their dearest rights, to scatter their limbs and their blood at its pleasure upon the earth; and, in return for' its atrocities, to be worshipped on bended knee, and hailed as a god. Its horrors are on the face of every nation; its annals are written in gore in all civilized climes; and, where pen never was known, it has scored its terrors in the hearts of millions, and left its traces in deserts of everlasting desolation, and in the ferocious spirits of abused and brutalized hordes. What is all the history of this wretched planet but a mass of its bloody wrath and detestable oppressions, whereby it has converted earth into a hell; men into the worst of demons; and has turned the human mind from its natural pursuit of knowledge, and virtue, and social happiness, into a career of blind rage, bitter and foolish prejudices; an en- tailment of awful and crime-crea...

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