# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S255
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Historical Notes of the Present Time. 255

set with pearls and diamonds, was laid on the altar and sprinkled with holy water by the Bishop of Newark. After the singing of a hymn he mounted the steps and fastened the crown on the head of an image of Mary, a copy of the Raphael Madonna preserved in the Vatican! —

That is what the poor, blind Romanists call worship!

Also a sign of the last time. To what diabolical depth the "apostasy" (2 Thess. 2:3) has already taken shape in whole circles in our time is shown by the following report, taken from the Missouri Republican of July 20, from the Age of Freedom, a periodical published at the Berlin Hights Free-Love Institution near Sandusky. The article in question in this periodical is devoted to the death of a member of this socialist association, who took his own life, and it comprises a letter left behind by the suicide and various addresses that were delivered over his body by "brothers" of the society.

In the letter the following passages are found: "I became a Free-Lover through the medium of Nichol's Monthly, while I was staying in Iowa. Then I heard through the Social Revolutionist of Berlin. I came to Berlin and found that it was my home; I had expected this."

"When things went badly for me in the world and I turned my eyes toward Berlin, I thought: 'In Berlin I will be happy; there I will find brave and loving and free men and women, and I will be happy.' And I have found the Berlin socialists as brave and free as I had expected; but I have discovered that no earthly, no outward circumstances can make me happy. I shut myself off from the world in order to save myself. But I cannot be saved, and now at last I cast myself into oblivion!"

"And none of you will say that I did wrong. You will say it is well. Indeed, on the contrary, it would be wrong if I wished to remain here, a burden to myself and to those around me. I am of no importance. Let me die, die, die!"

"And here I add my protest against marriage and pronounce my curse upon it. And I curse religion, and I curse God, the Father-Monster!"

So much from the letter of the suicide. Among the addresses we single out that of T. E. Tabor, a well-known spiritualist and Free-Lover. He refers to the curse which the suicide, with his last breath, pronounced upon religion and God, agrees with him in it, and declares God to be a monster of injustice and wickedness. He says:

"My heart's blood curdles at the thought. You may search the whole heathen world, from the blackest half-man of Ethiopia to the most cultivated Caucasian, and you could not find one so abominable, so inhuman, and so devilish. You might say that this is no true picture of God. He is the God for whose cause more blood has been shed than for all other causes combined — the God of the Bible — the God whom my brother has cursed."

"He is the God of the religion that sacrificed the life of my schoolmate in the Nashville Penitentiary, and that was the cause of a mother in the Queen City murdering her child. The God of the religion that upholds, on the one hand, the oppression and plundering of the poor, and on the other, the arrogance and vice of the rich; that suppresses and degrades women, tyrannizes them, and forces them to bring poor, sickly, miserable children into the world, who curse her while she lives, and who at last curse their people and their God, and die. Finally, he is the God who has created a terrible sea full of burning lava, in whose seething waves nine-tenths of the whole of mankind are to writhe in pain forever — and all of this because Adam, six thousand years ago, ate a forbidden apple."