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Hundreds of ministers
and priests and pious editors have preached, from the terrible deed
of Leon Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, sermons on the
disastrous results of unbelief and a system of non-religious education.
The situation in which the facts regarding the education and belief
of the murderer leave these argufiers almost excites our pity. Born
and reared a Roman Catholic, sent in his youth to a parochial school,
and never, so far as can be learned, an attendant on our “godless”
public schools, this man is mentally and morally a product of Christianity.
Perchance the wild theories of some revolutionary communist made
him a murderer, but it is the claim of the church that its teachings
render those who receive them immune from such influences. All the
pulpit oratory, all the priestly sophistry, all the editorial moralizing,
directed against Atheism and secular education on account of Czolgosz
proves to be so much wasted effort and falls into the category of
vain and aimless rhetoric when the truth is brought to view.
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