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“Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.”

“One cannot walk in such regions, consciously without enlargement of thought. There are heights and valleys which, to those who seek them in a sympathetic spirit, are better " seats of learning " than any school or university in the land ; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life.”

“Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk with the mind”

“It may be well here to sum up, in the fewest possible words, the conclusions reached in this book: (I) That our present so called "Civilisation" is only a "manner of speaking," and is in fact quite a rude state as compared with what may already be foreseen. (2) That the basis of any real morality must be the sense of Kinship between all living beings. (3) That there can be no abiding national welfare until the extremes of Wealth and Poverty are abolished. (4) That Warfare will not be discontinued until we have ceased to honour soldiering as heroic. (5) That the Rights of Animals have henceforth to be considered; and that such practices as cruel sports, vivisection, and flesh eating are not compatible with civilised life. (6) That Free Thought is essential to progress, and that the religion of the future will be a belief in a Creed of Kinship, a charter of human and sub-human relationships.”