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The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 04 (of 12)

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Title: The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 04 (of 12)

Author: Robert Green Ingersoll


        
Release date: February 9, 2012 [eBook #38804]

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, VOL. 04 (OF 12) ***




Produced by David Widger







THE WORKS OF ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

By Robert G. Ingersoll

"The Hands That Help Are Better Far Than Lips That Pray."

In Twelve Volumes, Volume IV.

1900

THE DRESDEN EDITION



CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV.

WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC.

(1896.)

I. Influence of Birth in determining Religious Belief--Scotch, Irish,
English, and Americans Inherit their Faith--Religions of Nations
not Suddenly Changed--People who Knew--What they were Certain
About--Revivals--Character of Sermons Preached--Effect of Conversion--A
Vermont Farmer for whom Perdition had no Terrors--The Man and his
Dog--Backsliding and Re-birth--Ministers who were Sincere--A Free Will
Baptist on the Rich Man and Lazarus--II. The Orthodox God--The
Two Dispensations--The Infinite Horror--III. Religious Books--The
Commentators--Paley's Watch Argument--Milton, Young, and Pollok--IV.
Studying Astronomy--Geology--Denial and Evasion by the Clergy--V. The
Poems of Robert Burns--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Shakespeare--VI.
Volney, Gibbon, and Thomas Paine--Voltaire's Services to Liberty--Pagans
Compared with Patriarchs--VII. Other Gods and Other Religions--Dogmas,
Myths, and Symbols of Christianity Older than our Era--VIII. The Men
of Science, Humboldt, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Haeckel--IX. Matter and
Force Indestructible and Uncreatable--The Theory of Design--X. God an
Impossible Being--The Panorama of the Past--XI. Free from Sanctified
Mistakes and Holy Lies.

THE TRUTH.

(1897.)

I. The Martyrdom of Man--How is Truth to be Found--Every Man should be
Mentally Honest--He should be Intellectually Hospitable--Geologists,
Chemists, Mechanics, and Professional Men are Seeking for the Truth--II.
Those who say that Slavery is Better than Liberty--Promises are not
Evidence--Horace Greeley and the Cold Stove--III. "The Science of
Theology" the only Dishonest Science--Moses and Brigham Young--Minds
Poisoned and Paralyzed in Youth--Sunday Schools and Theological
Seminaries--Orthodox Slanderers of Scientists--Religion has nothing
to do with Charity--Hospitals Built in Self-Defence--What Good has the
Church Accomplished?--Of what use are the Orthodox Ministers, and
What are they doing for the Good of Mankind--The Harm they are
Doing--Delusions they Teach--Truths they Should Tell about the
Bible--Conclusions--Our Christs and our Miracles.

HOW TO REFORM MANKIND.

(1896.)

I. "There is no Darkness but Ignorance"--False Notions Concerning
All Departments of Life--Changed Ideas about Science, Government and
Morals--II. How can we Reform the World?--Intellectual Light the First
Necessity--Avoid Waste of Wealth in War--III. Another Waste--Vast Amount
of Money Spent on the Church--IV. Plow can we Lessen Crime?--Frightful
Laws for the Punishment of Minor Crimes--A Penitentiary should be a
School--Professional Criminals should not be Allowed to Populate the
Earth--V. Homes for All-Make a Nation of Householders--Marriage
and Divorce-VI. The Labor Question--Employers cannot Govern
Prices--Railroads should Pay Pensions--What has been Accomplished
for the Improvement of the Condition of Labor--VII. Educate the
Children--Useless Knowledge--Liberty cannot be Sacrificed for the Sake
of Anything--False worship of Wealth--VIII. We must Work and Wait.

A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

(1897.)

I. Our fathers Ages Ago--From Savagery to Civilization--For the
Blessings we enjoy, Whom should we Thank?--What Good has the Church
Done?-Did Christ add to the Sum of Useful Knowledge--The Saints--What
have the Councils and Synods Done?--What they Gave us, and What they
did Not--Shall we Thank them for the Hell Here and for the Hell of
the Future?--II. What Does God Do?--The Infinite Juggler and his
Puppets--What the Puppets have Done--Shall we Thank these
Gods?--Shall we Thank Nature?--III. Men who deserve our Thanks--The
Infidels, Philanthropists and Scientists--The Discoverers and
Inventors--Magellan--Copernicus--Bruno--Galileo--Kepler, Herschel,
Newton, and LaPlace--Lyell--What the Worldly have Done--Origin and
Vicissitudes of the Bible--The Septuagint--Investigating the Phenomena
of Nature--IV. We thank the Good Men and Good Women of the Past--The
Poets, Dramatists, and Artists--The Statesmen--Paine, Jefferson,
Ericsson, Lincoln. Grant--Voltaire, Humboldt, Darwin.

A LAY SERMON.

(1886.)

Prayer of King Lear--When Honesty wears a Rag and Rascality a Robe-The
Nonsense of "Free Moral Agency "--Doing Right is not Self-denial-Wealth
often a Gilded Hell--The Log House--Insanity of Getting
More--Great Wealth the Mother of Crime--Separation of Rich and
Poor--Emulation--Invention of Machines to Save Labor--Production and
Destitution--The Remedy a Division of the Land--Evils of Tenement
Houses--Ownership and Use--The Great Weapon is the Ballot--Sewing
Women--Strikes and Boycotts of No Avail--Anarchy, Communism, and
Socialism--The Children of the Rich a Punishment for Wealth--Workingmen
Not a Danger--The Criminals a Necessary Product--Society's Right
to Punish--The Efficacy of Kindness--Labor is Honorable--Mental
Independence.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF FAITH.

(1895.)

I. The Old Testament--Story of the Creation--Age of the Earth and
of Man--Astronomical Calculations of the Egyptians--The Flood--The
Firmament a Fiction--Israelites who went into Egypt--Battles of the
Jews--Area of Palestine--Gold Collected by David for the Temple--II. The
New Testament--Discrepancies about the Birth of Christ--Herod and
the Wise Men--The Murder of the Babes of Bethlehem--When was Christ
born--Cyrenius and the Census of the World--Genealogy of Christ
according to Matthew and Luke--The Slaying of Zacharias--Appearance of
the Saints at the Crucifixion--The Death of Judas Iscariot--Did
Christ wish to be Convicted?--III. Jehovah--IV. The Trinity--The
Incarnation--Was Christ God?--The Trinity Expounded--"Let us pray"--V.
The Theological Christ--Sayings of a Contradictory Character--Christ a
Devout Jew--An ascetic--His Philosophy--The Ascension--The Best that Can
be Said about Christ--The Part that is beautiful and Glorious--The Other
Side--VI. The Scheme of Redemption--VII. Belief--Eternal Pain--No Hope
in Hell, Pity in Heaven, or Mercy in the Heart of God--VIII. Conclusion.

SUPERSTITION.

(1898.)

I. What is Superstition?--Popular Beliefs about the Significance
of Signs, Lucky and Unlucky Numbers, Days, Accidents, Jewels,
etc.--Eclipses, Earthquakes, and Cyclones as Omens--Signs and Wonders
of the Heavens--Efficacy of Bones and Rags of Saints--Diseases and
Devils--II. Witchcraft--Necromancers--What is a Miracle?--The Uniformity
of Nature--III. Belief in the Existence of Good Spirits or Angels--God
and the Devil--When Everything was done by the Supernatural--IV. All
these Beliefs now Rejected by Men of Intelligence--The Devil's Success
Made the Coming of Christ a Necessity--"Thou shalt not Suffer a Witch
to Live"--Some Biblical Angels--Vanished Visions--V. Where are Heaven
and Hell?--Prayers Never Answered--The Doctrine of Design--Why Worship
our Ignorance?--Would God Lead us into Temptation?--President McKinley's
Thanks giving for the Santiago Victory--VI. What Harm Does Superstition
Do?--The Heart Hardens and the Brain Softens--What Superstition has Done
and Taught--Fate of Spain--Of Portugal, Austria, Germany--VII. Inspired
Books--Mysteries added to by the Explanations of Theologians--The
Inspired Bible the Greatest Curse of Christendom--VIII. Modifications
of Jehovah--Changing the Bible--IX. Centuries of Darkness--The Church
Triumphant--When Men began to Think--X. Possibly these Superstitions are
True, but We have no Evidence--We Believe in the Natural--Science is the
Real Redeemer.

THE DEVIL.

(1899.)

I. If the Devil should Die, would God Make Another?--How was the Idea
of a Devil Produced--Other Devils than Ours--Natural Origin of these
Monsters--II. The Atlas of Christianity is The Devil--The Devil of the
Old Testament--The Serpent in Eden--"Personifications" of Evil--Satan
and Job--Satan and David--III. Take the Devil from the Drama
of Christianity and the Plot is Gone--Jesus Tempted by the Evil
One--Demoniac Possession--Mary Magdalene--Satan and Judas--Incubi
and Succubi--The Apostles believed in Miracles and Magic--The Pool of
Bethesda--IV. The Evidence of the Church--The Devil was forced to
Father the Failures of God--Belief of the Fathers of the Church
in Devils--Exorcism at the Baptism of an Infant in the Sixteenth
Century--Belief in Devils made the Universe a Madhouse presided over by
an Insane God--V. Personifications of the Devil--The Orthodox Ostrich
Thrusts his Head into the Sand--If Devils are Personifications so are
all the Other Characters of the Bible--VI. Some Queries about the
Devil, his Place of Residence, his Manner of Living, and his Object in
Life--Interrogatories to the Clergy--VII. The Man of Straw the Master
of the Orthodox Ministers--His recent Accomplishments--VIII. Keep the
Devils out of Children--IX. Conclusion.--Declaration of the Free.

PROGRESS.

(1860-64.)

The Prosperity of the World depends upon its Workers--Veneration for the
Ancient--Credulity and Faith of the Middle Ages--Penalty for Reading
the Scripture in the Mother Tongue--Unjust, Bloody, and Cruel Laws--The
Reformers too were Persecutors--Bigotry of Luther and Knox--Persecution
of Castalio--Montaigne against Torture in France--"Witchcraft" (chapter
on)--Confessed Wizards--A Case before Sir Matthew Hale--Belief
in Lycanthropy--Animals Tried and Executed--Animals received
as Witnesses--The Corsned or Morsel of Execution--Kepler an
Astrologer--Luther's Encounter with the Devil--Mathematician
Stoefflers, Astronomical Prediction of a Flood--Histories Filled with
Falsehood--Legend about the Daughter of Pharaoh invading Scotland and
giving the Country her name--A Story about Mohammed--A History of the
Britains written by Archdeacons--Ingenuous Remark of Eusebius--Progress
in the Mechanic Arts--England at the beginning of the Eighteenth
Century--Barbarous Punishments--Queen Elizabeth's Order Concerning
Clergymen and Servant Girls--Inventions of Watt, Arkwright, and
Others--Solomon's Deprivations--Language (chapter on)--Belief that the
Hebrew was< the original Tongue--Speculations about the Language
of Paradise--Geography (chapter on)--The Works of Cosmas--Printing
Invented--Church's Opposition to Books--The Inquisition--The
Reformation--"Slavery" (chapter on)--Voltaire's Remark on Slavery as
a Contract--White Slaves in Greece, Rome, England, Scotland, and
France--Free minds make Free Bodies--Causes of the Abolition of White
Slavery in Europe--The French Revolution--The African Slave Trade,
its Beginning and End--Liberty Triumphed (chapter head)--Abolition of
Chattel Slavery--Conclusion.

WHAT IS RELIGION?

(1899.)

I. Belief in God and Sacrifice--Did an Infinite God Create the Children
of Men and is he the Governor of the Universe?--II. If this God Exists,
how do we Know he is Good?--Should both the Inferior and the Superior
thank God for their Condition?--III. The Power that Works for
Righteousness--What is this Power?--The Accumulated Experience of the
World is a Power Working for Good?--Love the Commencement of the Higher
Virtues--IV. What has our Religion Done?--Would Christians have been
Worse had they Adopted another Faith?--V. How Can Mankind be Reformed
Without Religion?--VI. The Four Corner-stones of my Theory--VII. Matter
and Force Eternal--Links in the Chain of Evolution--VIII. Reform--The
Gutter as a Nursery--Can we Prevent the Unfit from Filling the World
with their Children?--Science must make Woman the Owner and Mistress
of Herself--Morality Born of Intelligence--IX. Real Religion and Real
Worship.




WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC.


I.

FOR the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits
and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments,
depend on where we were born. We are moulded and fashioned by our
surroundings.

Environment is a sculptor--a painter.

If we had been born in Constantinople, the most of us would have said:
"There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet." If our parents
had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of
Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana.

As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and
take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough
for them.

Most people love peace. They do not like to differ with their neighbors.
They like company. They are social. They enjoy traveling on the highway
with the multitude. They hate to walk alone.

The Scotch are Calvinists because their fathers were. The Irish are
Catholics because their fathers were. The English are Episcopalians
because their fathers were, and the Americans are divided in a hundred
sects because their fathers were. This is the general rule, to which
there are many exceptions. Children sometimes are superior to their
parents, modify their ideas, change their customs, and arrive at
different conclusions. But this is generally so gradual that the
departure is scarcely noticed, and those who change usually insist that
they are still following the fathers.

It is claimed by Christian historians that the religion of a nation was
sometimes suddenly changed, and that millions of Pagans were made into
Christians by the command of a king. Philosophers do not agree with
these historians. Names have been changed, altars have been overthrown,
but opinions, customs and beliefs remained the same. A Pagan, beneath
the drawn sword of a Christian, would probably change his religious
views, and a Christian, with a scimitar above his head, might suddenly
become a Mohammedan, but as a matter of fact both would remain exactly
as they were before--except in speech.

Belief is not subject to the will. Men think as they must. Children
do not, and cannot, believe exactly as they were taught. They are not
exactly like their parents. They differ in temperament, in experience,
in capacity, in surroundings. And so there is a continual, though almost
imperceptible change. There is development, conscious and unconscious
growth, and by comparing long periods of time we find that the old
has been almost abandoned, almost lost in the new. Men cannot remain
stationary. The mind cannot be securely anchored. If we do not advance,
we go backward. If we do not grow, we decay. If we do not develop, we
shrink and shrivel.

Like the most of you, I was raised among people who knew--who were
certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They
knew that they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess--no
perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of
things. They knew that God commenced to create one Monday morning,
four thousand and four years before Christ. They knew that in the
eternity--back of that morning, he had done nothing. They knew that it
took him six days to make the earth--all plants, all animals, all life,
and all the globes that wheel in space. They knew exactly what he did
each day and when he rested. They knew the origin, the cause of evil, of
all crime, of all disease and death.

They not only knew the beginning, but they knew the end. They knew that
life had one path and one road. They knew that the path, grass-grown and
narrow, filled with thorns and nettles, infested with vipers, wet with
tears, stained by bleeding feet, led to heaven, and that the road, broad
and smooth, bordered with fruits and flowers, filled with laughter and
song and all the happiness of human love, led straight to hell. They
knew that God was doing his best to make you take the path and that the
Devil used every art to keep you in the road.

They knew that there was a perpetual battle waged between the great
Powers of good and evil for the possession of human souls. They knew
that many centuries ago God had left his throne and had been born a
babe into this poor world--that he had suffered death for the sake of
man--for the sake of saving a few. They also knew that the human heart
was utterly depraved, so that man by nature was in love with wrong and
hated God with all his might.

At the same time they knew that God created man in his own image and
was perfectly satisfied with his work. They also knew that he had been
thwarted by the Devil, who with wiles and lies had deceived the first
of human kind. They knew that in consequence of that, God cursed the man
and woman; the man with toil, the woman with slavery and pain, and both
with death; and that he cursed the earth itself with briers and thorns,
brambles and thistles. All these blessed things they knew. They knew
too all that God had done to purify and elevate the race. They knew all
about the Flood--knew that God, with the exception of eight, drowned
all his children--the old and young--the bowed patriarch and the dimpled
babe--the young man and the merry maiden--the loving mother and the
laughing child--because his mercy endureth forever. They knew too, that
he drowned the beasts and birds--everything that walked or crawled or
flew--because his loving kindness is over all his works. They knew that
God, for the purpose of civilizing his children, had devoured some with
earthquakes, destroyed some with storms of fire, killed some with
his lightnings, millions with famine, with pestilence, and sacrificed
countless thousands upon the fields of war. They knew that it was
necessary to believe these things and to love God. They knew that there
could be no salvation except by faith, and through the atoning blood of
Jesus Christ.

All who doubted or denied would be lost. To live a moral and honest
life--to keep your contracts, to take care of wife and child--to make a
happy home--to be a good citizen, a patriot, a just and thoughtful man,
was simply a respectable way of going to hell.

God did not reward men for being honest, generous and brave, but for the
act of faith. Without faith, all the so-called virtues were sins, and
the men who practiced these virtues, without faith, deserved to suffer
eternal pain.

All of these comforting and reasonable things were taught by the
ministers in their pulpits--by teachers in Sunday schools and by
parents at home. The children were victims. They were assaulted in the
cradle--in their mother's arms. Then, the schoolmaster carried on the
war against their natural sense, and all the books they read were filled
with the same impossible truths. The poor children were helpless. The
atmosphere they breathed was filled with lies--lies that mingled with
their blood.

In those days ministers depended on revivals to save souls and reform
the world.

In the winter, navigation having closed, business was mostly suspended.
There were no railways and the only means of communication were wagons
and boats. Generally the roads were so bad that the wagons were laid up
with the boats. There were no operas, no theatres, no amusement except
parties and balls. The parties were regarded as worldly and the balls
as wicked. For real and virtuous enjoyment the good people depended on
revivals.

The sermons were mostly about the pains and agonies of hell, the joys
and ecstasies of heaven, salvation by faith, and the efficacy of the
atonement. The little churches, in which the services were held, were
generally small, badly ventilated, and exceedingly warm. The emotional
sermons, the sad singing, the hysterical amens, the hope of heaven, the
fear of hell, caused many to lose the little sense they had. They became
substantially insane. In this condition they flocked to the "mourners
bench"--asked for the prayers of the faithful--had strange feelings,
prayed and wept and thought they had been "born again." Then they would
tell their experience--how wicked they had been--how evil had been their
thoughts, their desires, and how good they had suddenly become.

They used to tell the story of an old woman who, in telling her
experience, said:--"Before I was converted, before I gave my heart to
God, I used to lie and steal, but now, thanks to the grace and blood of
Jesus Christ, I have quit 'em both, in a great measure."

Of course all the people were not exactly of one mind. There were some
scoffers, and now and then some man had sense enough to laugh at
the threats of priests and make a jest of hell. Some would tell of
unbelievers who had lived and died in peace.

When I was a boy I heard them tell of an old farmer in Vermont. He was
dying. The minister was at his bedside--asked him if he was a Christian
--if he was prepared to die. The old man answered that he had made
no preparation, that he was not a Christian--that he had never done
anything but work. The preacher said that he could give him no hope
unless he had faith in Christ, and that if he had no faith his soul
would certainly be lost.

The old man was not frightened. He was perfectly calm. In a weak and
broken voice he said: "Mr. Preacher, I suppose you noticed my farm. My
wife and I came here more than fifty years ago. We were just married. It
was a forest then and the land was covered with stones. I cut down the
trees, burned the logs, picked up the stones and laid the walls. My
wife spun and wove and worked every moment. We raised and educated our
children--denied ourselves. During all these years my wife never had a
good dress, or a decent bonnet. I never had a good suit of clothes. We
lived on the plainest food. Our hands, our bodies are deformed by toil.
We never had a vacation. We loved each other and the children. That is
the only luxury we ever had. Now I am about to die and you ask me if I
am prepared. Mr. Preacher, I have no fear of the future, no terror of
any other world. There may be such a place as hell--but if there is, you
never can make me believe that it's any worse than old Vermont."

So, they told of a man who compared himself with his dog. "My dog,"
he said, "just barks and plays--has all he wants to eat. He never
works--has no trouble about business. In a little while he dies, and
that is all. I work with all my strength. I have no time to play. I have
trouble every day. In a little while I will die, and then I go to hell.
I wish that I had been a dog."

Well, while the cold weather lasted, while the snows fell, the revival
went on, but when the winter was over, when the steamboat's whistle was
heard, when business started again, most of the converts "backslid" and
fell again into their old ways. But the next winter they were on hand,
ready to be "born again." They formed a kind of stock company, playing
the same parts every winter and backsliding every spring.

The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They
were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science
was the name of a vague dread--a dangerous enemy. They did not know
much, but they believed a great deal. To them hell was a burning
reality--they could see the smoke and flames. The Devil was no myth. He
was an actual person, a rival of God, an enemy of mankind. They thought
that the important business of this life was to save your soul--that
all should resist and scorn the pleasures of sense, and keep their
eyes steadily fixed on the golden gate of the New Jerusalem. They were
unbalanced, emotional, hysterical, bigoted, hateful, loving, and insane.
They really believed the Bible to be the actual word of God--a
book without mistake or contradiction. They called its cruelties,
justice--its absurdities, mysteries--its miracles, facts, and the
idiotic passages were regarded as profoundly spiritual. They dwelt on
the pangs, the regrets, the infinite agonies of the lost, and showed how
easily they could be avoided, and how cheaply heaven could be obtained.
They told their hearers to believe, to have faith, to give their hearts
to God, their sins to Christ, who would bear their burdens and make
their souls as white as snow.

All this the ministers really believed. They were absolutely certain. In
their minds the Devil had tried in vain to sow the seeds of doubt.

I heard hundreds of these evangelical sermons--heard hundreds of the
most fearful and vivid descriptions of the tortures inflicted in hell,
of the horrible state of the lost. I supposed that what I heard was true
and yet I did not believe it. I said: "It is," and then I thought: "It
cannot be."

These sermons made but faint impressions on my mind. I was not
convinced.

I had no desire to be "converted," did not want a "new heart" and had no
wish to be "born again."

But I heard one sermon that touched my heart, that left its mark, like a
scar, on my brain.

One Sunday I went with my brother to hear a Free Will Baptist preacher.
He was a large man, dressed like a farmer, but he was an orator. He
could paint a picture with words.

He took for his text the parable of "the rich man and Lazarus." He
described Dives, the rich man--his manner of life, the excesses in which
he indulged, his extravagance, his riotous nights, his purple and fine
linen, his feasts, his wines, and his beautiful women.

Then he described Lazarus, his poverty, his rags and wretchedness, his
poor body eaten by disease, the crusts and crumbs he devoured, the dogs
that pitied him. He pictured his lonely life, his friendless death.

Then, changing his tone of pity to one of triumph--leaping from tears
to the heights of exultation--from defeat to victory--he described the
glorious company of angels, who with white and outspread wings carried
the soul of the despised pauper to Paradise--to the bosom of Abraham.

Then, changing his voice to one of scorn and loathing, he told of the
rich man's death. He was in his palace, on his costly couch, the air
heavy with perfume, the room filled with servants and physicians. His
gold was worthless then. He could not buy another breath. He died, and
in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment.

Then, assuming a dramatic attitude, putting his right hand to his ear,
he whispered, "Hark! I hear the rich man's voice. What does he say?
Hark! 'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he
may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I
am tormented in this flame.'"

"Oh, my hearers, he has been making that request for more than eighteen
hundred years. And millions of ages hence that wail will cross the gulf
that lies between the saved and lost and still will be heard the cry:
'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may
dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am
tormented in this flame.'"

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain--appreciated
"the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination
grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It
is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God."

From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the
flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated
every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.


II.

FROM my childhood I had heard read and read the Bible. Morning and
evening the sacred volume was opened and prayers were said. The Bible
was my first history, the Jews were the first people, and the events
narrated by Moses and the other inspired writers, and those predicted
by prophets were the all important things. In other books were found the
thoughts and dreams of men, but in the Bible were the sacred truths of
God.

Yet in spite of my surroundings, of my education, I had no love for God.
He was so saving of mercy, so extravagant in murder, so anxious to kill,
so ready to assassinate, that I hated him with all my heart. At his
command, babes were butchered, women violated, and the white hair of
trembling age stained with blood. This God visited the people with
pestilence--filled the houses and covered the streets with the dying
and the dead--saw babes starving on the empty breasts of pallid mothers,
heard the sobs, saw the tears, the sunken cheeks, the sightless eyes,
the new made graves, and remained as pitiless as the pestilence.

This God withheld the rain--caused the famine--saw the fierce eyes of
hunger--the wasted forms, the white lips, saw mothers eating babes, and
remained ferocious as famine.

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or
respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really
civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

But in the old days the good people justified Jehovah in his treatment
of the heathen. The wretches who were murdered were idolaters and
therefore unfit to live.

According to the Bible, God had never revealed himself to these people
and he knew that without a revelation they could not know that he was
the true God. Whose fault was it then that they were heathen?

The Christians said that God had the right to destroy them because he
created them. What did he create them for? He knew when he made them
that they would be food for the sword. He knew that he would have the
pleasure of seeing them murdered.

As a last answer, as a final excuse, the worshipers of Jehovah said
that all these horrible things happened under the "old dispensation"
of unyielding law, and absolute justice, but that now under the "new
dispensation," all had been changed--the sword of justice had been
sheathed and love enthroned. In the Old Testament, they said, God is the
judge--but in the New, Christ is the merciful. As a matter of fact, the
New Testament is infinitely worse than the Old. In the Old there is no
threat of eternal pain. Jehovah had no eternal prison--no everlasting
fire. His hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his
enemy was dead.

In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of
punishment that has no end. In the New Testament the malice of God is
infinite and the hunger of his revenge eternal.

The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not
to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when smitten on one cheek to
turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same
loving lips, uttered these heartless, these fiendish words: "Depart ye
cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels."

These are the words of "eternal love."

No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite
horror.

All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and
famine, in fire and flood,--all the pangs and pains of every disease
and every death--all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be
endured by one lost soul.

This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice
of God--the mercy of Christ.

This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of
Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been
the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and
furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It
made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed
the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest
and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the
heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.

Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox
creed.

It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one
infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse.
Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this
Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice,
hatred, and revenge.

Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its
creator, God.

While I have life, as long as I draw breath, I shall deny with all my
strength, and hate with every drop of my blood, this infinite lie.

Nothing gives me greater joy than to know that this belief in eternal
pain is growing weaker every day--that thousands of ministers are
ashamed of it. It gives me joy to know that Christians are
becoming merciful, so merciful that the fires of hell are burning
low--flickering, choked with ashes, destined in a few years to die out
forever.

For centuries Christendom was a madhouse. Popes, cardinals, bishops,
priests, monks and heretics were all insane.

Only a few--four or five in a century were sound in heart and brain.
Only a few, in spite of the roar and din, in spite of the savage cries,
heard reason's voice. Only a few in the wild rage of ignorance, fear and
zeal preserved the perfect calm that wisdom gives.

We have advanced. In a few years the Christians will become--let us
hope--humane and sensible enough to deny the dogma that fills the
endless years with pain. They ought to know now that this dogma is
utterly inconsistent with the wisdom, the justice, the goodness of their
God. They ought to know that their belief in hell, gives to the Holy
Ghost--the Dove--the beak of a vulture, and fills the mouth of the Lamb
of God with the fangs of a viper.


III.

IN my youth I read religious books--books about God, about the
atonement--about salvation by faith, and about the other worlds. I
became familiar with the commentators--with Adam Clark, who thought that
the serpent seduced our mother Eve, and was in fact the father of Cain.
He also believed that the animals, while in the ark, had their natures'
changed to that degree that they devoured straw together and enjoyed
each other's society--thus prefiguring the blessed millennium. I read
Scott, who was such a natural theologian that he really thought
the story of Phaeton--of the wild steeds dashing across the
sky--corroborated the story of Joshua having stopped the sun and moon.
So, I read Henry and MacKnight and found that God so loved the world
that he made up his mind to damn a large majority of the human race. I
read Cruden, who made the great Concordance, and made the miracles as
small and probable as he could.

I remember that he explained the miracle of feeding the wandering Jews
with quails, by saying that even at this day immense numbers of quails
crossed the Red Sea, and that sometimes when tired, they settled on
ships that sank beneath their weight. The fact that the explanation
was as hard to believe as the miracle made no difference to the devout
Cruden.

To while away the time I read Calvin's Institutes, a book calculated to
produce, in any natural mind, considerable respect for the Devil.

I read Paley's Evidences and found that the evidence of ingenuity in
producing the evil, in contriving the hurtful, was at least equal to the
evidence tending to show the use of intelligence in the creation of what
we call good.

You know the watch argument was Paley's greatest effort. A man finds a
watch and it is so wonderful that he concludes that it must have had
a maker. He finds the maker and he is so much more wonderful than the
watch that he says he must have had a maker. Then he finds God, the
maker of the man, and he is so much more wonderful than the man that he
could _not_ have had a maker. This is what the lawyers call a departure
in pleading.

According to Paley there can be no design without a designer--but there
can be a designer without a design. The wonder of the watch suggested
the watchmaker, and the wonder of the watchmaker, suggested the creator,
and the wonder of the creator demonstrated that he was not created--but
was uncaused and eternal.

We had Edwards on The Will, in which the reverend author shows that
necessity has no effect on accountability--and that when God creates a
human being, and at the same time determines and decrees exactly what
that being shall do and be, the human being is responsible, and God in
his justice and mercy has the right to torture the soul of that human
being forever. Yet Edwards said that he loved God.

The fact is that if you believe in an infinite God, and also in eternal
punishment, then you must admit that Edwards and Calvin were absolutely
right. There is no escape from their conclusions if you admit their
premises. They were infinitely cruel, their premises infinitely absurd,
their God infinitely fiendish, and their logic perfect.

And yet I have kindness and candor enough to say that Calvin and Edwards
were both insane.

We had plenty of theological literature. There was Jenkyn on the
Atonement, who demonstrated the wisdom of God in devising a way in which
the sufferings of innocence could justify the guilty. He tried to show
that children could justly be punished for the sins of their ancestors,
and that men could, if they had faith, be justly credited with the
virtues of others. Nothing could be more devout, orthodox, and idiotic.
But all of our theology was not in prose. We had Milton with his
celestial militia--with his great and blundering God, his proud
and cunning Devil--his wars between immortals, and all the sublime
absurdities that religion wrought within the blind man's brain.

The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart. It was
accepted by New England, and it poisoned the souls and ruined the lives
of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make the theology of
Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there is nothing, outside
of the "sacred books," more perfectly absurd.

We had Young's Night Thoughts, and I supposed that the author was an
exceedingly devout and loving follower of the Lord. Yet Young had a
great desire to be a bishop, and to accomplish that end he electioneered
with the king's mistress. In other words, he was a fine old hypocrite.
In the "Night Thoughts" there is scarcely a genuinely honest, natural
line. It is pretence from beginning to end. He did not write what he
felt, but what he thought he ought to feel.

We had Pollok's Course of Time, with its worm that never dies, its
quenchless flames, its endless pangs, its leering devils, and its
gloating God. This frightful poem should have been written in a
madhouse. In it you find all the cries and groans and shrieks of
maniacs, when they tear and rend each other's flesh. It is as heartless,
as hideous, as hellish as the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy.

We all know the beautiful hymn commencing with the cheerful line:
"Hark from the tombs, a doleful sound." Nothing could have been more
appropriate for children. It is well to put a coffin where it can be
seen from the cradle. When a mother nurses her child, an open grave
should be at her feet. This would tend to make the babe serious,
reflective, religious and miserable.

God hates laughter and despises mirth. To feel free, untrammeled,
irresponsible, joyous,--to forget care and death--to be flooded with
sunshine without a fear of night--to forget the past, to have no thought
of the future, no dream of God, or heaven, or hell--to be intoxicated
with the present--to be conscious only of the clasp and kiss of the one
you love--this is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

But we had Cowper's poems. Cowper was sincere. He was the opposite
of Young. He had an observing eye, a gentle heart and a sense of the
artistic. He sympathized with all who suffered--with the imprisoned,
the enslaved, the outcasts. He loved the beautiful. No wonder that the
belief in eternal punishment made this loving soul insane. No wonder
that the "tidings of great joy" quenched Hope's great star and left his
broken heart in the darkness of despair.

We had many volumes of orthodox sermons, filled with wrath and the
terrors of the judgment to come--sermons that had been delivered by
savage saints.

We had the Book of Martyrs, showing that Christians had for many
centuries imitated the God they worshiped.

W|e had the history of the Waldenses--of the Reformation of the Church.
We had Pilgrim's Progress, Baxter's Call and Butler's Analogy.

To use a Western phrase or saying, I found that Bishop Butler dug
up more snakes than he killed--suggested more difficulties than he
explained--more doubts than he dispelled.


IV.

AMONG such books my youth was passed. All the seeds of Christianity--of
superstition, were sown in my mind and cultivated with great diligence
and care.

All that time I knew nothing of any science--nothing about the other
side--nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed
Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I
had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches,
of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their
arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated
by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in
spite of all I heard--of all I read, I could not quite believe. My brain
and heart said No.

For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and
delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a
little--I examined maps of the heavens--learned the names of some of the
constellations--of some of the stars--found something of their size and
the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits--obtained a faint
conception of astronomical spaces--found that some of the known stars
were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at
the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many
years to reach this little world--found that, compared with the great
stars, our earth was but a grain of sand--an atom--found that the old
belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for the benefit of
man, was infinitely absurd.

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of
creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired
book had no knowledge of astronomy--that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw
chief--as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author
of Genesis knew anything about the sun--its size? that he was acquainted
with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of
the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our
eyes, has been traveling for two million years?

If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked
nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of
the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars?

Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by
the Creator of all worlds.

Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been
paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by
an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts,
and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an
uninspired barbarian.

I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he
believed to be true--that he did the best he could. He did not claim
to be inspired--did not pretend that the story had been told to him by
Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them.

After I had learned a little about the stars I concluded that this
writer, this "inspired" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and
that he knew no more about creation than the average theologian of my
day. In other words, that he knew absolutely nothing.

And here, allow me to say that the ministers who are answering me are
turning their guns in the wrong direction. These reverend gentlemen
should attack the astronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler,
Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real
destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after having disposed of them,
they can wage a war against the stars, and against Jehovah himself for
having furnished evidence against the truthfulness of his book.

Then I studied geology--not much, just a little--just enough to find in
a general way the principal facts that had been discovered, and some of
the conclusions that had been reached. I learned something of the action
of fire--of water--of the formation of islands and continents--of
the sedimentary and igneous rocks--of the coal measures--of the chalk
cliffs, something about coral reefs--about the deposits made by rivers,
the effect of volcanoes, of glaciers, and of the all surrounding
sea--just enough to know that the Laurentian rocks were millions of ages
older than the grass beneath my feet--just enough to feel certain that
this world had been pursuing its flight about the sun, wheeling in light
and shade, for hundreds of millions of years--just enough to know that
the "inspired" writer knew nothing of the history of the earth--nothing
of the great forces of nature--of wind and wave and fire--forces that
have destroyed and built, wrecked and wrought through all the countless
years.

And let me tell the ministers again that they should not waste their
time in answering me. They should attack the geologists. They should
deny the facts that have been discovered. They should launch their
curses at the blaspheming seas, and dash their heads against the infidel
rocks.

Then I studied biology--not much--just enough to know something of
animal forms, enough to know that life existed when the Laurentian rocks
were made--just enough to know that implements of stone, implements that
had been formed by human hands, had been found mingled with the bones
of extinct animals, bones that had been split with these implements, and
that these animals had ceased to exist hundreds of thousands of years
before the manufacture of Adam and Eve.

Then I felt sure that the "inspired" record was false--that many
millions of people had been deceived and that all I had been taught
about the origin of worlds and men was utterly untrue. I felt that I
knew that the Old Testament was the work of ignorant men--that it was a
mingling of truth and mistake, of wisdom and foolishness, of cruelty and
kindness, of philosophy and absurdity--that it contained some
elevated thoughts, some poetry,---a good deal of the solemn and
commonplace,--some hysterical, some tender, some wicked prayers, some
insane predictions, some delusions, and some chaotic dreams.

Of course the theologians fought the facts found by the geologists, the
scientists, and sought to sustain the sacred Scriptures. They mistook
the bones of the mastodon for those of human beings, and by them proudly
proved that "there were giants in those days." They accounted for the
fossils by saying that God had made them to try our faith, or that the
Devil had imitated the works of the Creator.

They answered the geologists by saying that the "days" in Genesis were
long periods of time, and that after all the flood might have been
local. They told the astronomers that the sun and moon were not
actually, but only apparently, stopped. And that the appearance was
produced by the reflection and refraction of light.

They excused the slavery and polygamy, the robbery and murder upheld
in the Old Testament by saying that the people were so degraded that
Jehovah was compelled to pander to their ignorance and prejudice.

In every way the clergy sought to evade the facts, to dodge the truth,
to preserve the creed.

At first they flatly denied the facts--then they belittled them--then
they harmonized them--then they denied that they had denied them. Then
they changed the meaning of the "inspired" book to fit the facts.

At first they said that if the facts, as claimed, were true, the Bible
was false and Christianity itself a superstition. Afterward they said
the facts, as claimed, were true and that they established beyond all
doubt the inspiration of the Bible and the divine origin of orthodox
religion.

Anything they could not dodge, they swallowed, and anything they could
not swallow, they dodged.

I gave up the Old Testament on account of its mistakes, its absurdities,
its ignorance and its cruelty. I gave up the New because it vouched
for the truth of the Old. I gave it up on account of its miracles,
its contradictions, because Christ and his disciples believed in the
existence of devils--talked and made bargains with them, expelled them
from people and animals.

This, of itself, is enough. We know, if we know anything, that devils do
not exist--that Christ never cast them out, and that if he pretended to,
he was either ignorant, dishonest or insane. These stories about devils
demonstrate the human, the ignorant origin of the New Testament. I gave
up the New Testament because it rewards credulity, and curses brave and
honest men, and because it teaches the infinite horror of eternal pain.

V.

HAVING spent my youth in reading books about religion--about the "new
birth"--the disobedience of our first parents, the atonement, salvation
by faith, the wickedness of pleasure, the degrading consequences of
love, and the impossibility of getting to heaven by being honest and
generous, and having become somewhat weary of the frayed and raveled
thoughts, you can imagine my surprise, my delight when I read the poems
of Robert Burns.

I was familiar with the writings of the devout and insincere, the pious
and petrified, the pure and heartless. Here was a natural honest man. I
knew the works of those who regarded all nature as depraved, and looked
upon love as the legacy and perpetual witness of original sin. Here was
a man who plucked joy from the mire, made goddesses of peasant girls,
and enthroned the honest man. One whose sympathy, with loving arms,
embraced all forms of suffering life, who hated slavery of every kind,
who was as natural as heaven's blue, with humor kindly as an autumn day,
with wit as sharp as Ithuriel's spear, and scorn that blasted like the
simoon's breath. A man who loved this world, this life, the things of
every day, and placed above all else the thrilling ecstasies of human
love.

I read and read again with rapture, tears and smiles, feeling that a
great heart was throbbing in the lines.

The religious, the lugubrious, the artificial, the spiritual poets were
forgotten or remained only as the fragments, the half remembered horrors
of monstrous and distorted dreams.

I had found at last a natural man, one who despised his country's cruel
creed, and was brave and sensible enough to say: "All religions are auld
wives' fables, but an honest man has nothing to fear, either in this
world or the world to come."

One who had the genius to write Holy Willie's Prayer--a poem that
crucified Calvinism and through its bloodless heart thrust the spear
of common sense--a poem that made every orthodox creed the food of
scorn--of inextinguishable laughter.

Burns had his faults, his frailties. He was intensely human. Still, I
would rather appear at the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to
say that I was the author of "A man's a man for 'a that," than to
be perfectly sober and admit that I had lived and died a Scotch
Presbyterian.

I read Byron--read his Cain, in which, as in Paradise Lost, the Devil
seems to be the better god--read his beautiful, sublime and bitter
lines--read his Prisoner of Chillon--his best--a poem that filled my
heart with tenderness, with pity, and with an eternal hatred of tyranny.

I read Shelley's Queen Mab--a poem filled with beauty, courage, thought,
sympathy, tears and scorn, in which a brave soul tears down the prison
walls and floods the cells with light. I read his Skylark--a winged
flame--passionate as blood--tender as tears--pure as light.

I read Keats, "whose name was writ in water"--read St. Agnes Eve, a
story told with such an artless art that this poor common world is
changed to fairy land--the Grecian Urn, that fills the soul with ever
eager love, with all the rapture of imagined song--the Nightingale--a
melody in which there is the memory of morn--a melody that dies away in
dusk and tears, paining the senses with its perfectness.

And then I read Shakespeare, the plays, the sonnets, the poems--read
all. I beheld a new heaven and a new earth; Shakespeare, who knew the
brain and heart of man--the hopes and fears, the loves and hatreds,
the vices and the virtues of the human race; whose imagination read the
tear-blurred records, the blood-stained pages of all the past, and
saw falling athwart the outspread scroll the light of hope and love;
Shakespeare, who sounded every depth--while on the loftiest peak there
fell the shadow of his wings.

I compared the Plays with the "inspired" books--Romeo and Juliet with
the Song of Solomon, Lear with Job, and the Sonnets with the Psalms, and
I found that Jehovah did not understand the art of speech. I compared
Shakespeare's women--his perfect women--with the women of the Bible.
I found that Jehovah was not a sculptor, not a painter--not an
artist--that he lacked the power that changes clay to flesh--the art,
the plastic touch, that moulds the perfect form--the breath that gives
it free and joyous life--the genius that creates the faultless.

The sacred books of all the world are worthless dross and common stones
compared with Shakespeare's glittering gold and gleaming gems.


VI.

UP to this time I had read nothing against our blessed religion except
what I had found in Burns, Byron and Shelley. By some accident I read
Volney, who shows that all religions are, and have been, established in
the same way--that all had their Christs, their apostles, miracles and
sacred books, and then asked how it is possible to decide which is the
true one. A question that is still waiting for an answer.

I read Gibbon, the greatest of historians, who marshaled his facts as
skillfully as Caesar did his legions, and I learned that Christianity
is only a name for Paganism--for the old religion, shorn of its
beauty--that some absurdities had been exchanged for others--that some
gods had been killed--a vast multitude of devils created, and that hell
had been enlarged.

And then I read the Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Let me tell you
something about this sublime and slandered man. He came to this country
just before the Revolution. He brought a letter of introduction from
Benjamin Franklin, at that time the greatest American.

In Philadelphia, Paine was employed to write for the _Pennsylvania
Magazine_. We know that he wrote at least five articles. The first was
against slavery, the second against duelling, the third on the treatment
of prisoners--showing that the object should be to reform, not to punish
and degrade--the fourth on the rights of woman, and the fifth in favor
of forming societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and
animals.

From this you see that he suggested the great reforms of our century.

The truth is that he labored all his life for the good of his
fellow-men, and did as much to found the Great Republic as any man who
ever stood beneath our flag.

He gave his thoughts about religion--about the blessed Scriptures, about
the superstitions of his time. He was perfectly sincere and what he said
was kind and fair.

The Age of Reason filled with hatred the hearts of those who loved their
enemies, and the occupant of every orthodox pulpit became, and still is,
a passionate maligner of Thomas Paine.

No one has answered--no one will answer, his argument against the dogma
of inspiration--his objections to the Bible.

He did not rise above all the superstitions of his day. While he hated
Jehovah, he praised the God of Nature, the creator and preserver of all.
In this he was wrong, because, as Watson said in his Reply to Paine, the
God of Nature is as heartless, as cruel as the God of the Bible.

But Paine was one of the pioneers--one of the Titans, one of the
heroes, who gladly gave his life, his every thought and act, to free and
civilize mankind.

I read Voltaire--Voltaire, the greatest man of his century, and who did
more for liberty of thought and speech than any other being, human or
"divine." Voltaire, who tore the mask from hypocrisy and found behind
the painted smile the fangs of hate. Voltaire, who attacked the savagery
of the law, the cruel decisions of venal courts, and rescued victims
from the wheel and rack. Voltaire, who waged war against the tyranny of
thrones, the greed and heartlessness of power. Voltaire, who filled the
flesh of priests with the barbed and poisoned arrows of his wit and made
the pious jugglers, who cursed him in public, laugh at themselves
in private. Voltaire, who sided with the oppressed, rescued the
unfortunate, championed the obscure and weak, civilized judges, repealed
laws and abolished torture in his native land.

In every direction this tireless man fought the absurd, the miraculous,
the supernatural, the idiotic, the unjust. He had no reverence for the
ancient. He was not awed by pageantry and pomp, by crowned Crime or
mitered Pretence. Beneath the crown he saw the criminal, under the
miter, the hypocrite.

To the bar of his conscience, his reason, he summoned the barbarism and
the barbarians of his time. He pronounced judgment against them all,
and that judgment has been affirmed by the intelligent world. Voltaire
lighted a torch and gave to others the sacred flame. The light still
shines and will as long as man loves liberty and seeks for truth.

I read Zeno, the man who said, centuries before our Christ was born,
that man could not own his fellow-man.

"No matter whether you claim a slave by purchase or capture, the title
is bad. They who claim to own their fellow-men, look down into the pit
and forget the justice that should rule the world."

I became acquainted with Epicurus, who taught the religion of
usefulness, of temperance, of courage and wisdom, and who said: "Why
should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why
should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?"

I read about Socrates, who when on trial for his life, said, among other
things, to his judges, these wondrous words: "I have not sought during
my life to amass wealth and to adorn my body, but I have sought to adorn
my soul with the jewels of wisdom, patience, and above all with a love
of liberty."

So, I read about Diogenes, the philosopher who hated the
superfluous--the enemy of waste and greed, and who one day entered the
temple, reverently approached the altar, crushed a louse between the
nails of his thumbs, and solemnly said: "The sacrifice of Diogenes to
all the gods." This parodied the worship of the world--satirized all
creeds, and in one act put the essence of religion.

Diogenes must have know of this "inspired" passage--"Without the
shedding of blood there is no remission of sins."

I compared Zeno, Epicurus and Socrates, three heathen wretches who had
never heard of the Old Testament or the Ten Commandments, with Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, three favorites of Jehovah, and I was depraved enough
to think that the Pagans were superior to the Patriarchs--and to Jehovah
himself.


VII.

MY attention was turned to other religions, to the sacred books, the
creeds and ceremonies of other lands--of India, Egypt, Assyria, Persia,
of the dead and dying nations.

I concluded that all religions had the same foundation--a belief in
the supernatural--a power above nature that man could influence by
worship--by sacrifice and prayer.

I found that all religions rested on a mistaken conception of
nature--that the religion of a people was the science of that people,
that is to say, their explanation of the world--of life and death--of
origin and destiny.

I concluded that all religions had substantially the same origin, and
that in fact there has never been but one religion in the world. The
twigs and leaves may differ, but the trunk is the same.

The poor African that pours out his heart to his deity of stone is on an
exact religious level with the robed priest who supplicates his God. The
same mistake, the same superstition, bends the knees and shuts the eyes
of both. Both ask for supernatural aid, and neither has the slightest
thought of the absolute uniformity of nature.

It seems probable to me that the first organized ceremonial religion was
the worship of the sun. The sun was the "Sky Father," the "All Seeing,"
the source of life--the fireside of the world. The sun was regarded as a
god who fought the darkness, the power of evil, the enemy of man.

There have been many sun-gods, and they seem to have been the chief
deities in the ancient religions. They have been worshiped in many
lands--by many nations that have passed to death and dust.

Apollo was a sun-god and he fought and conquered the serpent of night.
Baldur was a sun-god. He was in love with the Dawn--a maiden. Chrishna
was a sun-god. At his birth the Ganges was thrilled from its source to
the sea, and all the trees, the dead as well as the living, burst into
leaf and bud and flower. Hercules was a sun-god and so was Samson, whose
strength was in his hair--that is to say, in his beams. He was shorn of
his strength by Delilah, the shadow--the darkness. Osiris, Bacchus, and
Mithra, Hermes, Buddha, and Quetzalcoatl, Prometheus, Zoroaster, and
Perseus, Cadom, Lao-tsze, Fo-hi, Horus and Rameses, were all sun-gods.

All of these gods had gods for fathers and their mothers were virgins.
The births of nearly all were announced by stars, celebrated by
celestial music, and voices declared that a blessing had come to the
poor world. All of these gods were born in humble places--in caves,
under trees, in common inns, and tyrants sought to kill them all
when they were babes. All of these sun-gods were born at the winter
solstice--on Christmas. Nearly all were worshiped by "wise men." All of
them fasted for forty days--all of them taught in parables--all of them
wrought miracles--all met with a violent death, and all rose from the
dead.

The history of these gods is the exact history of our Christ.

This is not a coincidence--an accident. Christ was a sun-god. Christ was
a new name for an old biography--a survival--the last of the sun-gods.
Christ was not a man, but a myth--not a life, but a legend.

I found that we had not only borrowed our Christ--but that all our
sacraments, symbols and ceremonies were legacies that we received from
the buried past. There is nothing original in Christianity.

The cross was a symbol thousands of years before our era. It was a
symbol of life, of immortality--of the god Agni, and it was chiseled
upon tombs many ages before a line of our Bible was written.

Baptism is far older than Christianity--than Judaism. The Hindus,
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had Holy Water long before a Catholic
lived. The eucharist was borrowed from the Pagans. Ceres was the goddess
of the fields--Bacchus of the vine. At the harvest festival they made
cakes of wheat and said: "This is the flesh of the goddess." They drank
wine and cried: "This is the blood of our god."

The Egyptians had a Trinity. They worshiped Osiris, Isis and Horus,
thousands of years before the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were known.

The Tree of Life grew in India, in China, and among the Aztecs, long
before the Garden of Eden was planted.

Long before our Bible was known, other nations had their sacred books.

The dogmas of the Fall of Man, the Atonement and Salvation by Faith, are
far older than our religion.

In our blessed gospel,--in our "divine scheme,"--there is nothing
new--nothing original. All old--all borrowed, pieced and patched.

Then I concluded that all religions had been naturally produced, and
that all were variations, modifications of one,--then I felt that I knew
that all were the work of man.


VIII.

THE theologians had always insisted that their God was the creator
of all living things--that the forms, parts, functions, colors and
varieties of animals were the expressions of his fancy, taste and
wisdom--that he made them all precisely as they are to-day--that he
invented fins and legs and wings--that he furnished them with the
weapons of attack, the shields of defence--that he formed them with
reference to food and climate, taking into consideration all facts
affecting life.

They insisted that man was a special creation, not related in any way
to the animals below him. They also asserted that all the forms of
vegetation, from mosses to forests, were just the same to-day as the
moment they were made.

Men of genius, who were for the most part free from religious prejudice,
were examining these things--were looking for facts. They were
examining the fossils of animals and plants--studying the forms of
animals--their bones and muscles--the effect of climate and food--the
strange modifications through which they had passed.

Humboldt had published his lectures--filled with great thoughts--with
splendid generalizations--with suggestions that stimulated the spirit
of investigation, and with conclusions that satisfied the mind. He
demonstrated the uniformity of Nature--the kinship of all that lives and
grows--that breathes and thinks.

Darwin, with his Origin of Species, his theories about Natural
Selection, the Survival of the Fittest, and the influence of
environment, shed a flood of light upon the great problems of plant and
animal life.

These things had been guessed, prophesied, asserted, hinted by many
others, but Darwin, with infinite patience, with perfect care and
candor, found the facts, fulfilled the prophecies, and demonstrated the
truth of the guesses, hints and assertions. He was, in my judgment, the
keenest observer, the best judge of the meaning and value of a fact, the
greatest Naturalist the world has produced.

The theological view began to look small and mean.

Spencer gave his theory of evolution and sustained it by countless
facts. He stood at a great height, and with the eyes of a philosopher,
a profound thinker, surveyed the world. He has influenced the thought of
the wisest.

Theology looked more absurd than ever.

Huxley entered the lists for Darwin. No man ever had a sharper sword--a
better shield. He challenged the world. The great theologians and the
small scientists--those who had more courage than sense, accepted the
challenge. Their poor bodies were carried away by their friends.

Huxley had intelligence, industry, genius, and the courage to express
his thought. He was absolutely loyal to what he thought was truth.
Without prejudice and without fear, he followed the footsteps of life
from the lowest to the highest forms.

Theology looked smaller still.

Haeckel began at the simplest cell, went from change to change--from
form to form--followed the line of development, the path of life,
until he reached the human race. It was all natural. There had been no
interference from without.

I read the works of these great men--of many others--and became
convinced that they were right, and that all the theologians--all the
believers in "special creation" were absolutely wrong.

The Garden of Eden faded away, Adam and Eve fell back to dust, the snake
crawled into the grass, and Jehovah became a miserable myth.


IX.

I TOOK another step. What is matter--substance? Can it be
destroyed--annihilated? Is it possible to conceive of the destruction of
the smallest atom of substance? It can be ground to powder--changed from
a solid to a liquid--from a liquid to a gas--but it all remains. Nothing
is lost--nothing destroyed.

Let an infinite God, if there be one, attack a grain of sand--attack
it with infinite power. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot surrender. It
defies all force. Substance cannot be destroyed.

Then I took another step.

If matter cannot be destroyed, cannot be annihilated, it could not have
been created.

The indestructible must be uncreateable.

And then I asked myself: What is force?

We cannot conceive of the creation of force, or of its destruction.
Force may be changed from one form to another--from motion to heat--but
it cannot be destroyed--annihilated.

If force cannot be destroyed it could not have been created. It is
eternal.

Another thing--matter cannot exist apart from force. Force cannot exist
apart from matter. Matter could not have existed before force. Force
could not have existed before matter. Matter and force can only be
conceived of together. This has been shown by several scientists, but
most clearly, most forcibly by Buechner.

Thought is a form of force, consequently it could not have caused or
created matter. Intelligence is a form of force and could not have
existed without or apart from matter. Without substance there could have
been no mind, no will, no force in any form, and there could have been
no substance without force.

Matter and force were not created. They have existed from eternity. They
cannot be destroyed.

There was, there is, no creator. Then came the question: Is there a
God? Is there a being of infinite intelligence, power and goodness, who
governs the world?

There can be goodness without much intelligence--but it seems to me
that perfect intelligence and perfect goodness must go together.

In nature I see, or seem to see, good and evil--intelligence and
ignorance--goodness and cruelty--care and carelessness--economy and
waste. I see means that do not accomplish the ends--designs that seem to
fail.

To me it seems infinitely cruel for life to feed on life--to create
animals that devour others.

The teeth and beaks, the claws and fangs, that tear and rend, fill me
with horror. What can be more frightful than a world at-war? Every leaf
a battle-field--every flower a Golgotha--in every drop of water pursuit,
capture and death. Under every piece of bark, life lying in wait for
life. On every blade of grass, something that kills,--something that
suffers. Everywhere the strong living on the weak--the superior on
the inferior. Everywhere the weak, the insignificant, living on
the strong--the inferior on the superior--the highest food for the
lowest--man sacrificed for the sake of microbes. Murder universal.
Everywhere pain, disease and death--death that does not wait for bent
forms and gray hairs, but clutches babes and happy youths. Death that
takes the mother from her helpless, dimpled child--death that fills the
world with grief and tears.

How can the orthodox Christian explain these things?

I know that life is good. I remember the sunshine and rain. Then I think
of the earthquake and flood. I do not forget health and harvest, home
and love--but what of pestilence and famine? I cannot harmonize all
these contradictions--these blessings and agonies--with the existence of
an infinitely good, wise and powerful God.

The theologian says that what we call evil is for our benefit--that we
are placed in this world of sin and sorrow to develop character. If
this is true I ask why the infant dies? Millions and millions draw a few
breaths and fade away in the arms of their mothers. They are not allowed
to develop character.

The theologian says that serpents were given fangs to protect themselves
from their enemies. Why did the God who made them, make enemies? Why is
it that many species of serpents have no fangs?

The theologian says that God armored the hippopotamus, covered his body,
except the under part, with scales and plates, that other animals could
not pierce with tooth or tusk. But the same God made the rhinoceros
and supplied him with a horn on his nose, with which he disembowels the
hippopotamus.

The same God made the eagle, the vulture, the hawk, and their helpless
prey.

On every hand there seems to be design to defeat design.

If God created man--if he is the father of us all, why did he make the
criminals, the insane, the deformed and idiotic?

Should the inferior man thank God? Should the mother, who clasps to her
breast an idiot child, thank God? Should the slave thank God?

The theologian says that God governs the wind, the rain, the lightning.
How then can we account for the cyclone, the flood, the drought, the
glittering bolt that kills?

Suppose we had a man in this country who could control the wind, the
rain and lightning, and suppose we elected him to govern these things,
and suppose that he allowed whole States to dry and wither, and at the
same time wasted the rain in the sea. Suppose that he allowed the winds
to destroy cities and to crush to shapelessness thousands of men and
women, and allowed the lightnings to strike the life out of mothers and
babes. What would we say? What would we think of such a savage?

And yet, according to the theologians, this is exactly the course
pursued by God.

What do we think of a man, who will not, when he has the power, protect
his friends? Yet the Christian's God allowed his enemies to torture and
burn his friends, his worshipers.

Who has ingenuity enough to explain this?

What good man, having the power to prevent it, would allow the innocent
to be imprisoned, chained in dungeons, and sigh against the dripping
walls their weary lives away?

If God governs the world, why is innocence not a perfect shield? Why
does injustice triumph?

Who can answer these questions?

In answer, the intelligent, honest man must say: I do not know.


X.

THIS God must be, if he exists, a person--a conscious being. Who can
imagine an infinite personality? This God must have force, and we cannot
conceive of force apart from matter. This God must be material. He must
have the means by which he changes force to what we call thought. When
he thinks he uses force, force that must be replaced. Yet we are told
that he is infinitely wise. If he is, he does not think. Thought is
a ladder--a process by which we reach a conclusion. He who knows all
conclusions cannot think. He cannot hope or fear. When knowledge is
perfect there can be no passion, no emotion. If God is infinite he does
not want. He has all. He who does not want does not act. The infinite
must dwell in eternal calm.

It is as impossible to conceive of such a being as to imagine a square
triangle, or to think of a circle without a diameter.

Yet we are told that it is our duty to love this God. Can we love the
unknown, the inconceivable? Can it be our duty to love anybody? It is
our duty to act justly, honestly, but it cannot be our duty to love. We
cannot be under obligation to admire a painting--to be charmed with a
poem--or thrilled with music. Admiration cannot be controlled. Taste
and love are not the servants of the will. Love is, and must be free. It
rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

For thousands of ages men and women have been trying to love the
gods--trying to soften their hearts--trying to get their aid.

I see them all. The panorama passes before me. I see them with
outstretched hands--with reverently closed eyes--worshiping the sun. I
see them bowing, in their fear and need, to meteoric stones--imploring
serpents, beasts and sacred trees--praying to idols wrought of wood and
stone. I see them building altars to the unseen powers, staining them
with blood of child and beast. I see the countless priests and hear
their solemn chants. I see the dying victims, the smoking altars, the
swinging censers, and the rising clouds. I see the half-god men--the
mournful Christs, in many lands. I see the common things of life change
to miracles as they speed from mouth to mouth. I see the insane prophets
reading the secret book of fate by signs and dreams. I see them
all--the Assyrians chanting the praises of Asshur and Ishtar--the Hindus
worshiping Brahma, Vishnu and Draupadi, the whitearmed--the Chaldeans
sacrificing to Bel and Hea--the Egyptians bowing to Ptah and Ra, Osiris
and Isis--the Medes placating the storm, worshiping the fire--the
Babylonians supplicating Bel and Morodach--I see them all by the
Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges and the Nile. I see the Greeks
building temples for Zeus, Neptune and Venus. I see the Romans kneeling
to a hundred gods. I see others spurning idols and pouring out their
hopes and fears to a vague image in the mind. I see the multitudes,
with open mouths, receive as truths the myths and fables of the vanished
years. I see them give their toil, their wealth to robe the priests, to
build the vaulted roofs, the spacious aisles, the glittering domes. I
see them clad in rags, huddled in dens and huts, devouring crusts and
scraps, that they may give the more to ghosts and gods. I see them make
their cruel creeds and fill the world with hatred, war, and death. I see
them with their faces in the dust in the dark days of plague and sudden
death, when cheeks are wan and lips are white for lack of bread. I hear
their prayers, their sighs, their sobs. I see them kiss the unconscious
lips as their hot tears fall on the pallid faces of the dead. I see the
nations as they fade and fail. I see them captured and enslaved. I see
their altars mingle with the common earth, their temples crumble slowly
back to dust. I see their gods grow old and weak, infirm and faint.
I see them fall from vague and misty thrones, helpless and dead. The
worshipers receive no help. Injustice triumphs. Toilers are paid with
the lash,--babes are sold,--the innocent stand on scaffolds, and the
heroic perish in flames. I see the earthquakes devour, the volcanoes
overwhelm, the cyclones wreck, the floods destroy, and the lightnings
kill.

The nations perished. The gods died. The toil and wealth were lost. The
temples were built in vain, and all the prayers died unanswered in the
heedless air.

Then I asked myself the question: Is there a supernatural power--an
arbitrary mind--an enthroned God--a supreme will that sways the tides
and currents of the world--to which all causes bow?

I do not deny. I do not know--but I do not believe. I believe that the
natural is supreme--that from the infinite chain no link can be lost or
broken--that there is no supernatural power that can answer prayer--no
power that worship can persuade or change--no power that cares for man.

I believe that with infinite arms Nature embraces the all--that there
is no interference--no chance--that behind every event are the necessary
and countless causes, and that beyond every event will be and must be
the necessary and countless effects.

Man must protect himself. He cannot depend upon the supernatural--upon
an imaginary father in the skies. He must protect himself by finding
the facts in Nature, by developing his brain, to the end that he may
overcome the obstructions and take advantage of the forces of Nature.

Is there a God?

I do not know.

Is man immortal?

I do not know.

One thing I do know, and that is, that neither hope, nor fear, belief,
nor denial, can change the fact. It is as it is, and it will be as it
must be.

We wait and hope.


XI.

WHEN I became convinced that the Universe is natural--that all the
ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul,
into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom.
The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with
light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no
longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all
the wide world--not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think,
to express my thoughts--free to live to my own ideal--free to live
for myself and those I loved--free to use all my faculties, all my
senses--free to spread imagination's wings--free to investigate, to
guess and dream and hope--free to judge and determine for myself--free
to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that
savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past--free
from popes and priests--free from all the "called" and "set apart"--free
from sanctified mistakes and holy lies--free from the fear of eternal
pain--free from the winged monsters of the night--free from devils,
ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited
places in all the realms of thought--no air, no space, where fancy could
not spread her painted wings--no chains for my limbs--no lashes for my
back--no fires for my flesh--no master's frown or threat--no following
another's steps--no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying
words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all
worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went
out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for
the liberty of hand and brain--for the freedom of labor and thought--to
those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in
dungeons bound with chains--to those who proudly mounted scaffold's
stairs--to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and
torn--to those by fire consumed--to all the wise, the good, the brave of
every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of
men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it
high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Let us be true to ourselves--true to the facts we know, and let us,
above all things, preserve the veracity of our souls.

If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow-men.
We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and
friend.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is
beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can
tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have
won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes
of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things
that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men.
We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art
and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with
sunshine--with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the
last drop the golden cup of joy.




THE TRUTH.


I.

THROUGH millions of ages, by countless efforts to satisfy his wants,
to gratify his passions, his appetites, man slowly developed his brain,
changed two of his feet into hands and forced into the darkness of
his brain a few gleams and glimmerings of reason. He was hindered by
ignorance, by fear, by mistakes, and he advanced only as he found the
truth--the absolute facts. Through countless years he has groped and
crawled and struggled and climbed and stumbled toward the light. He has
been hindered and delayed and deceived by augurs and prophets--by popes
and priests. He has been betrayed by saints, misled by apostles and
Christs, frightened by devils and ghosts--enslaved by chiefs and
kings--robbed by altars and thrones. In the name of education his
mind has been filled with mistakes, with miracles, and lies, with the
impossible, the absurd and infamous. In the name of religion he has been
taught humility and arrogance, love and hatred, forgiveness and revenge.

But the world is changing. We are tired of barbarian bibles and savage
creeds.

Nothing is greater, nothing is of more importance, than to find amid the
errors and darkness of this life, a shining truth.

Truth is the intellectual wealth of the world.

The noblest of occupations is to search for truth.

Truth is the foundation, the superstructure, and the glittering dome of
progress.

Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles, and purifies. The
grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

Truth gives man the greatest power for good. Truth is sword and shield.
It is the sacred light of the soul.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.

How is Truth to be Found?

By investigation, experiment and reason.

Every human being should be allowed to investigate to the extent of
his desire--his ability. The literature of the world should be open to
him--nothing prohibited, sealed or hidden. No subject can be too
sacred to be understood. Each person should be allowed to reach his own
conclusions and to speak his honest thought.

He who threatens the investigator with punishment here, or hereafter, is
an enemy of the human race. And he who tries to bribe the investigator
with the promise of eternal joy is a traitor to his fellow-men.

There is no real investigation without freedom--freedom from the fear of
gods and men.

So, all investigation--all experiment--should be pursued in the light of
reason.

Every man should be true to himself--true to the inward light. Each man,
in the laboratory of his own mind, and for himself alone, should
test the so-called facts--the theories of all the world. Truth, _in
accordance with his reason_, should be his guide and master.

To love the truth, thus perceived, is mental virtue--intellectual
purity. This is true manhood. This is freedom.

To throw away your reason at the command of churches, popes, parties,
kings or gods, is to be a serf, a slave.

It is not simply the right, but it is the duty of every man to think--to
investigate for himself--and every man who tries to prevent this
by force or fear, is doing all he can to degrade and enslave his
fellow-men.

Every Man Should be Mentally Honest.

He should preserve as his most precious jewel the perfect veracity of
his soul.

He should examine all questions presented to his mind, without
prejudice,--unbiased by hatred or love--by desire or fear. His object
and his only object should be to find the truth. He knows, if he listens
to reason, that truth is not dangerous and that error is. He should
weigh the evidence, the arguments, in honest scales--scales that passion
or interest cannot change. He should care nothing for authority--nothing
for names, customs or creeds--nothing for anything that his reason does
not say is true.

Of his world he should be the sovereign, and his soul should wear the
purple. From his dominions should be banished the hosts of force and
fear.

He Should be Intellectually Hospitable.

Prejudice, egotism, hatred, contempt, disdain, are the enemies of truth
and progress.

The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it
is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men
because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With
him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without
the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf--a
philosopher or servant,--but the utterance neither gains nor loses in
truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or
station of the man who gave it to the world.

Nothing but falsehood needs the assistance of fame and place, of robes
and mitres, of tiaras and crowns.

The wise, the really honest and intelligent, are not swayed or governed
by numbers--by majorities.

They accept what they really believe to be true. They care nothing for
the opinions of ancestors, nothing for creeds, assertions and theories,
unless they satisfy the reason.

In all directions they seek for truth, and when found, accept it with
joy--accept it in spite of preconceived opinions--in spite of prejudice
and hatred.

This is the course pursued by wise and honest men, and no other course
is possible for them.

In every department of human endeavor men are seeking for the truth--for
the facts. The statesman reads the history of the world, gathers the
statistics of all nations to the end that his country may avoid the
mistakes of the past. The geologist penetrates the rocks in search of
facts--climbs mountains, visits the extinct craters, traverses islands
and continents that he may know something of the history of the world.
He wants the truth.

The chemist, with crucible and retort, with countless experiments, is
trying to find the qualities of substances--to ravel what nature has
woven.

The great mechanics dwell in the realm of the real. They seek by natural
means to conquer and use the forces of nature. They want the truth--the
actual facts.

The physicians, the surgeons, rely on observation, experiment and
reason. They become acquainted with the human body--with muscle, blood
and nerve--with the wonders of the brain. They want nothing but the
truth.

And so it is with the students of every science. On every hand they
look for facts, and it is of the utmost importance that they give to the
world the facts they find.

Their courage should equal their intelligence. No matter what the dead
have said, or the living believe, they should tell what they know. They
should have intellectual courage.

If it be good for man to find the truth--good for him to be
intellectually honest and hospitable, then it is good for others to know
the truths thus found.

Every man should have the courage to give his honest thought. This makes
the finder and publisher of truth a public benefactor.

Those who prevent, or try to prevent, the expression of honest thought,
are the foes of civilization--the enemies of truth. Nothing can exceed
the egotism and impudence of the man who claims the right to express his
thought and denies the same right to others.

It will not do to say that certain ideas are sacred, and that man has
not the right to investigate and test these ideas for himself.

Who knows that they are sacred? Can anything be sacred to us that we do
not know to be true?

For many centuries free speech has been an insult to God. Nothing has
been more blasphemous than the expression of honest thought. For many
ages the lips of the wise were sealed. The torches that truth had
lighted, that courage carried and held aloft, were extinguished with
blood.

Truth has always been in favor of free speech--has always asked to be
investigated--has always longed to be known and understood. Freedom,
discussion, honesty, investigation and courage are the friends and
allies of truth. Truth loves the light and the open field. It appeals
to the senses--to the judgment, the reason, to all the higher and nobler
faculties and powers of the mind. It seeks to calm the passions, to
destroy prejudice and to increase the volume and intensity of reason's
flame.

It does not ask man to cringe or crawl. It does not desire the worship
of the ignorant or the prayers and praises of the frightened. It says to
every human being, "Think for yourself. Enjoy the freedom of a god, and
have the goodness and the courage to express your honest thought."

Why should we pursue the truth? and why should we investigate and
reason? and why should we be mentally honest and hospitable? and why
should we express our honest thoughts? To this there is but one answer:
for the benefit of mankind.

The brain must be developed. The world must think. Speech must be free.
The world must learn that credulity is not a virtue and that no question
is settled until reason is fully satisfied.

By these means man will overcome many of the obstructions of nature. He
will cure or avoid many diseases. He will lessen pain. He will lengthen,
ennoble and enrich life. In every direction he will increase his power.
He will satisfy his wants, gratify his tastes. He will put roof and
raiment, food and fuel, home and happiness within the reach of all.

He will drive want and crime from the world. He will destroy the
serpents of fear, the monsters of superstition. He will become
intelligent and free, honest and serene.

The monarch of the skies will be dethroned--the flames of hell will be
extinguished. Pious beggars will become honest and useful men. Hypocrisy
will collect no tolls from fear, lies will not be regarded as sacred,
this life will not be sacrificed for another, human beings will love
each other instead of gods, men will do right, not for the sake of
reward in some other world, but for the sake of happiness here. Man
will find that Nature is the only revelation, and that he, by his own
efforts, must learn to read the stories told by star and cloud, by rock
and soil, by sea and stream, by rain and fire, by plant and flower,
by life in all its curious forms, and all the things and forces of the
world.

When he reads these stories, these records, he will know that man must
rely on himself,--that the supernatural does not exist, and that man
must be the providence of man.

It is impossible to conceive of an argument against the freedom of
thought--against maintaining your self-respect and preserving the
spotless and stainless veracity of the soul.


II.

ALL that I have said seems to be true--almost self-evident,--and you may
ask who it is that says slavery is better than liberty. Let me tell you.

All the popes and priests, all the orthodox churches and clergymen, say
that they have a revelation from God.

The Protestants say that it is the duty of every person to read, to
understand, and to believe this revelation--that a man should use his
reason; but if he honestly concludes that the Bible is not a revelation
from God, and dies with that conclusion in his mind, he will be
tormented forever. They say:--"Read," and then add: "Believe, or be
damned."

"No matter how unreasonable the Bible may appear to you, you must
believe. No matter how impossible the miracles may seem, you must
believe. No matter how cruel the laws, your heart must approve them
all!"

This is what the church calls the liberty of thought. We read the Bible
under the scowl and threat of God. We read by the glare of hell. On one
side is the devil, with the instruments of torture in his hands. On the
other, God, ready to launch the infinite curse. And the church says to
the readers: "You are free to decide. God is good, and he gives you the
liberty to choose."

The popes and the priests say to the poor people: "You need not read
the Bible. You cannot understand it. That is the reason it is called a
revelation. We will read it for you, and you must believe what we say.
We carry the key of hell. Contradict us and you will become eternal
convicts in the prison of God."

This is the freedom of the Catholic Church.

And all these priests and clergymen insist that the Bible is superior
to human reason--that it is the duty of man to accept it--to believe it,
whether he really thinks it is true or not, and without the slightest
regard to evidence or reason.

It is his duty to cast out from the temple of his soul the goddess
Reason, and bow before the coiled serpent of Fear.

This is what the church calls virtue.

Under these conditions what can thought be worth? The brain, swept by
the sirocco of God's curse, becomes a desert.

But this is not all. To compel man to desert the standard of Reason,
the church does not entirely rely on the threat of eternal pain to be
endured in another world, but holds out the reward of everlasting joy.

To those who believe, it promises the endless ecstasies of heaven. If it
cannot frighten, it will bribe. It relies on fear and hope.

A religion, to command the respect of intelligent men, should rest on a
foundation of established facts. It should appeal, not to passion,
not to hope and fear, but to the judgment. It should ask that all the
faculties of the mind, all the senses, should assemble and take
counsel together, and that its claims be passed upon and tested without
prejudice, without fear, in the calm of perfect candor.

But the church cries: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt
be saved." Without this belief there is no salvation. Salvation is the
reward for belief.

Belief is, and forever must be, the result of evidence. A promised
reward is not evidence. It sheds no intellectual light. It establishes
no fact, answers no objection, and dissipates no doubt.

Is it honest to offer a reward for belief?

The man who gives money to a judge or juror for a decision or verdict
is guilty of a crime. Why? Because he induces the judge, the juror, to
decide, not according to the law, to the facts, the right, but according
to the bribe.

The bribe is not evidence.

So, the promise of Christ to reward those who will believe is a bribe.
It is an attempt to make a promise take the place of evidence. He
who says that he believes, and does this for the sake of the reward,
corrupts his soul.

Suppose I should say that at the center of the earth there is a diamond
one hundred miles in diameter, and that I would give ten thousand
dollars to any man who would believe my statement. Could such a promise
be regarded as evidence?

Intelligent people would ask not for rewards, but reasons. Only
hypocrites would ask for the money.

Yet, according to the New Testament, Christ offered a reward to those
who would believe, and this promised reward was to take the place of
evidence. When Christ made this promise he forgot, ignored, or held in
contempt the rectitude of a brave, free and natural soul.

The declaration that salvation is the reward for belief is inconsistent
with mental freedom, and could have been made by no man who thought that
evidence sustained the slightest relation to belief.

Every sermon in which men have been told that they could save their
souls by believing, has been an injury. Such sermons dull the moral
sense and subvert the true conception of virtue and duty.

The true man, when asked to believe, asks for evidence. The true man,
who asks another to believe, offers evidence.

But this is not all.

In spite of the threat of eternal pain--of the promise of everlasting
joy, unbelievers increased, and the churches took another step.

The churches said to the unbelievers, the heretics: "Although our God
will punish you forever in another world--in his prison--the doors of
which open only to receive, we, unless you believe, will torment you
now."

And then the members of these churches, led by priests, popes, and
clergymen, sought out their unbelieving neighbors--chained them in
dungeons, stretched them on racks, crushed their bones, cut out their
tongues, extinguished their eyes, flayed them alive and consumed their
poor bodies in flames.

All this was done because these Christian savages believed in the dogma
of eternal pain. Because they believed that heaven was the reward
for belief. So believing, they were the enemies of free thought and
speech--they cared nothing for conscience, nothing for the veracity of
a soul,--nothing for the manhood of a man. In all ages most priests have
been heartless and relentless. They have calumniated and tortured. In
defeat they have crawled and whined. In victory they have killed. The
flower of pity never blossomed in their hearts and in their brain.
Justice never held aloft the scales. Now they are not as cruel. They
have lost their power, but they are still trying to accomplish the
impossible. They fill their pockets with "fool's gold" and think they
are rich. They stuff their minds with mistakes and think they are wise.
They console themselves with legends and myths, have faith in fiction
and forgery--give their hearts to ghosts and phantoms and seek the aid
of the non-existent.

They put a monster--a master--a tyrant in the sky, and seek to enslave
their fellow-men. They teach the cringing virtues of serfs. They abhor
the courage of manly men. They hate the man who thinks. They long for
revenge.

They warm their hands at the imaginary fires of hell.

I show them that hell does not exist and they denounce me for destroying
their consolation.

Horace Greeley, as the story goes, one cold day went into a country
store, took a seat by the stove, unbuttoned his coat and spread out his
hands.

In a few minutes, a little boy who clerked in the store said: "Mr.
Greeley, there aint no fire in that stove."

"You d----d little rascal," said Greeley, "What did you tell me for, I
was getting real warm."


III.

"THE SCIENCE OF THEOLOGY."

ALL the sciences--except Theology--are eager for facts--hungry for the
truth. On the brow of a finder of a fact the laurel is placed.

In a theological seminary, if a professor finds a fact inconsistent with
the creed, he must keep it secret or deny it, or lose his place. Mental
veracity is a crime, cowardice and hypocrisy are virtues.

A fact, inconsistent with the creed, is denounced as a lie, and the
man who declares or announces the fact is a blasphemer. Every professor
breathes the air of insincerity. Every one is mentally dishonest. Every
one is a pious fraud. Theology is the only dishonest science--the only
one that is based on belief--on credulity,--the only one that abhors
investigation, that despises thought and denounces reason.

All the great theologians in the Catholic Church have denounced reason
as the light furnished by the enemy of mankind--as the road that leads
to perdition. All the great Protestant theologians, from Luther to
the orthodox clergy of our time, have been the enemies of reason. All
orthodox churches of all ages have been the enemies of science. They
attacked the astronomers as though they were criminals--the geologists
as though they were assassins. They regarded physicians as the enemies
of God--as men who were trying to defeat the decrees of Providence.
The biologists, the anthropologists, the archaeologists, the readers of
ancient inscriptions, the delvers in buried cities, were all hated by
the theologians. They were afraid that these men might find something
inconsistent with the Bible.

The theologians attacked those who studied other religions. They
insisted that Christianity was not a growth--not an evolution--but
a revelation. They denied that it was in any way connected with any
natural religion.

The facts now show beyond all doubt that all religions came from
substantially the same source--but there is not an orthodox Christian
theologian who will admit the facts. He must defend his creed--his
revelation. He cannot afford to be honest. He was not educated in an
honest school. He was not taught to be honest. He was taught to believe
and to defend his belief, not only against argument but against facts.

There is not a theologian in the whole world who can produce the
slightest, the least particle of evidence tending to show that the Bible
is the inspired word of God.

Where is the evidence that the book of Ruth was written by an inspired
man? Where is the evidence that God is the author of the Song of
Solomon? Where is the evidence that any human being has been inspired?
Where is the evidence that Christ was and is God? Where is the evidence
that the places called heaven and hell exist? Where is the evidence that
a miracle was ever wrought?

There is none.

Theology is entirely independent of evidence.

Where is the evidence that angels and ghosts--that devils and gods
exist? Have these beings been seen or touched? Does one of our senses
certify to their existence?

The theologians depend on assertions. They have no evidence. They
claim that their inspired book is superior to reason and independent of
evidence.

They talk about probability--analogy--inferences--but they present no
evidence. They say that they know that Christ lived, in the same way
that they know that Caesar lived. They might add that they know Moses
talked with Jehovah on Sinai the same way they know that Brigham Young
talked with God in Utah. The evidence in both cases is the same,--none
in either.

How do they prove that Christ rose from the dead? They find the account
in a book. Who wrote the book? They do not know. What evidence is this?
None, unless all things found in books are true.

It is impossible to establish one miracle except by another--and that
would have to be established by another still, and so on without end.
Human testimony is not sufficient to establish a miracle. Each human
being, to be really convinced, must witness the miracle for himself.

They say that Christianity was established, proven to be true, by
miracles wrought nearly two thousand years ago. Not one of these
miracles can be established except by impudent and ignorant
assertion--except by poisoning and deforming the minds of the ignorant
and the young. To succeed, the theologians invade the cradle, the
nursery. In the brain of innocence they plant the seeds of superstition.
They pollute the minds and imaginations of children. They frighten the
happy with threats of pain--they soothe the wretched with gilded lies.

This perpetual insincerity stamps itself on the face--affects every
feature. We all know the theological countenance,--cold, unsympathetic,
cruel, lighted with a pious smirk,--no line of laughter--no dimpled
mirth--no touch of humor--nothing human.

This face is a rebuke, a reprimand to natural joy. It says to the happy:
"Beware of the dog"--"Prepare for death." This face, like the fabled
Gorgon, turns cheerfulness to stone. It is a protest against pleasure--a
warning and a threat.

You see every soul is a sculptor that fashions the features, and in this
way reveals itself.

Every thought leaves its impress.

The student of this science of theology must be taught in youth,--in
his mother's arms. These lies must be sown and planted in his brain the
first of all. He must be taught to believe, to accept without question.
He must be told that it is wicked to doubt, that it is sinful to
inquire--that Faith is a virtue and unbelief a crime.

In this way his mind is poisoned, paralyzed. On all other subjects he
has liberty--and in all other directions he is urged to study and think.
From his mother's arms he goes to the Sunday school. His poor little
mind is filled with miracles and wonders. He is told about a God who
made the world and who rewards and punishes. He is told that this God
is the author of the Bible--that Christ is his son. He is told about
original sin and the atonement, and he believes what he hears. No
reasons are given--no facts--no evidence is presented--nothing
but assertion. If he asks questions, he is silenced by more solemn
assertions and warned against the devices of the evil one. Every Sunday
school is a kind of inquisition where they torture and deform the minds
of children--where they force their souls into Catholic or Protestant
moulds--and do all they can to destroy the originality, the
individuality, and the veracity of the soul. In the theological seminary
the destruction is complete.

When the minister leaves the seminary, he is not seeking the truth.
He has it. He has a revelation from God, and he has a creed in exact
accordance with that revelation. His business is to stand by that
revelation and to defend that creed. Arguments against the revelation
and the creed he will not read, he will not hear. All facts that are
against his religion he will deny. It is impossible for him to be
candid. The tremendous "verities" of eternal joy, of everlasting pain
are in his creed, and they result from believing the false and denying
the true.

Investigation is an infinite danger, unbelief is an infinite offence
and deserves and will receive infinite punishment. In the shadow of this
tremendous "fact" his courage dies, his manhood is lost, and in his fear
he cries out that he believes, whether he does or not.

He says and teaches that credulity is safe and thought dangerous. Yet he
pretends to be a teacher--a leader, one selected by God to educate his
fellow-men.

These orthodox ministers have been the slanderers of the really great
men of our century. They denounced Lyell, the great geologist, for
giving facts to the world. They hated and belittled Humboldt, one of the
greatest and most intellectual of the race. They ridiculed and derided
Darwin, the greatest naturalist, the keenest observer, the best judge
of the value of a fact, the most wonderful discoverer of truth that the
world has produced.

In every orthodox pulpit stood a traducer of the greatest of
scientists--of one who filled the world with intellectual light.

The church has been the enemy of every science, of every real thinker,
and for many centuries has used her power to prevent intellectual
progress.

Ministers ought to be free. They should be the heralds of the ever
coming day, but they are the bats, the owls that inhabit ruins, that
hate the light. They denounce honest men who express their thoughts, as
blasphemers, and do what they can to close their mouths. For their Bible
they ask the protection of law. They wish to be shielded from laughter
by the Legislature. They ask that the arguments of their opponents
be answered by the courts. This is the result of a due admixture of
cowardice, hypocrisy and malice.

What valuable fact has been proclaimed from an orthodox pulpit? What
ecclesiastical council has added to the intellectual wealth of the
world?

Many centuries ago the church gave to Christendom a code of laws,
stupid, unphilosophic and brutal to the last degree.

The church insists that it has made man merciful and just. Did it do
this by torturing heretics--by extinguishing their eyes--by flaying them
alive? Did it accomplish this result through the Inquisition--by the
use of the thumb-screw, the rack and the fagot? Of what science has the
church been the friend and champion? What orthodox church has opened its
doors to a persecuted truth? Of what use has Christianity been to man?

They tell us that the church has been and is the friend of education.
I deny it. The church founded colleges not to educate men, but to
make proselytes, converts, defenders. This was in accordance with the
instinct of self-preservation. No orthodox church ever was, or ever
will be in favor of real education. A Catholic is in favor of enough
education to make a Catholic out of a savage, and the Protestant is in
favor of enough education to make a Protestant out of a Catholic, but
both are opposed to the education that makes free and manly men.

So, ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on
alms. All beggars teach that others should give.

So, they tell us that the church has built hospitals. This is not true.
Men have not built hospitals because they were Christians, but
because they were men. They have not built them for charity--but in
self-defence.

If a man comes to your door with the smallpox, you cannot let him in,
you cannot kill him. As a necessity, you provide a place for him. And
you do this to protect yourself. With this Christianity has had nothing
to do.

The church cannot give, because it does not produce. It is claimed that
the church has made men and women forgiving. I admit that the church has
preached forgiveness, but it has never forgiven an enemy--never. Against
the great and brave thinkers it has coined and circulated countless
lies. Never has the church told, or tried to tell, the truth about an
honest foe.

The church teaches the existence of the supernatural. It believes in
the divine sleight-of-hand--in the "presto" and "open sesame" of the
Infinite; in some invisible Being who produces effects without causes
and causes without effects; whose caprice governs the world and who can
be persuaded by prayer, softened by ceremony, and who will, as a reward
for faith, save men from the natural consequences of their actions.

The church denies the eternal, inexorable sequence of events.

What Good has the Church Accomplished?

It claims to have preached peace because its founder said, "I came not
to bring peace but a sword."

It claims to have preserved the family because its founder offered a
hundred-fold here and life everlasting to those who would desert wife
and children.

So, it claims to have taught the brotherhood of man and that the gospel
is for all the world, because Christ said to the woman of Samaria that
he came only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and declared that
it was not meet to take the bread of the children and cast it unto dogs.

In the name of Christ, who threatened eternal revenge, it has preached
forgiveness.

Of what Use are the Orthodox Ministers?

They are the enemies of pleasure. They denounce dancing as one of
the deadly sins. They are shocked at the wickedness of the waltz--the
pollution of the polka. They are the enemies of the theatre. They
slander actors and actresses. They hate them because they are rivals.
They are trying to preserve the sacredness of the Sabbath. It fills them
with malice to see the people happy on that day. They preach against
excursions and picnics--against those who seek the woods and the sea,
the shadows and the waves. They are filled with holy wrath against
bicycles and bloomers. They are opposed to divorces. They insist that
for the glory of God, husbands and wives who loathe each other should
be compelled to live together. They abhor all works of fiction, and love
the Bible. They declare that the literary master-pieces of the world are
unfit to be read. They think that the people should be satisfied with
sermons and poems about death and hell. They hate art--abhor the marbles
of the Greeks, and all representations of the human form. They want
nothing painted or sculptured but hands, faces and clothes. Most of the
priests are prudes, and publicly denounce what they secretly admire and
enjoy. In the presence of the nude they cover their faces with their
holy hands, but keep their fingers apart. They pretend to believe in
moral suasion, and want everything regulated by law. If they had the
power, they would prohibit everything that men and women really enjoy.
They want libraries, museums and art galleries closed on the Sabbath.
They would abolish the Sunday paper--stop the running of cars and all
public conveyances on the holy day, and compel all the people to enjoy
sermons, prayers and psalms.

These dear ministers, when they have poor congregations, thunder against
trusts, syndicates, and corporations--against wealth, fashion and
luxury. They tell about Dives and Lazarus, paint rich men in hell and
beggars in heaven. If their congregations are rich they turn their guns
in the other direction.

They have no confidence in education--in the development of the
brain. They appeal to hopes and fears. They ask no one to think--to
investigate. They insist that all shall believe. Credulity is the
greatest of virtues, and doubt the deadliest of sins.

These men are the enemies of science--of intellectual progress. They
ridicule and calumniate the great thinkers. They deny everything that
conflicts with the "sacred Scriptures." They still believe in the
astronomy of Joshua and the geology of Moses. They believe in the
miracles of the past, and deny the demonstrations of the present. They
are the foes of facts--the enemies of knowledge. A desire to be happy
here, they regard as wicked and worldly--but a desire to be happy in
another world, as virtuous and spiritual.

Every orthodox church is founded on mistake and falsehood. Every good
orthodox minister asserts what he does not know, and denies what he does
know.

What are the Orthodox Clergy Doing for the Good of Mankind?

Absolutely nothing.

What harm are they doing?

On every hand they sow the seeds of superstition. They paralyze the
minds, and pollute the imaginations of children. They fill their hearts
with fear. By their teachings, thousands become insane. With them,
hypocrisy is respectable and candor infamous.

They enslave the minds of men. Under their teachings men waste and
misdirect their energies, abandon the ends that can be accomplished,
dedicate their lives to the impossible, worship the unknown, pray to the
inconceivable, and become the trembling slaves of a monstrous myth born
of ignorance and fashioned by the trembling hands of fear.

Superstition is the serpent that crawls and hisses in every Eden and
fastens its poisonous fangs in the hearts of men.

It is the deadliest foe of the human race.

Superstition is a beggar--a robber, a tyrant.

Science is a benefactor.

Superstition sheds blood.

Science sheds light.

The dear preachers must give up the account of creation--the Garden of
Eden, the mud-man, the rib-woman, and the walking, talking, snake. They
must throw away the apple, the fall of man, the expulsion, and the gate
guarded by angels armed with swords. They must give up the flood and the
tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues. They must give up Abraham
and the wrestling match between Jacob and the Lord. So, the story of
Joseph, the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, the story of
Moses in the bullrushes, the burning bush, the turning of sticks into
serpents, of water into blood, the miraculous creation of frogs, the
killing of cattle with hail and changing dust into lice, all must be
given up. The sojourn of forty years in the desert, the opening of the
Red Sea, the clothes and shoes that refused to wear out, the manna,
the quails and the serpents, the water that ran up hill, the talking of
Jehovah with Moses face to face, the giving of the Ten Commandments, the
opening of the earth to swallow the enemies of Moses--all must be thrown
away.

These good preachers must admit that blowing horns could not throw down
the walls of a city, that it was horrible for Jephthah to sacrifice his
daughter, that the day was not lengthened and the moon stopped for the
sake of Joshua, that the dead Samuel was not raised by a witch, that
a man was not carried to heaven in a chariot of fire, that the river
Jordan was not divided by the stroke of a cloak, that the bears did not
destroy children for laughing at a prophet, that a wandering soothsayer
did not collect lightnings from heaven to destroy the lives of innocent
men, that he did not cause rain and make iron float, that ravens did not
keep a hotel where preachers got board and lodging free, that the shadow
on a dial was not turned back ten degrees to show that a king was going
to recover from a boil, that Ezekiel was not told by God how to prepare
a dinner, that Jonah did not take cabin passage in a fish--and that all
the miracles in the old Testament are not allegories, or poems, but just
old-fashioned lies. And the dear preachers will be compelled to admit
that there never was a miraculous babe without a natural father, that
Christ, if he lived, was a man and nothing more. That he did not cast
devils out of folks--that he did not cure blindness with spittle and
clay, nor turn water into wine, nor make fishes and loaves of bread out
of nothing--that he did not know where to catch fishes with money in
their mouths--that he did not take a walk on the water--that he did
not at will become invisible--that he did not pass through closed
doors--that he did not raise the dead--that angels never rolled stones
from a sepulchre--that Christ did not rise from the dead and did not
ascend to heaven.

All these mistakes and illusions and delusions--all these miracles and
myths must fade from the minds of intelligent men.

My dear preachers, I beg you to tell the truth. Tell your congregations
that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. Tell them that nobody
knows who wrote the five books. Tell them that Deuteronomy was not
written until about six hundred years before Christ. Tell them that
nobody knows who wrote Joshua, or Judges, or Ruth, Samuel, Kings, or
Chronicles, Job, or the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon. Be honest,
tell the truth. Tell them that nobody knows who wrote Esther--that
Ecclesiastes was written long after Christ--that many of the prophecies
were written after the events pretended to be foretold had happened.
Tell them that Ezekiel and Daniel were insane. Tell them that nobody
knows who wrote the gospels, and tell them that no line about Christ
written by a contemporary has been found. Tell them it is all guess--and
may be, and perhaps. Be honest. Tell the truth, develop your brains, use
all your senses and hold high the torch of Reason.

In a few years the pulpits will be filled with teachers instead of
preachers--with thoughtful, brave, and honest men. The congregations
will be civilized--intellectually honest and hospitable.

Now, most of the ministers insist that the old falsehoods shall
be treated with reverence--that ancient lies with long white
beards--wrinkled and bald-headed frauds--round-shouldered and toothless
miracles, and palsied mistakes on crutches, shall be called allegories,
parables, oriental imagery, inspired poems. In their presence the
ungodly should remove their hats. They should respect the mould and moss
of antiquity. They should remember that these lies, these frauds, the
miracles and mistakes, have for thousands of years ruled, enslaved, and
corrupted the human race.

These ministers ought to know that their creeds are based on imagined
facts and demonstrated by assertion.

They ought to know that they have no evidence,--nothing but promises
and threats. They ought to know that it is impossible to conceive of
force existing without and before matter--that it is equally impossible
to conceive of matter without force--that it is impossible to conceive
of the creation or destruction of matter or force,--that it is
impossible to conceive of infinite intelligence dwelling from eternity
in infinite space, and that it is impossible to conceive of the creator,
or creation, of substance.

The God of the Christian is an enthroned guess--a perhaps--an inference.

No man, and no body of men, can answer the questions of the Whence and
Whither. The mystery of existence cannot be explained by the intellect
of man.

Back of life, of existence, we cannot go--beyond death we cannot see.
All duties, all obligations, all knowledge, all experience, are for this
life, for this world.

We know that men and women and children exist. We know that happiness,
for the most part, depends on conduct.

We are satisfied that all the gods are phantoms and that the
supernatural does not exist.

We know the difference between hope and knowledge, we hope for happiness
here and we dream of joy hereafter, but we do not know. We cannot
assert, we can only hope. We can have our dream. In the wide night our
star can shine and shed its radiance on the graves of those we love. We
can bend above our pallid dead and say that beyond this life there are
no sighs--no tears--no breaking hearts.


CONCLUSION.

LET us be honest. Let us preserve the veracity of our souls. Let
education commence in the cradle--in the lap of the loving mother.
This is the first school. The teacher, the mother, should be absolutely
honest.

The nursery should not be an asylum for lies.

Parents should be modest enough to be truthful--honest enough to
admit their ignorance. Nothing should be taught as true that cannot be
demonstrated.

Every child should be taught to doubt, to inquire, to demand reasons.
Every soul should defend itself--should be on its guard against
falsehood, deceit, and mistake, and should beware of all kinds of
confidence men, including those in the pulpit.

Children should be taught to express their doubts--to demand reasons.
The object of education should be to develop the brain, to quicken the
senses. Every school should be a mental gymnasium. The child should be
equipped for the battle of life. Credulity, implicit obedience, are the
virtues of slaves and the enslavers of the free. All should be taught
that there is nothing too sacred to be investigated--too holy to be
understood.

Each mind has the right to lift all curtains, withdraw all veils, scale
all walls, explore all recesses, all heights, all depths for itself, in
spite of church or priest, or creed or book.

The great volume of Nature should be open to all. None but the
intelligent and honest can really read this book. Prejudice clouds and
darkens every page. Hypocrisy reads and misquotes, and credulity accepts
the quotation. Superstition cannot read a line or spell the shortest
word. And yet this volume holds all knowledge, all truth, and is the
only source of thought. Mental liberty means the right of all to read
this book. Here the Pope and Peasant are equal. Each must read
for himself--and each ought honestly and fearlessly to give to his
fellow-men what he learns.

There is no authority in churches or priests--no authority in numbers or
majorities. The only authority is Nature--the facts we know. Facts are
the masters, the enemies of the ignorant, the servants and friends of
the intelligent.

Ignorance is the mother of mystery and misery, of superstition and
sorrow, of waste and want.

Intelligence is the only light. It enables us to keep the highway, to
avoid the obstructions, and to take advantage of the forces of nature.
It is the only lever capable of raising mankind. To develop the brain
is to civilize the world. Intelligence reaves the heavens of winged and
frightful monsters--drives ghosts and leering fiends from the darkness,
and floods with light the dungeons of fear.

All should be taught that there is no evidence of the existence of the
supernatural--that the man who bows before an idol of wood or stone
is just as foolish as the one who prays to an imagined God,--that all
worship has for its foundation the same mistake--the same ignorance, the
same fear--that it is just as foolish to believe in a personal god as in
a personal devil--just as foolish to believe in great ghosts as little
ones.

So, all should be taught that the forces, the facts in Nature, cannot be
controlled or changed by prayer or praise, by supplication, ceremony,
or sacrifice; that there is no magic, no miracle; that force can be
overcome only by force, and that the whole world is natural.

All should be taught that man must protect himself--that there is no
power superior to Nature that cares for man--that Nature has neither
pity nor hatred--that her forces act without the slightest regard for
man--that she produces without intention and destroys without regret.

All should be taught that usefulness is the bud and flower and fruit of
real religion. The popes and cardinals, the bishops, priests and parsons
are all useless. They produce nothing. They live on the labor of others.
They are parasites that feed on the frightened. They are vampires that
suck the blood of honest toil. Every church is an organized beggar.
Every one lives on alms--on alms collected by force and fear. Every
orthodox church promises heaven and threatens hell, and these promises
and threats are made for the sake of alms, for revenue. Every church
cries: "Believe and give."

A new era is dawning on the world. We are beginning to believe in the
religion of usefulness.

The men who felled the forests, cultivated the earth, spanned the rivers
with bridges of steel, built the railways and canals, the great ships,
invented the locomotives and engines, supplying the countless wants of
man; the men who invented the telegraphs and cables, and freighted the
electric spark with thought and love; the men who invented the looms and
spindles that clothe the world, the inventors of printing and the great
presses that fill the earth with poetry, fiction and fact, that save and
keep all knowledge for the children yet to be; the inventors of all the
wonderful machines that deftly mould from wood and steel the things we
use; the men who have explored the heavens and traced the orbits of
the stars--who have read the story of the world in mountain range and
billowed sea; the men who have lengthened life and conquered pain; the
great philosophers and naturalists who have filled the world with
light; the great poets whose thoughts have charmed the souls, the great
painters and sculptors who have made the canvas speak, the marble live;
the great orators who have swayed the world, the composers who have
given their souls to sound, the captains of industry, the producers,
the soldiers who have battled for the right, the vast host of useful
men--these are our Christs, our apostles and our saints. The triumphs of
science are our miracles. The books filled with the facts of Nature are
our sacred scriptures, and the force that is in every atom and in every
star--in everything that lives and grows and thinks, that hopes and
suffers, is the only possible god.

The absolute we cannot know--beyond the horizon of the Natural we cannot
go. All our duties are within our reach--all our obligations must be
discharged here, in this world. Let us love and labor. Let us wait and
work. Let us cultivate courage and cheerfulness--open our hearts to the
good--our minds to the true. Let us live free lives. Let us hope that
the future will bring peace and joy to all the children of men, and
above all, let us preserve the veracity of our souls.




HOW TO REFORM MANKIND.

     * This address was delivered before the Militant Church at
     the Columbia Theatre, Chicago, Ills., April 12, 1896.


I.

"THERE is no darkness but ignorance." Every human being is a necessary
product of conditions, and every one is born with defects for which
he cannot be held responsible. Nature seems to care nothing for the
individual, nothing for the species.

Life pursuing life and in its turn pursued by death, presses to the snow
line of the possible, and every form of life, of instinct, thought and
action is fixed and determined by conditions, by countless antecedent
and co-existing facts. The present is the child, and the necessary
child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future.

Every human being longs to be happy, to satisfy the wants of the body
with food, with roof and raiment, and to feed the hunger of the mind,
according to his capacity, with love, wisdom, philosophy, art and song.

The wants of the savage are few; but with civilization the wants of the
body increase, the intellectual horizon widens and the brain demands
more and more.

The savage feels, but scarcely thinks. The passion of the savage is
uninfluenced by his thought, while the thought of the philosopher is
uninfluenced by passion. Children have wants and passions before they
are capable of reasoning. So, in the infancy of the race, wants and
passions dominate.

The savage was controlled by appearances, by impressions; he was
mentally weak, mentally indolent, and his mind pursued the path of least
resistance. Things were to him as they appeared to be. He was a natural
believer in the supernatural, and, finding himself beset by dangers and
evils, he sought in many ways the aid of unseen powers. His children
followed his example, and for many ages, in many lands, millions and
millions of human beings, many of them the kindest and the best, asked
for supernatural help. Countless altars and temples have been built,
and the supernatural has been worshiped with sacrifice and song, with
self-denial, ceremony, thankfulness and prayer.

During all these ages, the brain of man was being slowly and painfully
developed. Gradually mind came to the assistance of muscle, and thought
became the friend of labor. Man has advanced just in the proportion that
he has mingled thought with his work, just in the proportion that he has
succeeded in getting his head and hands into partnership. All this was
the result of experience.

Nature, generous and heartless, extravagant and miserly as she is, is
our mother and our only teacher, and she is also the deceiver of men.
Above her we cannot rise, below her we cannot fall. In her we find
the seed and soil of all that is good, of all that is evil. Nature
originates, nourishes, preserves and destroys.

Good deeds bear fruit, and in the fruit are seeds that in their turn
bear fruit and seeds. Great thoughts are never lost, and words of
kindness do not perish from the earth.

Every brain is a field where nature sows the seeds of thought, and the
crop depends upon the soil.

Every flower that gives its fragrance to the wandering air leaves
its influence on the soul of man. The wheel and swoop of the winged
creatures of the air suggest the flowing lines of subtle art. The
roar and murmur of the restless sea, the cataract's solemn chant, the
thunder's voice, the happy babble of the brook, the whispering leaves,
the thrilling notes of mating birds, the sighing winds, taught man to
pour his heart in song and gave a voice to grief and hope, to love and
death.

In all that is, in mountain range and billowed plain, in winding stream
and desert sand, in cloud and star, in snow and rain, in calm and storm,
in night and day, in woods and vales, in all the colors of divided
light, in all there is of growth and life, decay and death, in all that
flies and floats and swims, in all that moves, in all the forms and
qualities of things, man found the seeds and symbols of his thoughts;
and all that man has wrought becomes a part of nature's self, forming
the lives of those to be. The marbles of the Greeks, like strains of
music, suggest the perfect, and teach the melody of life. The great
poems, paintings, inventions, theories and philosophies, enlarge
and mould the mind of man. All that is is natural. All is naturally
produced. Beyond the horizon of the natural man cannot go.

Yet, for many ages, man in all directions has relied upon, and sincerely
believed in, the existence of the supernatural. He did not believe in
the uniformity of nature; he had no conception of cause and effect, of
the indestructibility of force.

In medicine he believed in charms, magic, amulets, and incantations. It
never occurred to the savage that diseases were natural.

In chemistry he sought for the elixir of life, for the philosopher's
stone, and for some way of changing the baser metals into gold.

In mechanics he searched for perpetual motion, believing that he, by
some curious combinations of levers, could produce, could create a
force.

In government, he found the source of authority in the will of the
supernatural.

For many centuries his only conception of morality was the idea of
obedience, not to facts as they exist in nature, but to the supposed
command of some being superior to nature. During all these years
religion consisted in the praise and worship of the invisible and
infinite, of some vast and incomprehensible power, that is to say, of
the supernatural.

By experience, by experiment, possibly by accident, man found that some
diseases could be cured by natural means; that he could be relieved in
many instances of pain by certain kinds of leaves or bark.

This was the beginning. Gradually his confidence increased in the
direction of the natural, and began to decrease in charms and amulets,
The war was waged for many centuries, but the natural gained the
victory. Now we know that all diseases are naturally produced, and that
all remedies, all curatives, act in accordance with the facts in nature.
Now we know that charms, magic, amulets and incantations are just
as useless in the practice of medicine as they would be in solving
a problem in mathematics. We now know that there are no supernatural
remedies.

In chemistry the war was long and bitter; but we now no longer seek
for the elixir of life, and no one is trying to find the philosopher's
stone. We are satisfied that there is nothing supernatural in all the
realm of chemistry. We know that substances are always true to their
natures; we know that just so many atoms of one substance will
unite with just so many of another. The miraculous has departed from
chemistry; in that science there is no magic, no caprice and no possible
use for the supernatural. We are satisfied that there can be no change,
that we can absolutely rely on the uniformity of nature; that the
attraction of gravitation will always remain the same; and we feel
that we know this as certainly as we know that the relation between the
diameter and circumference of a circle can never change.

We now know that in mechanics the natural is supreme. We know that man
can by no possibility create a force; that by no possibility can he
destroy a force. No mechanic dreams of depending upon or asking for
any supernatural aid. He knows that he works in accordance with certain
facts that no power can change.

So we in the United States believe that the authority to govern, the
authority to make and execute laws, comes from the consent of the
governed and not from any supernatural source. We do not believe that
the king occupied his throne because of the will of the supernatural.
Neither do we believe that others are subjects or serfs or slaves by
reason of any supernatural will.

So, our ideas of morality have changed, and millions now believe that
whatever produces happiness and well-being is in the highest sense
moral. Unreasoning obedience is not the foundation or the essence of
morality. That is the result of mental slavery. To act in accordance
with obligation perceived is to be free and noble. To simply obey is to
practice what might be called a slave virtue; but real morality is the
flower and fruit of liberty and wisdom.

There are very many who have reached the conclusion that the
supernatural has nothing to do with real religion. Religion does not
consist in believing without evidence or against evidence. It does not
consist in worshiping the unknown or in trying to do something for the
Infinite. Ceremonies, prayers and inspired books, miracles, special
providence, and divine interference all belong to the supernatural and
form no part of real religion.

Every science rests on the natural, on demonstrated facts. So, morality
and religion must find their foundations in the necessary nature of
things.


II. HOW CAN WE REFORM THE WORLD?

IGNORANCE being darkness, what we need is intellectual light. The most
important things to teach, as the basis of all progress, are that the
universe is natural; that man must be the providence of man; that, by
the development of the brain, we can avoid some of the dangers, some of
the evils, overcome some of the obstructions, and take advantage of some
of the facts and forces of nature; that, by invention and industry,
we can supply, to a reasonable degree, the wants of the body, and by
thought, study and effort, we can in part satisfy the hunger of the
mind.

Man should cease to expect any aid from any supernatural source. By this
time he should be satisfied that worship has not created wealth, and
that prosperity is not the child of prayer. He should know that the
supernatural has not succored the oppressed, clothed the naked, fed
the hungry, shielded the innocent, stayed the pestilence, or freed the
slave.

Being satisfied that the supernatural does not exist, man should turn
his entire attention to the affairs of this world, to the facts in
nature.

And, first of all, he should avoid waste--waste of energy, waste of
wealth. Every good man, every good woman, should try to do away with
war, to stop the appeal to savage force. Man in a savage state relies
upon his strength, and decides for himself what is right and what is
wrong. Civilized men do not settle their differences by a resort to
arms. They submit the quarrel to arbitrators and courts. This is the
great difference between the savage and the civilized. Nations, however,
sustain the relations of savages to each other. There is no way of
settling their disputes. Each nation decides for itself, and each
nation endeavors to carry its decision into effect. This produces war.
Thousands of men at this moment are trying to invent more deadly weapons
to destroy their fellow-men. For eighteen hundred years peace has been
preached, and yet the civilized nations are the most warlike of the
world. There are in Europe to-day between eleven and twelve millions of
soldiers, ready to take the field, and the frontiers of every civilized
nation are protected by breastwork and fort. The sea is covered with
steel clad ships, filled with missiles of death.

The civilized world has impoverished itself, and the debt of
Christendom, mostly for war, is now nearly thirty thousand million
dollars. The interest on this vast sum has to be paid; it has to be paid
by labor, much of it by the poor, by those who are compelled to deny
themselves almost the necessities of life. This debt is growing year by
year. There must come a change, or Christendom will become bankrupt.

The interest on this debt amounts at least to nine hundred million
dollars a year; and the cost of supporting armies and navies, of
repairing ships, of manufacturing new engines of death, probably
amounts, including the interest on the debt, to at least six million
dollars a day. Allowing ten hours for a day, that is for a working day,
the waste of war is at least six hundred thousand dollars an hour, that
is to say, ten thousand dollars a minute.

Think of all this being paid for the purpose of killing and preparing to
kill our fellow-men. Think of the good that could be done with this vast
sum of money; the schools that could be built, the wants that could
be supplied. Think of the homes it would build, the children it would
clothe.

If we wish to do away with war, we must provide for the settlement of
national differences by an international court. This court should be
in perpetual session; its members should be selected by the various
governments to be affected by its decisions, and, at the command and
disposal of this court, the rest of Christendom being disarmed, there
should be a military force sufficient to carry its judgments into
effect. There should be no other excuse, no other business for an army
or a navy in the civilized world.

No man has imagination enough to paint the agonies, the horrors and
cruelties of war. Think of sending shot and shell crashing through the
bodies of men! Think of the widows and orphans! Think of the maimed, the
mutilated, the mangled!


III. ANOTHER WASTE.

LET us be perfectly candid with each other. We are seeking the truth,
trying to find what ought to be done to increase the well-being of man.
I must give you my honest thought. You have the right to demand it, and
I must maintain the integrity of my soul.

There is another direction in which the wealth and energies of man are
wasted. From the beginning of history until now man has been seeking the
aid of the supernatural. For many centuries the wealth of the world was
used to propitiate the unseen powers. In our own country, the property
dedicated to this purpose is worth at least one thousand million
dollars. The interest on this sum is fifty million dollars a year, and
the cost of employing persons, whose business it is to seek the aid
of the supernatural and to maintain the property, is certainly as much
more. So that the cost in our country is about two million dollars a
week, and, counting ten hours as a working day, this amounts to about
five hundred dollars a minute.

For this vast amount of money the returns are remarkably small. The good
accomplished does not appear to be great. There is no great diminution
in crime. The decrease of immorality and poverty is hardly perceptible.
In spite, however, of the apparent failure here, a vast sum of money
is expended every year to carry our ideas of the supernatural to other
races. Our churches, for the most part, are closed during the week,
being used only a part of one day in seven. No one wishes to destroy
churches or church organizations. The only desire is that they shall
accomplish substantial good for the world. In many of our small
towns--towns of three or four thousand people--will be found four
or five churches, sometimes more. These churches are founded upon
immaterial differences; a difference as to the mode of baptism; a
difference as to who shall be entitled to partake of the Lord's
supper; a difference of ceremony; of government; a difference about
fore-ordination; a difference about fate and free will. And it must be
admitted that all the arguments on all sides of these differences have
been presented countless millions of times. Upon these subjects nothing
new is produced or anticipated, and yet the discussion is maintained by
the repetition of the old arguments.

Now, it seems to me that it would be far better for the people of a
town, having a population of four or five thousand, to have one church,
and the edifice should be of use, not only on Sunday, but on every day
of the week. In this building should be the library of the town.
It should be the clubhouse of the people, where they could find the
principal newspapers and periodicals of the world. Its auditorium
should be like a theatre. Plays should be presented by home talent; an
orchestra formed, music cultivated. The people should meet there at any
time they desire. The women could carry their knitting and sewing; and
connected with it should be rooms for the playing of games, billiards,
cards, and chess. Everything should be made as agreeable as possible.
The citizens should take pride in this building. They should adorn
its niches with statues and its walls with pictures. It should be the
intellectual centre. They could employ a gentleman of ability, possibly
of genius, to address them on Sundays, on subjects that would be of real
interest, of real importance. They could say to this minister:

"We are engaged in business during the week; while we are working at our
trades and professions, we want you to study, and on Sunday tell us what
you have found out."

Let such a minister take for a series of sermons the history, the
philosophy, the art and the genius of the Greeks. Let him tell of the
wondrous metaphysics, myths and religions of India and Egypt. Let him
make his congregation conversant with the philosophies of the world,
with the great thinkers, the great poets, the great artists, the
great actors, the great orators, the great inventors, the captains of
industry, the soldiers of progress. Let them have a Sunday school in
which the children shall be made acquainted with the facts of nature;
with botany, entomology, something of geology and astronomy.

Let them be made familiar with the greatest of poems, the finest
paragraphs of literature, with stories of the heroic, the self-denying
and generous.

Now, it seems to me that such a congregation in a few years would become
the most intelligent people in the United States.

The truth is that people are tired of the old theories. They have lost
confidence in the miraculous, in the supernatural, and they have ceased
to take interest in "facts" that they do not quite believe.

     "There is no darkness but ignorance."
     There is no light but intelligence,

As often as we can exchange a mistake for a fact, a falsehood for a
truth, we advance. We add to the intellectual wealth of the world, and
in this way, and in this way alone, can be laid the foundation for the
future prosperity and civilization of the race.

I blame no one; I call in question the motives of no person; I admit
that the world has acted as it must.

But hope for the future depends upon the intelligence of the present.
Man must husband his resources. He must not waste his energies in
endeavoring to accomplish the impossible.

He must take advantage of the forces of nature. He must depend on
education, on what he can ascertain by the use of his senses, by
observation, by experiment and reason. He must break the chains of
prejudice and custom. He must be free to express his thoughts on all
questions. He must find the conditions of happiness and become wise
enough to live in accordance with them.


IV. HOW CAN WE LESSEN CRIME?

IN spite of all that has been done for the reformation of the world, in
spite of all the inventions, in spite of all the forces of nature that
are now the tireless slaves of man, in spite of all improvements in
agriculture, in mechanics, in every department of human labor, the world
is still cursed with poverty and with crime.

The prisons are full, the courts are crowded, the officers of the law
are busy, and there seems to be no material decrease in crime.

For many thousands of years man has endeavored to reform his fellow-men
by imprisonment, torture, mutilation and death, and yet the history
of the world shows that there has been and is no reforming power in
punishment. It is impossible to make the penalty great enough, horrible
enough to lessen crime.

Only a few years ago, in civilized countries, larceny and many offences
even below larceny, were punished by death; and yet the number of
thieves and criminals of all grades increased. Traitors were hanged and
quartered or drawn into fragments by horses; and yet treason flourished.

Most of these frightful laws have been repealed, and the repeal
certainly did not increase crime. In our own country we rely upon the
gallows, the penitentiary and the jail. When a murder is committed, the
man is hanged, shocked to death by electricity, or lynched, and in a few
minutes a new murderer is ready to suffer a like fate. Men steal; they
are sent to the penitentiary for a certain number of years, treated
like wild beasts, frequently tortured. At the end of the term they are
discharged, having only enough money to return to the place from which
they were sent. They are thrown upon the world without means--without
friends--they are convicts. They are shunned, suspected and despised.
If they obtain a place, they are discharged as soon as it is found that
they were in prison. They do the best they can to retain the respect of
their fellow-men by denying their imprisonment and their identity. In
a little while, unable to gain a living by honest means, they resort
to crime, they again appear in court, and again are taken within the
dungeon walls. No reformation, no chance to reform, nothing to give them
bread while making new friends.

All this is infamous. Men should not be sent to the pentitentiary as a
punishment, because we must remember that men do as they must. Nature
does not frequently produce the perfect. In the human race there is a
large percentage of failures. Under certain conditions, with certain
appetites and passions and with a certain quality, quantity and shape of
brain, men will become thieves, forgers and counterfeiters. The question
is whether reformation is possible, whether a change can be produced
in the person by producing a change in the conditions. The criminal
is dangerous and society has the right to protect itself. The
criminal should be confined, and, if possible, should be reformed. A
pentitentiary should be a school; the convicts should be educated. So,
prisoners should work, and they should be paid a reasonable sum for
their labor. The best men should have charge of prisons. They should be
philanthropists and philosophers; they should know something of
human nature. The prisoner, having been taught, we will say, for five
years--taught the underlying principles of conduct, of the naturalness
and harmony of virtue, of the discord of crime; having been convinced
that society has no hatred, that nobody wishes to punish, to degrade,
or to rob him; and being at the time of his discharge paid a reasonable
price for his labor; being allowed by law to change his name, so that
his identity will not be preserved, he could go out of the prison a
friend of the government. He would have the feeling that he had been
made a better man; that he had been treated with justice, with mercy,
and the money he carried with him would be a breastwork behind which he
could defy temptation, a breastwork that would support and take care of
him until he could find some means by which to support himself. And this
man, instead of making crime a business, would become a good, honorable
and useful-citizen.

As it is now, there is but little reform. The same faces appear again
and again at the bar; the same men hear again and again the verdict of
guilty and the sentence of the court, and the same men return again and
again to the prison cell. Murderers, those belonging to the dangerous
classes, those who are so formed by nature that they rush to the crimes
of desperation, should be imprisoned for life; or they should be put
upon some island, some place where they can be guarded, where it may
be that by proper effort they could support themselves; the men on
one island, the women on another. And to these islands should be sent
professional criminals, those who have deliberately adopted a life
of crime for the purpose of supporting themselves, the women upon one
island, the men upon another. Such people should not populate the earth.

Neither the diseases nor the deformities of the mind or body should be
perpetuated. Life at the fountain should not be polluted.


V. HOMES FOR ALL.

THE home is the unit of the nation. The more homes the broader the
foundation of the nation and the more secure.

Everything that is possible should be done to keep this from being
a nation of tenants. The men who cultivate the earth should own it.
Something has already been done in our country in that direction, and
probably in every State there is a homestead exemption. This exemption
has thus far done no harm to the creditor class. When we imprisoned
people for debt, debts were as insecure, to say the least, as now. By
the homestead laws, a home of a certain value or of a certain extent,
is exempt from forced levy or sale; and these laws have done great good.
Undoubtedly they have trebled the homes of the nation.

I wish to go a step further. I want, if possible, to get the people
out of the tenements, out of the gutters of degradation, to homes where
there can be privacy, where these people can feel that they are in
partnership with nature; that they have an interest in good government.
With the means we now have of transportation, there is no necessity for
poor people being huddled in festering masses in the vile, filthy and
loathsome parts of cities, where poverty breeds rags, and the rags breed
diseases. I would exempt a homestead of a reasonable value, say of
the value of two or three thousand dollars, not only from sale under
execution, but from sale for taxes of every description. These homes
should be absolutely exempt; they should belong to the family, so that
every mother should feel that the roof above her head was hers; that
her house was her castle, and that in its possession she could not be
disturbed, even by the nation. Under certain conditions I would allow
the sale of this homestead, and exempt the proceeds of the sale for a
certain time, during which they might be invested in another home; and
all this could be done to make a nation of householders, a nation of
land-owners, a nation of home-builders.

I would invoke the same power to preserve these homes, and to acquire
these homes, that I would invoke for acquiring lands for building
railways. Every State should fix the amount of land that could be owned
by an individual, not liable to be taken from him for the purpose of
giving a home to another, and when any man owned more acres than the law
allowed, and another should ask to purchase them, and he should refuse,
I would have the law so that the person wishing to purchase could file
his petition in court. The court would appoint commissioners, or a
jury would be called, to determine the value of the land the petitioner
wished for a home, and, upon the amount being paid, found by such
commission, or jury, the land should vest absolutely in the petitioner.

This right of eminent domain should be used not only for the benefit
of the person wishing a home, but for the benefit of all the people.
Nothing is more important to America than that the babes of America
should be born around the firesides of homes.

There is another question in which I take great interest, and it ought,
in my judgment, to be answered by the intelligence and kindness of our
century.

We all know that for many, many ages, men have been slaves, and we all
know that during all these years, women have, to some extent been the
slaves of slaves. It is of the utmost importance to the human race that
women, that mothers, should be free. Without doubt, the contract of
marriage is the most important and the most sacred that human beings can
make. Marriage is the most important of all institutions. Of course, the
ceremony of marriage is not the real marriage. It is only evidence
of the mutual flames that burn within. There can be no real marriage
without mutual love. So I believe in the ceremony of marriage, that it
should be public; that records should be kept. Besides, the ceremony
says to all the world that those who marry are in love with each other.

Then arises the question of divorce. Millions of people imagine that the
married are joined together by some supernatural power, and that they
should remain together, or at least married, during life. If all who
have been married were joined together by the supernatural, we must
admit that the supernatural is not infinitely wise.

After all, marriage is a contract, and the parties to the contract are
bound to keep its provisions; and neither should be released from such
a contract unless, in some way, the interests of society are involved.
I would have the law so that any husband could obtain a divorce when the
wife had persistently and flagrantly violated the contract; such divorce
to be granted on equitable terms. I would give the wife a divorce if she
requested it, if she wanted it.

And I would do this, not only for her sake, but for the sake of the
community, of the nation. All children should be children of love. All
that are born should be sincerely welcomed. The children of mothers
who dislike, or hate, or loathe the fathers, will fill the world with
insanity and crime. No woman should by law, or by public opinion,
be forced to live with a man whom she abhors. There is no danger of
demoralizing the world through divorce. Neither is there any danger of
destroying in the human heart that divine thing called love. As long as
the human race exists, men and women will love each other, and just so
long there will be true and perfect marriage. Slavery is not the soil or
rain of virtue.

I make a difference between granting divorce to a man and to a woman,
and for this reason: A woman dowers her husband with her youth and
beauty. He should not be allowed to desert her because she has grown
wrinkled and old. Her capital is gone; her prospects in life lessened;
while, on the contrary, he may be far better able to succeed than when
he married her. As a rule, the man can take care of himself, and as a
rule, the woman needs help. So, I would not allow him to cast her off
unless she had flagrantly violated the contract. But, for the sake of
the community, and especially for the sake of the babes, I would give
her a divorce for the asking.

There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a
generation of free women--of free mothers.

The tenderest word in our language is maternity. In this word is the
divine mingling of ecstasy and agony--of love and self-sacrifice. This
word is holy!


VI. THE LABOR QUESTION.

HERE has been for many years ceaseless discussion upon what is called
the labor question; the conflict between the workingman and the
capitalist. Many ways have been devised, some experiments have been
tried for the purpose of solving this question. Profit-sharing would
not work, because it is impossible to share profits with those who are
incapable of sharing losses. Communities have been formed, the object
being to pay the expenses and share the profits among all the persons
belonging to the society. For the most part these have failed.

Others have advocated arbitration. And, while it may be that the
employers could be bound by the decision of the arbitrators, there has
been no way discovered by which the employees could be held by such
decision. In other words, the question has not been solved.

For my own part, I see no final and satisfactory solution except
through the civilization of employers and employed. The question is so
complicated, the ramifications are so countless, that a solution by law,
or by force, seems at least improbable. Employers are supposed to
pay according to their profits. They may or may not. Profits may
be destroyed by competition. The employer is at the mercy of other
employers, and as much so as his employees are at his mercy. The
employers cannot govern prices; they cannot fix demand; they cannot
control supply; and at present, in the world of trade, the laws of
supply and demand, except when interfered with by conspiracy, are in
absolute control.

Will the time arrive, and can it arrive, except by developing the brain,
except by the aid of intellectual light, when the purchaser will wish to
give what a thing is worth, when the employer will be satisfied with a
reasonable profit, when the employer will be anxious to give the real
value for raw material; when he will be really anxious to pay the
laborer the full value of his labor? Will the employer ever become
civilized enough to know that the law of supply and demand should not
absolutely apply in the labor market of the world? Will he ever become
civilized enough not to take advantage of the necessities of the
poor, of the hunger and rags and want of poverty? Will he ever become
civilized enough to say: "I will pay the man who labors for me enough to
give him a reasonable support, enough for him to assist in taking care
of wife and children, enough for him to do this, and lay aside something
to feed and clothe him when old age comes; to lay aside something,
enough to give him house and hearth during the December of his life, so
that he can warm his worn and shriveled hands at the fire of home"?

Of course, capital can do nothing without the assistance of labor. All
there is of value in the world is the product of labor. The laboring man
pays all the expenses. No matter whether taxes are laid on luxuries or
on the necessaries of life, labor pays every cent.

So we must remember that, day by day, labor is becoming intelligent.
So, I believe the employer is gradually becoming civilized, gradually
becoming kinder; and many men who have made large fortunes from the
labor of their fellows have given of their millions to what they
regarded as objects of charity, or for the interests of education. This
is a kind of penance, because the men that have made this money from
the brain and muscle of their fellow-men have ever felt that it was not
quite their own. Many of these employers have sought to balance their
accounts by leaving something for universities, for the establishment
of libraries, drinking fountains, or to build monuments to departed
greatness. It would have been, I think, far better had they used this
money to better the condition of the men who really earned it.

So, I think that when we become civilized, great corporations will make
provision for men who have given their lives to their service. I think
the great railroads should pay pensions to their worn out employees.
They should take care of them in old age. They should not maim and
wear out their servants and then discharge them, and allow them to be
supported in poorhouses. These great companies should take care of the
men they maim; they should look out for the ones whose lives they have
used and whose labor has been the foundation of their prosperity. Upon
this question, public sentiment should be aroused to such a degree that
these corporations would be ashamed to use a human life and then throw
away the broken old man as they would cast aside a rotten tie.

It may be that the mechanics, the workingmen, will finally become
intelligent enough to really unite, to act in absolute concert. Could
this be accomplished, then a reasonable rate of compensation could be
fixed and enforced. Now such efforts are local, and the result up to
this time has been failure. But, if all could unite, they could obtain
what is reasonable, what is just, and they would have the sympathy of a
very large majority of their fellow-men, provided they were reasonable.

But, before they can act in this way, they must become really
intelligent, intelligent enough to know what is reasonable and honest
enough to ask for no more.

So much has already been accomplished for the workingman that I have
hope, and great hope, of the future. The hours of labor have been
shortened, and materially shortened, in many countries. There was a time
when men worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Now, generally, a day's
work is not longer than ten hours, and the tendency is to still further
decrease the hours.

By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance
that has been made. In 1860, the average amount earned by the laboring
men, workmen, mechanics, per year, was about two hundred and eighty-five
dollars. It is now about five hundred dollars, and a dollar to-day will
purchase more of the necessaries of life, more food, clothing and fuel,
than it would in 1860. These facts are full of hope for the future.

All our sympathies should be with the men who work, who toil; for the
women who labor for themselves and children; because we know that labor
is the foundation of all, and that those who labor are the Caryatides
that support the structure and glittering dome of civilization and
progress.


VII. EDUCATE THE CHILDREN.

EVERY child should be taught to be self-supporting, and every one should
be taught to avoid being a burden on others, as they would shun death.

Every child should be taught that the useful are the honorable, and that
they who live on the labor of others are the enemies of society. Every
child should be taught that useful work is worship and that intelligent
labor is the highest form of prayer.

Children should be taught to think, to investigate, to rely upon the
light of reason, of observation and experience; should be taught to
use all their senses; and they should be taught only that which in some
sense is really useful. They should be taught the use of tools, to use
their hands, to embody their thoughts in the construction of things.
Their lives should not be wasted in the acquisition of the useless, or
of the almost useless. Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of
dead languages, or to the study of history which, for the most part, is
a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill
the mind with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of
kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of
nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.

So, they should be taught the importance, not only of financial, but of
mental honesty; to be absolutely sincere; to utter their real thoughts,
and to give their actual opinions; and, if parents want honest children,
they should be honest themselves. It may be that hypocrites transmit
their failing to their offspring. Men and women who pretend to agree
with the majority, who think one way and talk another, can hardly expect
their children to be absolutely sincere.

Nothing should be taught in any school that the teacher does not
know. Beliefs, superstitions, theories, should not be treated like
demonstrated facts. The child should be taught to investigate, not to
believe. Too much doubt is better than too much credulity. So, children
should be taught that it is their duty to think for themselves, to
understand, and, if possible, to know.

Real education is the hope of the future. The development of the brain,
the civilization of the heart, will drive want and crime from the world.
The schoolhouse is the real cathedral, and science the only possible
savior of the human race. Education, real education, is the friend of
honesty, of morality, of temperance.

We cannot rely upon legislative enactments to make people wise and good;
neither can we expect to make human beings manly and womanly by keeping
them out of temptation. Temptations are as thick as the leaves of the
forest, and no one can be out of the reach of temptation unless he is
dead. The great thing is to make people intelligent enough and strong
enough, not to keep away from temptation, but to resist it. All the
forces of civilization are in favor of morality and temperance. Little
can be accomplished by law, because law, for the most part, about
such things, is a destruction of personal liberty. Liberty cannot be
sacrificed for the sake of temperance, for the sake of morality, or for
the sake of anything. It is of more value than everything else. Yet some
people would destroy the sun to prevent the growth of weeds. Liberty
sustains the same relation to all the virtues that the sun does to life.
The world had better go back to barbarism, to the dens, the caves and
lairs of savagery; better lose all art, all inventions, than to lose
liberty. Liberty is the breath of progress; it is the seed and soil, the
heat and rain of love and joy.

So, all should be taught that the highest ambition is to be happy,
and to add to the well-being of others; that place and power are not
necessary to success; that the desire to acquire great wealth is a kind
of insanity. They should be taught that it is a waste of energy, a waste
of thought, a waste of life, to acquire what you do not need and what
you do not really use for the benefit of yourself or others.

Neither mendicants nor millionaires are the happiest of mankind. The man
at the bottom of the ladder hopes to rise; the man at the top fears to
fall. The one asks; the other refuses; and, by frequent refusal, the
heart becomes hard enough and the hand greedy enough to clutch and hold.

Few men have intelligence enough, real greatness enough, to own a
great fortune. As a rule, the fortune owns them. Their fortune is their
master, for whom they work and toil like slaves. The man who has a good
business and who can make a reasonable living and lay aside something
for the future, who can educate his children and can leave enough to
keep the wolf of want from the door of those he loves, ought to be the
happiest of men.

Now, society bows and kneels at the feet of wealth. Wealth gives power.
Wealth commands flattery and adulation. And so, millions of men give
all their energies, as well as their very souls, for the acquisition of
gold. And this will continue as long as society is ignorant enough and
hypocritical enough to hold in high esteem the man of wealth without the
slightest regard to the character of the man.

In judging of the rich, two things should be considered: How did they
get it, and what are they doing with it? Was it honestly acquired? Is
it being used for the benefit of mankind? When people become really
intelligent, when the brain is really developed, no human being will
give his life to the acquisition of what he does not need or what he
cannot intelligently use.

The time will come when the truly intelligent man cannot be happy,
cannot be satisfied, when millions of his fellow-men are hungry and
naked. The time will come when in every heart will be the perfume of
pity's sacred flower. The time will come when the world will be anxious
to ascertain the truth, to find out the conditions of happiness, and to
live in accordance with such conditions; and the time will come when
in the brain of every human being will be the climate of intellectual
hospitality.

Man will be civilized when the passions are dominated by the intellect,
when reason occupies the throne, and when the hot blood of passion no
longer rises in successful revolt.

To civilize the world, to hasten the coming of the Golden Dawn of the
Perfect Day, we must educate the children, we must commence at the
cradle, at the lap of the loving mother.


VIII. WE MUST WORK AND WAIT.

THE reforms that I have mentioned cannot be accomplished in a day,
possibly not for many centuries; and in the meantime there is much
crime, much poverty, much want, and consequently something must be done
now.

Let each human being, within the limits of the possible be
self-supporting; let every one take intelligent thought for the morrow;
and if a human being supports himself and acquires a surplus, let him
use a part of that surplus for the unfortunate; and let each one to the
extent of his ability help his fellow-men. Let him do what he can in the
circle of his own acquaintance to rescue the fallen, to help those
who are trying to help themselves, to give work to the idle. Let him
distribute kind words, words of wisdom, of cheerfulness and hope. In
other words, let every human being do all the good he can, and let him
bind up the wounds of his fellow-creatures, and at the same time put
forth every effort, to hasten the coming of a better day.

This, in my judgment, is real religion. To do all the good you can is to
be a saint in the highest and in the noblest sense. To do all the good
you can; this is to be really and truly spiritual. To relieve suffering,
to put the star of hope in the midnight of despair, this is true
holiness. This is the religion of science. The old creeds are too
narrow, they are not for the world in which we live. The old dogmas lack
breadth and tenderness; they are too cruel, too merciless, too savage.
We are growing grander and nobler.

The firmament inlaid with suns is the dome of the real cathedral. The
interpreters of nature are the true and only priests. In the great creed
are all the truths that lips have uttered, and in the real litany will
be found all the ecstasies and aspirations of the soul, all dreams
of joy, all hopes for nobler, fuller life. The real church, the real
edifice, is adorned and glorified with all that Art has done. In the
real choir is all the thrilling music of the world, and in the star-lit
aisles have been, and are, the grandest souls of every land and clime.

     "There is no darkness but ignorance."
     Let us flood the world with intellectual light.




A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

MANY ages ago our fathers were living in dens and caves. Their bodies,
their low foreheads, were covered with hair. They were eating berries,
roots, bark and vermin. They were fond of snakes and raw fish. They
discovered fire and, probably by accident, learned how to cause it by
friction. They found how to warm themselves--to fight the frost and
storm. They fashioned clubs and rude weapons of stone with which they
killed the larger beasts and now and then each other. Slowly, painfully,
almost imperceptibly they advanced. They crawled and stumbled, staggered
and struggled toward the light. To them the world was unknown. On every
hand was the mysterious, the sinister, the hurtful. The forests were
filled with monsters, and the darkness was crowded with ghosts, devils,
and fiendish gods.

These poor wretches were the slaves of fear, the sport of dreams.

Now and then, one rose a little above his fellows--used his senses--the
little reason that he had--found something new--some better way. Then
the people killed him and afterward knelt with reverence at his grave.
Then another thinker gave his thought--was murdered--another tomb became
sacred--another step was taken in advance. And so through countless
years of ignorance and cruelty--of thought and crime--of murder and
worship, of heroism, suffering, and self-denial, the race has reached
the heights where now we stand.

Looking back over the long and devious roads that lie between the
barbarism of the past and the civilization of to-day, thinking of the
centuries that rolled like waves between these distant shores, we
can form some idea of what our fathers suffered--of the mistakes they
made--some idea of their ignorance, their stupidity--and some idea of
their sense, their goodness, their heroism.

It is a long road from the savage to the scientist--from a den to
a mansion--from leaves to clothes--from a flickering rush to the
arc-light--from a hammer of stone to the modern mill--a long distance
from the pipe of Pan to the violin--to the orchestra--from a floating
log to the steamship--from a sickle to a reaper--from a flail to a
threshing machine---from a crooked stick to a plow--from a spinning
wheel to a spinning jenny--from a hand loom to a Jacquard--a Jacquard
that weaves fair forms and wondrous flowers beyond Arachne's utmost
dream--from a few hieroglyphics on the skins of beasts--on bricks
of clay--to a printing press, to a library--a long distance from the
messenger, traveling on foot, to the electric spark--from knives
and tools of stone to those of steel--a long distance from sand to
telescopes--from echo to the phonograph, the phonograph that buries in
indented lines and dots the sounds of living speech, and then gives
back to life the very words and voices of the dead--a long way from the
trumpet to the telephone, the telephone that transports speech as swift
as thought and drops the words, perfect as minted coins, in listening
ears--a long way from a fallen tree to the suspension bridge--from
the dried sinews of beasts to the cables of steel--from the oar to
the propeller--from the sling to the rifle--from the catapult to the
cannon--a long distance from revenge to law--from the club to the
Legislature--from slavery to freedom--from appearance to fact--from fear
to reason.

And yet the distance has been traveled by the human race. Countless
obstructions have been overcome--numberless enemies have been
conquered--thousands and thousands of victories have been won for the
right, and millions have lived, labored and died for their fellow-men.

For the blessings we enjoy--for the happiness that is ours, we ought to
be grateful. Our hearts should blossom with thankfulness.

Whom, what, should we thank?

Let us be honest--generous.

Should we thank the church?

Christianity has controlled Christendom for at least fifteen hundred
years.

During these centuries what have the orthodox churches accomplished, for
the good of man?

In this life man needs raiment and roof, food and fuel. He must be
protected from heat and cold, from snow and storm. He must take thought
for the morrow. In the summer of youth he must prepare for the winter of
age. He must know something of the causes of disease--of the conditions
of health. If possible he must conquer pain, increase happiness and
lengthen life. He must supply the wants of the body--and feed the hunger
of the mind.

What good has the church done?

Has it taught men to cultivate the earth? to build homes? to weave cloth
to cure or prevent disease? to build ships, to navigate the seas? to
conquer pain, or to lengthen life?

Did Christ or any of his apostles add to the sum of useful knowledge?
Did they say one word in favor of any science, of any art? Did they
teach their fellow-men how to make a living, how to overcome the
obstructions of nature, how to prevent sickness--how to protect
themselves from pain, from famine, from misery and rags?

Did they explain any of the phenomena of nature? any of the facts
that affect the life of man? Did they say anything in favor of
investigation--of study--of thought? Did they teach the gospel of
self-reliance, of industry--of honest effort? Can any farmer, mechanic,
or scientist find in the New Testament one useful fact? Is there
anything in the sacred book that can help the geologist, the astronomer,
the biologist, the physician, the inventor--the manufacturer of any
useful thing?

What has the church done?

From the very first it taught the vanity--the worthlessness of all
earthly things. It taught the wickedness of wealth, the blessedness of
poverty. It taught that the business of this life was to prepare
for death. It insisted that a certain belief was necessary to insure
salvation, and that all who failed to believe, or doubted in the least
would suffer eternal pain. According to the church the natural desires,
ambitions and passions of man were all wicked and depraved.

To love God, to practice self-denial, to overcome desire, to despise
wealth, to hate prosperity, to desert wife and children, to live on
roots and berries, to repeat prayers, to wear rags, to live in filth,
and drive love from the heart--these, for centuries, were the highest
and most perfect virtues, and those who practiced them were saints.

The saints did not assist their fellow-men. Their fellow-men
assisted them. They did not labor for others. They were
beggars--parasites--vermin. They were insane. They followed the
teachings of Christ. They took no thought for the morrow. They mutilated
their bodies--scarred their flesh and destroyed their minds for the
sake of happiness in another world. During the journey of life they
kept their eyes on the grave. They gathered no flowers by the way--they
walked in the dust of the road--avoided the green fields. Their moans
made all the music they wished to hear. The babble of brooks, the songs
of birds, the laughter of children, were nothing to them. Pleasure was
the child of sin, and the happy needed a change of heart. They
were sinless and miserable--but they had faith--they were pious and
wretched--but they were limping towards heaven.

What has the church done?

It has denounced pride and luxury--all things that adorn and enrich
life--all the pleasures of sense--the ecstasies of love--the happiness
of the hearth--the clasp and kiss of wife and child.

And the church has done this because it regarded this life as a period
of probation--a time to prepare--to become spiritual--to overcome
the natural--to fix the affections on the invisible--to become
passionless--to subdue the flesh--to congeal the blood--to fold the
wings of fancy--to become dead to the world--so that when you appeared
before God you would be the exact opposite of what he made you.

What has the church done?

It pretended to have a revelation from God. It knew the road to eternal
joy, the way to death. It preached salvation by faith, and declared that
only orthodox believers could become angels, and all doubters would be
damned. It knew this, and so knowing it became the enemy of discussion,
of investigation, of thought. Why investigate, why discuss, why think
when you know? It sought to enslave the world. It appealed to force.
It unsheathed the sword, lighted the fagot, forged the chain, built
the dungeon, erected the scaffold, invented and used the instruments
of torture. It branded, maimed and mutilated--it imprisoned and
tortured--it blinded and burned, hanged and crucified, and utterly
destroyed millions and millions of human beings. It touched every nerve
of the body--produced every pain that can be felt, every agony that can
be endured.

And it did all this to preserve what it called the truth--to destroy
heresy and doubt, and to save, if possible, the souls of a few. It was
honest. It was necessary to prevent the development of the brain--to
arrest all progress--and to do this the church used all its power. If
men were allowed to think and express their thoughts they would fill
their minds and the minds of others with doubts. If they were allowed to
think they would investigate, and then they might contradict the creed,
dispute the words of priests and defy the church. The priests cried to
the people: "It is for us to talk. It is for you to hear. Our duty is to
preach and yours is to believe."

What has the church done?

There have been thousands of councils and synods--thousands and
thousands of occasions when the clergy have met and discussed and
quarreled--when pope and cardinals, bishops and priests have added to
or explained their creeds--and denied the rights of others. What useful
truth did they discover? What fact did they find? Did they add to
the intellectual wealth of the world? Did they increase the sum of
knowledge?

I admit that they looked over a number of Jewish books and picked out
the ones that Jehovah wrote.

Did they find the medicinal virtue that dwells in any weed or flower?

I know that they decided that the Holy Ghost was not created--not
begotten--but that he proceeded.

Did they teach us the mysteries of the metals and how to purify the ores
in furnace flames?

They shouted: "Great is the mystery of Godliness."

Did they show us how to improve our condition in this world?

They informed us that Christ had two natures and two wills.

Did they give us even a hint as to any useful thing?

They gave us predestination, foreordination and just enough "free will"
to go to hell.

Did they discover or show us how to produce anything for food?

Did they produce anything to satisfy the hunger of man?

Instead of this they discovered that a peasant girl who lived in
Palestine, was the mother of God. This they proved by a book, and to
make the book evidence they called it inspired.

Did they tell us anything about chemistry--how to combine and separate
substances--how to subtract the hurtful--how to produce the useful?

They told us that bread, by making certain motions and mumbling certain
prayers, could be changed into the flesh of God, and that in the same
way wine could be changed to his blood. And this, notwithstanding the
fact that God never had any flesh or blood, but has always been a spirit
without body, parts or passions.

What has the church done?

It gave us the history of the world--of the stars, and the beginning of
all things. It taught the geology of Moses--the astronomy of Joshua
and Elijah. It taught the fall of man and the atonement--proved that a
Jewish peasant was God--established the existence of hell, purgatory and
heaven.

It pretended to have a revelation from God--the Scriptures, in which
could be found all knowledge--everything that man could need in the
journey of life. Nothing outside of the inspired book--except legends
and prayers--could be of any value. Books that contradicted the Bible
were hurtful, those that agreed with it--useless. Nothing was of
importance except faith, credulity--belief. The church said: "Let
philosophy alone, count your beads. Ask no questions, fall upon your
knees. Shut your eyes, and save your souls."

What has the church done?

For centuries it kept the earth flat, for centuries it made all the
hosts of heaven travel around this world--for centuries it clung to
"sacred" knowledge, and fought facts with the ferocity of a fiend. For
centuries it hated the useful. It was the deadly enemy of medicine.
Disease was produced by devils and could be cured only by priests,
decaying bones, and holy water. Doctors were the rivals of priests. They
diverted the revenues.

The church opposed the study of anatomy--was against the dissection of
the dead. Man had no right to cure disease--God would do that through
his priests.

Man had no right to prevent disease--diseases were sent by God as
judgments.

The church opposed inoculation--vaccination, and the use of chloroform
and ether. It was declared to be a sin, a crime for a woman to lessen
the pangs of motherhood. The church declared that woman must bear the
curse of the merciful Jehovah.

What has the church done?

It taught that the insane were inhabited by devils. Insanity was not a
disease. It was produced by demons. It could be cured by prayers--gifts,
amulets and charms. All these had to be paid for. This enriched the
church. These ideas were honestly entertained by Protestants as well as
Catholics--by Luther, Calvin, Knox and Wesley.

What has the church done?

It taught the awful doctrine of witchcraft. It filled the darkness with
demons--the air with devils, and the world with grief and shame. It
charged men, women and children with being in league with Satan to
injure their fellows. Old women were convicted for causing storms at
sea--for preventing rain and for bringing frost. Girls were convicted
for having changed themselves into wolves, snakes and toads. These
witches were burned for causing diseases--for selling their souls and
for souring beer. All these things were done with the aid of the Devil
who sought to persecute the faithful, the lambs of God. Satan sought in
many ways to scandalize the church. He sometimes assumed the appearance
of a priest and committed crimes.

On one occasion he personated a bishop--a bishop renowned for his
sanctity--allowed himself to be discovered and dragged from the room of
a beautiful widow. So perfectly did he counterfeit the features and form
of the bishop, that many who were well acquainted with the prelate,
were actually deceived, and the widow herself thought her lover was the
bishop. All this was done by the Devil to bring reproach upon holy men.

Hundreds of like instances could be given, as the war waged between
demons and priests was long and bitter.

These popes and priests--these clergymen, were not hypocrites. They
believed in the New Testament--in the teachings of Christ, and they knew
that the principal business of the Savior was casting out devils.

What has the church done?

It made the wife a slave--the property of the husband, and it placed
the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It
taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of
pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life--to take the
veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead--made
them believe that they were the brides of Christ.

For my part, I would as soon be a widow as the bride of a man who had
been dead for eighteen hundred years.

The poor deluded girls imagined that they, in some mysterious way, were
in spiritual wedlock united with God. All worldly desires were
driven from their hearts. They filled their lives with fastings--with
prayers--with self-accusings. They forgot fathers and mothers and gave
their love to the invisible. They were the victims, the convicts of
superstition--prisoners in the penitentiaries of God. Conscientious,
good, sincere--insane.

These loving women gave their hearts to a phantom, their lives to a
dream.

A few years ago, at a revival, a fine buxom girl was "converted," "born
again." In her excitement she cried, "I'm married to Christ--I'm married
to Christ." In her delirium she threw her arms around the neck of an old
man and again cried, "I'm married to Christ." The old man, who happened
to be a kind of skeptic, gently removed her hands, saying at the same
time: "I don't know much about your husband, but I have great respect
for your father-in-law."

Priests, theologians, have taken advantage of women--of their
gentleness--their love of approbation. They have lived upon their hopes
and fears. Like vampires, they have sucked their blood. They have made
them responsible for the sins of the world. They have taught them the
slave virtues--meekness, humility--implicit obedience. They have
fed their minds with mistakes, mysteries and absurdities. They have
endeavored to weaken and shrivel their brains, until, to them, there
would be no possible connection between evidence and belief--between
fact and faith.

What has the church done?

It was the enemy of commerce--of business. It denounced the taking
of interest for money. Without taking interest for money, progress is
impossible. The steamships, the great factories, the railroads have all
been built with borrowed money, money on which interest was promised and
for the most part paid.

The church was opposed to fire insurance--to life insurance. It
denounced insurance in any form as gambling, as immoral. To insure your
life was to declare that you had no confidence in God--that you relied
on a corporation instead of divine providence. It was declared that God
would provide for your widow and your fatherless children.

To insure your life was to insult heaven.

What has the church done?

The church regarded epidemics as the messengers of the good God. The
"Black Death" was sent by the eternal Father, whose mercy spared some
and whose justice murdered the rest. To stop the scourge, they tried to
soften the heart of God by kneelings and prostrations--by processions
and prayers--by burning incense and by making vows. They did not try to
remove the cause. The cause was God. They did not ask for pure water,
but for holy water. Faith and filth lived or rather died together.
Religion and rags, piety and pollution kept company. Sanctity kept its
odor.

What has the church done?

It was the enemy of art and literature. It destroyed the marbles of
Greece and Rome. Beauty was Pagan. It destroyed so far as it could the
best literature of the world. It feared thought--but it preserved the
Scriptures, the ravings of insane saints, the falsehoods of the Fathers,
the bulls of popes, the accounts of miracles performed by shrines, by
dried blood and faded hair, by pieces of bones and wood, by rusty nails
and thorns, by handkerchiefs and rags, by water and beads and by a
finger of the Holy Ghost.

This was the literature of the church.

I admit that the priests were honest--as honest as ignorant. More could
not be said.

What has the church done?

Christianity claims, with great pride, that it established asylums for
the insane. Yes, it did. But the insane were treated as criminals. They
were regarded as the homes--as the tenement-houses of devils. They were
persecuted and tormented. They were chained and flogged, starved and
killed. The asylums were prisons, dungeons, the insane were victims and
the keepers were ignorant, conscientious, pious fiends. They were not
trying to help men, they were fighting devils--destroying demons. They
were not actuated by love--but by hate and fear.

What has the church done?

It founded schools where facts were denied, where science was denounced
and philosophy despised. Schools, where priests were made--where they
were taught to hate reason and to look upon doubts as the suggestions of
the Devil. Schools where the heart was hardened and the brain shriveled.
Schools in which lies were sacred and truths profane. Schools for the
more general diffusion of ignorance--schools to prevent thought--to
suppress knowledge. Schools for the purpose of enslaving the world.
Schools in which teachers knew less than pupils.

What has the church done?

It has used its influence with God to get rain and sunshine--to stop
flood and storm--to kill insects, rats, snakes and wild beasts--to stay
pestilence and famine--to delay frost and snow--to lengthen the lives of
kings and queens--to protect presidents--to give legislators wisdom--to
increase collections and subscriptions. In marriages it has made God the
party of the third part. It has sprinkled water on babes when they were
named. It has put oil on the dying and repeated prayers for the dead.
It has tried to protect the people from the malice of the Devil--from
ghosts and spooks, from witches and wizards and all the leering fiends
that seek to poison the souls of men. It has endeavored to protect the
sheep of God from the wolves of science--from the wild beasts of doubt
and investigation. It has tried to wean the lambs of the Lord from the
delights, the pleasures, the joys, of life. According to the philosophy
of the church, the virtuous weep and suffer, the vicious laugh and
thrive, the good carry a cross, and the wicked fly. But in the next life
this will be reversed. Then the good will be happy, and the bad will be
damned.

The church filled the world with faith and crime.

It polluted the fountains of joy. It gave us an ignorant, jealous,
revengeful and cruel God--sometimes merciful--sometimes ferocious. Now
just, now infamous--sometimes wise--generally foolish. It gave us
a Devil, cunning, malicious, almost the equal of God, not quite as
strong--but quicker--not as profound--but sharper.

It gave us angels with wings--cherubim and seraphim and a heaven with
harps and hallelujahs--with streets of gold and gates of pearl.

It gave us fiends and imps with wings like bats. It gave us ghosts
and goblins, spooks and sprites, and little devils that swarmed in the
bodies of men, and it gave us hell where the souls of men will roast in
eternal flames. Shall we thank the church? Shall we thank the orthodox
churches?

Shall we thank them for the hell they made here? Shall we thank them for
the hell of the future?


II.

WE must remember that the church was founded and has been protected by
God, that all the popes, and cardinals, all the bishops, priests and
monks, all the ministers and exhorters were selected and set apart--all
sanctified and enlightened by the infinite God--that the Holy Scriptures
were inspired by the same Being, and that all the orthodox creeds were
really made by him.

We know what these men--filled with the Holy Ghost--have done. We know
the part they have played. We know the souls they have saved and the
bodies they have destroyed. We know the consolation they have given and
the pain they have inflicted--the lies they have defended--the truths
they have denied. We know that they convinced millions that celibacy is
the greatest of all virtues--that women are perpetual temptations,
the enemies of true holiness--that monks and priests are nobler than
fathers, that nuns are purer than mothers. We know that they taught the
blessed absurdity of the Trinity--that God once worked at the trade
of a carpenter in Palestine. We know that they divided knowledge into
sacred and profane--taught that Revelation was sacred--that Reason was
blasphemous--that faith was holy and facts false. That the sin of Adam
and Eve brought disease and pain, vice and death into the world. We know
that they have taught the dogma of special providence--that all
events are ordered and regulated by God--that he crowns and uncrowns
kings--preserves and destroys--guards and kills--that it is the duty of
man to submit to the divine will, and that no matter how much evil
there may be--no matter how much suffering--how much pain and death, man
should pour out-his heart in thankfulness that it is no worse.

Let me be understood. I do not say and I do not think that the church
was dishonest, that the clergy were insincere. I admit that all
religions, all creeds, all priests, have been naturally produced. I
admit, and cheerfully admit, that the believers in the supernatural have
done some good--not because they believed in gods and devils--but in
spite of it.

I know that thousands and thousands of clergymen are honest,
self-denying and humane--that they are doing what they believe to be
their duty--doing what they can to induce men and women to live pure and
noble lives. This is not the result of their creeds--it is because they
are human.

What I say is that every honest teacher of the supernatural has been and
is an unconscious enemy of the human race.

What is the philosophy of the church--of those who believe in the
supernatural?

Back of all that is--back of all events--Christians put an infinite
Juggler who with a wish creates, preserves, destroys. The world is his
stage and mankind his puppets. He fills them with wants and desires,
with appetites and ambitions--with hopes and fears--with love and hate.
He touches the springs. He pulls the strings--baits the hooks, sets the
traps and digs the pits.

The play is a continuous performance.

He watches these puppets as they struggle and fail. Sees them outwit
each other and themselves--leads them to every crime, watches the
births and deaths--hears lullabies at cradles and the fall of
clods on coffins. He has no pity. He enjoys the tragedies--the
desperation--the despair--the suicides. He smiles at the murders, the
assassinations,--the seductions, the desertions--the abandoned babes of
shame. He sees the weak enslaved--mothers robbed of babes--the innocent
in dungeons--on scaffolds. He sees crime crowned and hypocrisy robed.

He withholds the rain and his puppets starve. He opens the earth and
they are devoured. He sends the flood and they are drowned. He empties
the volcano and they perish in fire. He sends the cyclone and they are
torn and mangled. With quick lightnings they are dashed to death.
He fills the air and water with the invisible enemies of life--the
messengers of pain, and watches the puppets as they breathe and
drink. He creates cancers to feed upon their flesh--their quivering
nerves--serpents, to fill their veins with venom,--beasts to crunch
their bones--to lap their blood.

Some of the poor puppets he makes insane--makes them struggle in the
darkness with imagined monsters with glaring eyes and dripping jaws, and
some are made without the flame of thought, to drool and drivel through
the darkened days. He sees all the agony, the injustice, the rags
of poverty, the withered hands of want--the motherless babe

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