← catalogue

Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I

by Robert Green Ingersoll · English · Gutenberg #8140 · 689,378 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I

Author: Robert Green Ingersoll


        
Release date: May 1, 2005 [eBook #8140]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8140

Credits: Produced by Mark R. Jaqua.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES OF COL. R. G. INGERSOLL, VOLUME I ***




Produced by Mark R. Jaqua.  HTML version by Al Haines.









LECTURES OF COL. R. G. INGERSOLL



  Including His Answers To The Clergy,
  His Oration At His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.



Complete In Two Volumes


Volume I





CONTENTS

     Gods
     Ghosts
     Hell
     Individuality
     Humboldt
     Which Way
     The Great Infidels
     Talmagian Theology
     At a Child's Grave
     Ingersoll's Oration at His Brother's Grave
     Mistakes of Moses
     Skulls and Replies
     What Shall We Do To Be Saved?
     Ingersoll's Answer To Prof. Swing, Dr. Thomas, And Others




INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON GODS


Ladies and Gentlemen: An honest god is the noblest work of man. Each
nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his
creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was
invariably found on the side of those in power.  Each god was intensely
patriotic, and detested all nations but his own.  All these Gods
demanded praise, flattery, and worship.  Most of them were pleased with
sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a
divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number
of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported
by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to
boast about their God, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all
the other gods put together.

These gods have been manufactured after numberless models, and
according to the most grotesque fashions.  Some have a thousand arms,
some a hundred heads, some are adorned with necklaces of living snakes,
some are armed with clubs, some with sword and shield, some with
bucklers, and some with wings as a cherub; some were invisible, some
would show themselves entire, and some would only show their backs;
some were jealous, some were foolish, some turned themselves into men,
some into swans, some into bulls, some into doves, and some into holy
ghosts, and made love to the beautiful daughters of men.  Some were
married--all ought to have been--and some were considered as old
bachelors from all eternity.  Some had children, and the children were
turned into gods and worshiped as their fathers had been.  Most of
these gods were revengeful, savage, lustful, and ignorant; as they
generally depended upon their priests for information, their ignorance
can hardly excite our astonishment.

These gods did not even know the shape of the worlds they had created,
but supposed them perfectly flat.  Some thought the day could be
lengthened by stopping the sun, that the blowing of horns could throw
down the walls of a city, and all knew so little of the real nature of
the people they had created, that they commanded the people to love
them.  Some were so ignorant as to suppose that man could believe just
as he might desire, or as might command, and to be governed by
observation, reason, and experience was a most foul and damning sin.
None of these gods could give a true account of the creation of this
little earth.  All were woefully deficient in geology and astronomy.
As a rule, they were most miserable legislators, and as executives,
they were far inferior to the average of American presidents.

The deities have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In
order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of
course, they have always been partial to the people who created them,
and they have generally shown their partiality by assisting those
people to rob and destroy others, and to ravish their wives and
daughters.  Nothing is so pleasing to these gods as the butchery of
unbelievers.  Nothing so enrages them, even now as to have some one
deny their existence.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god.  Gods were made
so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god
market was fairly glutted, and heaven crammed with these phantoms.
These gods not only attended to the skies, but were supposed to
interfere in all the affairs of men.  They presided over everybody and
everything.  They attended to every department. All was supposed to be
under their immediate control.  Nothing was too small--nothing too
large; the falling of sparrows and the motions of planets were alike
attended to by these industrious and observing deities.  From their
starry thrones they frequently came to the earth for the purpose of
imparting information to man.  It is related of one that he came amid
thunderings and lightnings in order to tell the people they should not
cook a kid in its mother's milk.  Some left their shining abode to tell
women that they should, or should not, have children, to inform a
priest how to cut and wear his apron, and to give directions as to the
proper manner for cleaning the intestines of a bird.

When the people failed to worship one of these gods, or failed to feed
and clothe his priests, (which was much the same thing,) he generally
visited them with pestilence and famine.  Sometimes he allowed some
other nation to drag them into slavery--to sell their wives and
children; but generally he glutted his vengeance by murdering their
first born.  The priests always did their whole duty, not only in
predicting these calamities, but in proving, when they did happen, that
they were brought upon the people because they had not given quite
enough to them.

These gods differed just as the nations differed; the greatest and most
powerful had the most powerful gods, while the weaker ones were obliged
to content themselves with the very off-scourings of the heavens.  Each
of these gods promised happiness here and hereafter to all his slaves,
and threatened to eternally punish all who either disbelieved in his
existence or suspected that some other God might be his superior; but
to deny the existence of all gods was, and is, the crime of crimes.
Redden your hands with human blood; blast by slander the fair fame of
the innocent; strangle the smiling child upon its mother's knees;
deceive, ruin and desert the beautiful girl who loves and trusts you,
and your case is not hopeless.  For all this, and for all these, you
may be forgiven. For all this, and for all these, that bankrupt court
established by the gospel, will give you a discharge; but deny the
existence of these divine ghosts, of these gods, and the sweet and
tearful face of Mercy becomes livid with eternal hate.  Heaven's golden
gates are shut, and you, with an infinite curse ringing in your ears,
with the brand of infamy upon your brow, commence your endless
wanderings in the lurid gloom of hell--an immortal vagrant--an eternal
outcast--a deathless convict.

One of these gods, and one who demands our love, our admiration and our
worship, and one who is worshiped, if mere heartless ceremony is
worship, gave to his chosen people for their guidance the following
laws of war: "When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it,
then proclaim peace unto it.  And it shall be if it make thee answer of
peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be that all the people that is
found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve
thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against
thee, then thou shalt besiege it. And when the Lord thy God hath
delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with
the edge of the sword.  But the women and the little ones, and the
cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt
thou take unto thyself, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies
which the Lord thy God hath given thee.  Thus shalt thou do unto all
the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the
cities of these nations.  But of the cities of these people which the
Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive
nothing that breatheth."

Is it possible for man to conceive of anything more perfectly infamous?
Can you believe that such directions were given by any except an
infinite fiend?  Remember that the army receiving these instructions
was one of invasion.  Peace was offered on condition that the people
submitting should be the slaves of the invader; but if any should have
the courage to defend their home, to fight for the love of wife and
child, then the sword was to spare none--not even the prattling,
dimpled babe.

And we are called upon to worship such a god; to get upon our knees and
tell him that he is good, that he is merciful, that he is just, that he
is love.  We are asked to stifle every noble sentiment of the soul, and
to trample under foot all the sweet charities of the heart.  Because we
refuse to stultify ourselves--refuse to become liars--we are denounced,
hated, traduced and ostracized here, and this same god threatens to
torment us in eternal fire the moment death allows him to fiercely
clutch our naked helpless souls.  Let the people hate, let the god
threaten--we will educate them, and we will despise and defy him.

The book, called the bible, is filled with passages equally horrible,
unjust and atrocious.  This is the book to read in schools in order to
make our children loving, kind and gentle!  This is the book recognized
in our Constitution as the source of authority and justice!

Strange that no one has ever been persecuted by the Church for
believing God bad, while hundreds of millions have been destroyed for
thinking him good.  The orthodox church never will forgive the
Universalist for saying "God is love."   It has always been considered
as one of the very highest evidence of true and undefiled religion to
insist that all men, women and children deserve eternal damnation.  It
has always been heresy to say, "God will at last save all."

We are asked to justify these frightful passages, these infamous laws
of war, because the bible is the word of God.  As a matter of fact,
there never was, and there never can be, an argument, even tending to
prove the inspiration of any book whatever.  In the absence of positive
evidence, analogy and experience, argument is simply impossible, and at
the very best, can amount only to a useless agitation of the air.  The
instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted, or even
reasoned about, we are mental serfs.  It is infinitely absurd to
suppose that a god would address a communication to intelligent beings,
and yet make it a crime, to be punished in eternal flames for them to
use their intelligence for the purpose of understanding his
communication.  If we have the right to use our reason, we certainly
have the right to act in accordance with it, and no god can have the
right to punish us for such action.

The doctrine that future happiness depends upon belief is monstrous. It
is the infamy of infamies.  The notion that faith in Christ is to be
rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason,
observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for
refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of
insanity and ignorance, called "faith."  What man, who ever thinks, can
believe that blood can appease God?  And yet, our entire system of
religion is based upon that belief.  The Jews pacified Jehovah with the
blood of animals, and according to the Christian system, the blood of
Jesus softened the heart of God a little, and rendered possible the
salvation of a fortunate few. It is hard to conceive how the human mind
can give assent to such terrible ideas, or how any sane man can read
the bible and still believe in the doctrine of inspiration.

Whether the bible is true or false, is of no consequence in comparison
with the mental freedom of the race.

Salvation through slavery is worthless.  Salvation from slavery is
inestimable.

As long as man believes the bible to be infallible, that is his master.
The civilization of this century is not the child of faith, but of
unbelief--the result of free thought.

All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable
person that the bible is simply and purely of human invention--of
barbarian invention--is to read it.  Read it as you would any other
book; think of it as you would any other; get the bandage of reverence
from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from
the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition--then read the
holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment,
supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity to be the
author of such ignorance and of such atrocity.

Our ancestors not only had their God-factories, but they made devils as
well.  These devils were generally disgraced and fallen gods. Some had
headed unsuccessful revolts; some had been caught sweetly reclining in
the shadowy folds of some fleecy clouds, kissing the wife of the God of
gods.  These devils generally sympathized with man.  There is in regard
to them a most wonderful fact: In nearly all the theologies, mythologic
and religious, the devils have been much more humane and merciful than
the gods.  No devil ever gave one of his generals an order to kill
children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women.  Such
barbarities were always ordered by the good gods.  The pestilences were
sent by the most merciful gods.  The frightful famine, during which the
dying child with pallid lips sucked the withered bosom of a dead
mother, was sent by the loving gods.  No devil was ever charged with
such fiendish brutality.

One of these gods, according to the account, drowned an entire world,
with the exception of eight persons.  The old, the young, the beautiful
and the helpless were remorselessly devoured by the shoreless sea.
This, the most fearful tragedy that the imagination of ignorant priests
ever conceived, was the act not of a devil, but of God so-called, whom
men ignorantly worship unto this day.  What a stain such an act would
leave upon the character of a devil!  One of the prophets of one of
these gods, having in his power a captured king, hewed him in pieces in
the sight of all the people.  Was ever any imp of any devil guilty of
such savagery?

One of these gods is reported to have given the following directions
concerning human slavery:  "If thou buy a Hebrew servant six years
shall he serve, and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If
he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he were married,
then his wife shall go out with him.  If his master have given him a
wife, and she have borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her
children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.  And if
the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife and my
children; I will not go out free; then his master shall bring him unto
the judges: he shall also bring him unto the door, or unto the
doorpost; and his Master shall bore his ear with an awl; and he shall
serve him forever."

According to this, a man was given liberty upon condition that he would
desert forever his wife and children.  Did any devil ever force upon a
husband, upon a father, so cruel and so heartless an alternative?  Who
can worship such a god?  Who can bend the knee to such a monster?  Who
can pray to such a fiend?

All these gods threatened to torment forever the souls of their
enemies. Did any devil ever make so infamous a threat?  The basest
thing recorded of the devil, is what he did concerning job and his
family, and that was done by the express permission of one of these
gods and to decide a little difference of opinion between their serene
highnesses as to the character of "my servant Job."

The first account we have of the devil is found in that purely
scientific book called Genesis, and is as follows: "Now the serpent was
more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,
and he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of the
fruit of the trees of the garden?  And the woman said unto the serpent.
We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of
the tree which is in the midst of the garden God hath said,  Ye shall
not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.  And the serpent
said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die.  For God doth know that
in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil.  And when the woman saw that the
tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a
tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and
did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat......
And the Lord God said, Behold the man has become as one of us, to know
good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of
the tree of life and eat, and live forever.  Therefore the Lord God
sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he
was taken.  So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the
garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way to
keep the way of the tree of life."

According to this account the promise of the devil was fulfilled to the
very letter.  Adam and Eve did not die, and they did become as gods,
knowing good and evil.   The account shows, however, that the gods
dreaded education and knowledge then just as they do now. The church
still faithfully guards the dangerous tree of knowledge, and has
exerted in all ages her utmost power to keep mankind from eating the
fruit thereof.  The priests have never ceased repeating the old
falsehood and the old threat: "Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye
touch it, lest ye die."  From every pulpit comes the same cry, born of
the same fear "Lest they eat and become as gods, knowing good and
evil."  For this reason, religion hates science, faith detests reason,
theology is the sworn enemy of philosophy, and the church with its
flaming sword still guards the hated tree, and like its supposed
founder, curses to the lowest depths the brave thinkers who eat and
become as gods.

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after
all, to thank this serpent?  He was the first schoolmaster, the first
advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to
whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition,
the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of
progress and of civilization.

Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the
dead calm of ignorance and faith.  Banish me from Eden when you will;
but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!   Some
nations have borrowed their gods; of this number, we are compelled to
say, is our own.   The Jews having ceased to exist as a nation, and
having no further use for a god, our ancestors appropriated him and
adopted their devil at the same time.  This borrowed god is still an
object of some adoration, and this adopted devil still excites the
apprehensions of our people. He is still supposed to be setting his
traps and snares for the purpose of catching our unwary souls, and is
still, with reasonable success, waging the old war against our god.

To me, it seems easy to account for these ideas concerning gods and
devils.  They are a perfectly natural production.  Man has created them
all, and under the same circumstances will create them again.  Man has
not only created all these gods, but he has created them out of the
materials by which he has been surrounded. Generally he has modeled
them after himself, and has given them hands, heads, feet, eyes, ears,
and organs of speech.  Each nation made its gods and devils speak its
language not only, but put in their mouths the same mistakes in
history, geography, astronomy, and in all matters of fact, generally
made by the people.

No god was ever in advance of the nation that created him.  The negroes
represented their deities with black skins and curly hair. The
Mongolian gave to his a yellow complexion and dark almond-shaped eyes.
The Jews were not allowed to paint theirs, or we should have seen
Jehovah with a full beard, an oval face, and an aquiline nose. Zeus was
a perfect Greek and Jove looked as though a member of the Roman senate.
The gods of Egypt had the patient face and placid look of the loving
people who made them.  The gods of northern countries were represented
warmly clad in robes of fur; those of the tropics were naked.  The gods
of India were often mounted upon elephants, those of some islanders
were great swimmers, and the deities of the Arctic zone were
passionately fond of whale's blubber. Nearly all people have carved or
painted representations of their gods, and these representations were,
by the lower classes generally treated as the real gods, and to these
images and idols they addressed prayers and offered sacrifice.

In some countries, even at this day, if the people after long praying
do not obtain their desires, they turn their images off as impotent
gods, or upbraid them in a most reproachful manner, loading them with
blows and curses.  'How now, dog of a spirit,' they say,  'we give you
lodging in a magnificent temple, we gild you with gold, feed you with
the choicest food, and offer incense to you; yet, after all this care,
you are so ungrateful as to refuse us what we ask.'  Hereupon they will
pull the god down and drag him through the filth of the street.  If, in
the meantime, it happens that they obtain their request, then with a
great deal of ceremony, they wash him clean, carry him back and place
him in his temple again, where they fall down and make excuses for what
they have done.  'Of a truth,' they say,  'we were a little too hasty,
and you were a little too long in your grant.  Why should you bring
this beating on yourself.  But what is done cannot be undone.'   Let us
not think of it any more.  If you will forget what is past, we will
gild you over brighter again than before.

Man has never been at a loss for gods.  He has worshiped almost
everything, including the vilest and most disgusting beasts.  He has
worshiped fire, earth, air, water, light, stars, and for hundreds of
ages, prostrated himself before enormous snakes. Savage tribes often
make gods of articles they get from civilized people.  The Todas
worship a cow-bell.  The Kotas worship two silver plates, which they
regard as husband and wife, and another tribe manufactured a god out of
a king of hearts.

Man, having always been the physical superior of woman, accounts for
the fact that most of the high gods have been males.  Had woman been
the physical superior, the powers supposed to be the ruler of Nature
would have been woman, and instead of being represented in the apparel
of man, they would have luxuriated in trains, low necked dresses, laces
and back-hair.

Nothing can be plainer than that each nation gives to its god its
peculiar characteristics, and that every individual gives to his God
his personal peculiarities.

Man has no ideas, and can have none, except those suggested by his
surroundings.  He cannot conceive of anything utterly unlike what he
has seen or felt.  He can exaggerate, diminish, combine, separate,
deform, beautify, improve, multiply and compare what he sees, what he
feels, what he hears, and all of which he takes cognizance through the
medium of the senses; but he cannot create.  Having seen exhibitions of
power, he can say, omnipotent.  Having lived, he can say, immortality.
Knowing something of time, he can say, eternity. Conceiving something
of intelligence, he can say God.  Having seen exhibitions of malice, he
can say, devil.  A few gleams of happiness having fallen athwart the
gloom of his life, he can say, heaven. Pain, in its numberless forms,
having been experienced, he can say, hell.  Yet all these ideas have a
foundation in fact, and only a foundation.  The superstructure has been
reared by exaggerating, diminishing, combining, separating, deforming,
beautifying, improving or multiplying realities, so that the edifice or
fabric is but the incongruous grouping of what man has perceived
through the medium of the senses.  It is as though we should give to a
lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a horse,
the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk of an elephant.  We have in
imagination created an impossible monster.  And yet the various parts
of this monster really exist.  So it is with all the gods that man has
made.

Beyond nature man cannot go even in thought--above nature he cannot
rise--below nature he cannot fall.

Man, in his ignorance, supposed that all phenomena were produced by
some intelligent powers, and with direct reference to him.  To preserve
friendly relations with these powers was, and still is, the object of
all religions.  Man knelt through fear and to implore assistance, or
through gratitude for some favor which he supposed had been rendered.
He endeavored by supplication to appease some being who, for some
reason, had, as he believed become enraged. The lightning and thunder
terrified him.  In the presence of the volcano he sank upon his knees.
The great forests filled with wild and ferocious beasts, the monstrous
serpents crawling in mysterious depths, the boundless sea, the flaming
comets, the sinister eclipses, the awful calmness of the stars, and
more than all, the perpetual presence of death, convinced him that he
was the sport and prey of unseen and malignant powers.  The strange and
frightful diseases to which he was subject, the freezings and burnings
of fever, the contortions of epilepsy, the sudden palsies, the darkness
of night, and the wild, terrible and fantastic dreams that filled his
brain, satisfied him that he was haunted and pursued by countless
spirits of evil.  For some reason he supposed that these spirits
differed in power--that they were not all alike malevolent--that the
higher controlled the lower, and that his very existence depended upon
gaining the assistance of the more powerful.  For this purpose he
resorted to prayer, to flattery, to worship and to sacrifice.  These
ideas appear to have been almost universal in savage man.

For ages all nations supposed that the sick and insane were possessed
by evil spirits.  For thousands of years the practice of medicine
consisted in frightening these spirits away.  Usually the priests would
make the loudest and most discordant noises possible.  They would blow
horns, beat upon rude drums, clash cymbals, and in the meantime utter
the most unearthly yells.  If the noise-remedy failed, they would
implore the aid of some more powerful spirit.

To pacify these spirits was considered of infinite importance. The poor
barbarian, knowing that men could be softened by gifts, gave to these
spirits that which to him seemed of the most value. With bursting heart
he would offer the blood of his dearest child. It was impossible for
him to conceive of a god utterly unlike himself, and he naturally
supposed that these powers of the air would be affected a little at the
sight of so great and so deep a sorrow.  It was with the barbarian then
as with the civilized now--one class lived upon and made merchandise of
the fears of another. Certain persons took it upon themselves to
appease the gods, and to instruct the people in their duties to these
unseen powers. This was the origin of the priesthood.  The priest
pretended to stand between the wrath of the gods and the helplessness
of man.  He was man's attorney at the court of heaven.  He carried to
the invisible world a flag of truce, a protest and a request. He came
back with a command, with authority and with power.  Man fell upon his
knees before his own servant, and the priest, taking advantage of the
awe inspired by his supposed influence with the gods, made of his
fellow-man a cringing hypocrite and slave.  Even Christ, the supposed
son of God, taught that persons were possessed of evil spirits, and
frequently, according to the account, gave proof of his divine origin
and mission by frightening droves of devils out of his unfortunate
countrymen.  Casting out devils was his principal employment, and the
devils thus banished generally took occasion to acknowledge him as the
true Messiah; which was not only very kind of them, but quite fortunate
for him.  The religious people have always regarded the testimony of
these devils as perfectly conclusive, and the writers of the New
Testament quote the words of these imps of darkness with great
satisfaction.

The fact that Christ could withstand the temptations of the devil was
considered as conclusive evidence that he was assisted by some god, or
at least by some being superior to man.  St. Matthew gives an account
of an attempt made by the devil to tempt the supposed son of God; and
it has always excited the wonder of Christians that the temptation was
so nobly and heroically withstood.  The account to which I refer is as
follows:

"Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted
of the devil.  And when the tempter came to him, he said: 'If thou be
the son of God command that these stones be made bread.' But he
answered, and said  'It is written: man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.'  Then the
devil taketh him up into the holy city and setteth him upon a pinnacle
of the temple and saith unto him: 'If thou be the son of God, cast
thyself down, for it is written.  He shall give his angels charge
concerning thee, lest at any time thou shalt dash thy foot against a
stone.'  Jesus said unto him  'It is written again, thou shalt not
tempt the Lord thy God.'  Again the devil taketh him up into an
exceeding high mountain and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world
and the glory of them, and saith unto him 'All these will I give thee
if thou wilt fall down and worship me.'"

The Christians now claim that Jesus was God.  If he was God, of course
the devil knew that fact, and yet, according to this account, the devil
took the omnipotent God and placed him upon a pinnacle of the temple,
and endeavored to induce him to dash himself against the earth.
Failing in that, he took the creator, owner and governor of the
universe up into an exceeding high mountain, and offered him this
world--this grain of sand--if he, the God of all the worlds, would fall
down and worship him, a poor devil, without even a tax title to one
foot of dirt!  Is it possible the devil was such an idiot?  Should any
great credit be given to this deity for not being caught with such
chaff?  Think of it!  The devil--the prince of sharpers--the king of
cunning--the master of finesse, trying to bribe God with a grain of
sand that belonged to God!

Is there in ail the religious literature of the world any thing more
grossly absurd than this?

These devils, according to the bible, were various kinds--some could
speak and hear, others were deaf and dumb.  All could not be cast out
in the same way.  The deaf and dumb spirits were quite difficult to
deal with.  St. Mark tells of a gentleman who brought his son to
Christ.  The boy, it seems, was possessed of a dumb spirit, over which
the disciples had no control.  "Jesus said unto the spirit: 'Thou dumb
and deaf spirit.  I charge thee come out of him, and enter no more into
him.'" Whereupon, the deaf spirit having heard what was said, cried out
(being dumb) and immediately vacated the premises.  The ease with which
Christ controlled this deaf and dumb spirit excited the wonder of his
disciples, and they asked him privately why they could not cast that
spirit out.  To whom he replied: "This kind can come forth by nothing
but prayer and fasting."  Is there a Christian in the whole world who
would believe such a story if found in any other book?  The trouble is,
these pious people shut up their reason, and then open their bible.

In the olden times the existence of devils was universally admitted.
The people had no doubt upon that subject, and from such belief it
followed as a matter of course, that a person, in order to vanquish
these devils, had either to be a god, or to be assisted by one. All
founders of religions have established their claims to divine origin by
controlling evil spirits--and suspending the laws of nature.  Casting
out devils was a certificate of divinity.  A prophet, unable to cope
with the powers of darkness, was regarded with contempt.  The utterance
of the highest and noblest sentiments, the most blameless and holy
life, commanded but little respect, unless accompanied by power to work
miracles and command spirits.

This belief in good and evil powers had its origin in the fact that man
was surrounded by what he was pleased to call good and evil phenomena.
Phenomena affecting man pleasantly were ascribed to good spirits, while
those affecting him unpleasantly or injuriously, were ascribed to evil
spirits.  It being admitted that all phenomena were produced by
spirits, the spirits were divided according to the phenomena, and the
phenomena were good or bad as they affected man. Good spirits were
supposed to be the authors of good phenomena, and evil spirits of the
evil--so that the idea of a devil has been as universal as the idea of
a god.

Many writers maintain that an idea to become universal must be true;
that all universal ideas are innate, and that innate ideas cannot be
false.  If the fact that an idea has been universal proves that it is
innate, and if the fact that an idea is innate proves that it is
correct, then the believer in innate ideas must admit that the evidence
of a god superior to nature, and of a devil superior to nature, is
exactly the same, and that the existence of such a devil must be as
self-evident as the existence of such a god.  The truth is, a god was
inferred from good, and a devil from bad, phenomena.  And it is just as
natural and logical to suppose that a devil would cause happiness as to
suppose that a god would produce misery.  Consequently, if an
intelligence, infinite and supreme, is the immediate author of all
phenomena, it is difficult to determine whether such intelligence is
the friend or enemy of man. If phenomena were all good, we might say
they were all produced by a perfectly beneficent being.  If they were
all bad, we, might say they were produced by a perfectly malevolent
power; but as phenomena are, as they affect man, both good and bad,
they must be produced by different and antagonistic spirits; by one who
is sometimes actuated by kindness, and sometimes by malice; or all must
be produced of necessity, and without reference to their consequences
upon man.

The foolish doctrine that all phenomena can be traced to the
interference of good and evil spirits, has been, and still is, almost
universal.  That most people still believe in some spirit that can
change the natural order of events, is proven by the fact that nearly
all resort to prayer.  Thousands, at this very moment, are probably
imploring some supposed power to interfere in their behalf.  Some want
health restored; some ask that the loved and absent be watched over and
protected, some pray for riches, some for rain, some want diseases
stayed, some vainly ask for food, some ask for revivals, a few ask for
more wisdom, and now and then one tells the Lord to do as he thinks
best. Thousands ask to be protected from the devil; some, like David,
pray for revenge, and some implore, even God, not to lead them into
temptation.  All these prayers rest upon, and are produced by the idea
that some power not only can, but probably will, change the order of
the universe.  This belief has been among the great majority of tribes
and nations.  All sacred books are filled with the accounts of such
interferences, and our own bible is no exception to this rule.

If we believe in a power superior to nature, it is perfectly natural to
suppose that such power can and will interfere in the affairs of this
world.  If there is no interference, of what practical use can such
power be?  The scriptures give us the most wonderful accounts of divine
interference: Animals talk like men; springs gurgle from dry bones; the
sun and moon stop in the heavens in order that General Joshua may have
more time to murder; the shadow on a dial goes back ten degrees to
convince a petty king of a barbarous people that he is not going to die
of a boil; fire refused to burn; water positively declined to seek its
level, but stands up like a wall; grains of sand become lice; common
walking-sticks, to gratify a mere freak, twist themselves into
serpents, and then swallow each other by way of exercise; murmuring
streams, laughing at the attraction of gravitation, run up hill for
years, following wandering tribes from a pure love of frolic; prophecy
becomes altogether easier than history; the sons of God become enamored
of the world's girls; women are changed into salt for the purpose of
keeping a great event fresh in the minds of man; an excellent article
of brimstone is imported from heaven free of duty; clothes refuse to
wear out for forty years, birds keep restaurants and feed wandering
prophets free of expense; bears tear children in pieces for laughing at
old men without wigs; muscular development depends upon the length of
one's hair; dead people come to life, simply to get a joke on their
enemies and heirs; witches and wizards converse freely with the souls
of the departed, and God himself becomes a stone-cutter and engraver,
after having been a tailor and dressmaker.

The veil between heaven and earth was always rent or lifted.  The
shadows of this world, the radiance of heaven, and the glare of hell
mixed and mingled until man became uncertain as to which country he
really inhabited.  Man dwelt in an unreal world.  He mistook his ideas,
his dream, for real things.  His fears became terrible and malicious
monsters.  He lived in the midst of furies and fairies, nymphs and
naiads, goblins and ghosts, witches and wizards, sprites and spooks,
deities and devils.  The obscure and gloomy depths were filled with
claw and wing--with beak and hoof--with leering look and sneering
mouths--with the malice of deformity--with the cunning of hatred, and
with all the slimy forms that fear can draw and paint upon the shadowy
canvas of the dark.

It is enough to make one almost insane with pity to think what man in
the long night has suffered: of the tortures he has endured,
surrounded, as he supposed, by malignant powers and clutched by the
fierce phantoms of the air.  No wonder that he fell upon his trembling
knees--that he built altars and reddened them even with his own blood.
No wonder that he implored ignorant priests and impudent magicians for
aid.  No wonder that he crawled groveling in the dust to the temple's
door, and there, in the insanity of despair, besought the deaf gods to
hear his bitter cry of agony and fear.

The savage as he emerges from a state of barbarism, gradually loses
faith in his idols of wood and stone, and in their place puts a
multitude of spirits.  As he advances in knowledge, he generally
discards the petty spirits, and in their stead believes in one, whom he
supposes to be infinite and supreme.  Supposing this great spirit to be
superior to nature, he offers worship or flattery in exchange for
assistance.  At last, finding that he obtains no aid from this supposed
deity--finding that every search after the absolute must of necessity
end in failure--finding that man cannot by any possibility conceive of
the conditionless--he begins to investigate the facts by which he is
surrounded, and to depend upon himself.

The people are beginning to think, to reason and to investigate.
Slowly, painfully, but surely, the gods are being driven from the
earth.  Only upon rare occasions are they, even by the most religious,
supposed to interfere in the affairs of men.  In most matters we are at
last supposed to be free.  Since the invention of steamships and
railways, so that the products of all countries can be easily
interchanged, the gods have quit the business of producing famine.  Now
and then they kill a child because it is idolized by its parents.  As a
rule they have given up causing accidents on railroads, exploding
boilers, and bursting kerosene lamps.  Cholera, yellow fever, and
smallpox are still considered heavenly weapons; but measles, itch and
ague are now attributed to natural causes.  As a general thing, the
gods have stopped drowning children, except as a punishment for
violating the Sabbath. They still pay some attention to the affairs of
kings, men of genius and persons of great wealth: but ordinary people
are left to shift for themselves as best they may.  In wars between
great nations, the gods still interfere; but in prize fights, the best
man with an honest referee, is almost sure to win.

The church cannot abandon the idea of special providence.  To give up
that doctrine is to give up all.  The church must insist that prayer is
answered--that some power superior to nature hears and grants the
request of the sincere and humble Christian, and that this same power
in some mysterious way provides for all.

A devout Clergyman sought every opportunity to impress upon the mind of
his son the fact, that God takes care of all his creatures; that the
falling sparrow attracts his attentions, and that his loving kindness
is over all his works.  Happening, one day, to see a crane wading in
quest of food, the good man pointed out to his son the perfect
adaptation of the crane to get his living in that manner.  "See," said
he, "how his legs are formed for wading! What a long slender bill he
has!  Observe how nicely he folds his feet when putting them in or
drawing them out of the water!  He does not cause the slightest ripple.
He is thus enabled to approach the fish without giving them any notice
of his arrival." "My son," said he, "it is impossible to look at that
bird without recognizing the design, as well as the goodness of God, in
thus providing the means of subsistence."  "Yes" replied the boy, "I
think I see the goodness of God, at least so far as the crane is
concerned: but after all, father, don't you think the arrangement a
little tough on the fish?"

Even the advanced religionist, although disbelieving in any great
amount of interference by the gods in this age of the world, still
thinks that in the beginning some god made the laws governing the
universe.  He believes that in consequence of these laws a man can lift
a greater weight with than without a lever; that this god so made
matter, and so established the order of things, that--two bodies cannot
occupy the same space at the same time; so that a body once put in
motion will keep moving until it is stopped; so that it is a greater
distance around than across a circle; so that a perfect square has four
equal sides, instead of five or seven. He insists that it took a direct
interposition of providence to make the whole greater than a part, and
that had it not been for this power superior to nature, twice one might
have been more than twice two, and sticks and strings might have had
only one end apiece. Like the old Scotch divine, he thanks God that
Sunday comes at the end instead of in the middle of the week, and that
death comes at the close instead of at the commencement of life,
thereby giving us time to prepare for that holy day and that most
solemn event. These religious people see nothing but design everywhere,
and personal, intelligent interference in everything.  They insist that
the universe has been created, and that the adaptation of means to ends
is perfectly apparent. They point us to the sunshine, to the flowers,
to the April rain, and to all there is of beauty and of use in the
world.  Did it ever occur to them that a cancer is as beautiful in its
development as is the reddest rose?  That what they are pleased to call
the adaptation of means to ends, is as apparent in the cancer as in the
April rain?  How beautiful the process of digestion!  By what ingenious
methods the blood is poisoned so that the cancer shall have food!  By
what wonderful contrivances the entire system of man is made to pay
tribute to this divine and charming cancer!  See by what admirable
instrumentalities it feeds itself from the surrounding, quivering,
dainty flesh!   See how it gradually but surely expands and grows! By
what marvelous mechanism it is supplied with long and slender roots
that reach out to the most secret nerves of pain for sustenance and
life!  What beautiful colors it presents!  Seen through the microscope
it is a miracle of order and beauty.  All the ingenuity of man cannot
stop its growth.  Think of the amount of thought it must have required
to invent a way by which the life of one man might be given to produce
one cancer?  Is it possible to look upon it and doubt that there is
design in the universe, and that the inventor of this wonderful cancer
must be infinitely powerful, ingenious and good?

We are told that the universe was designed and created, and that it is
absurd to suppose that matter has existed from eternity, but that it is
perfectly self-evident that a god has.

If a god created the universe, then there must have been a time when he
commenced to create.  Back of that time there must have been an
eternity, during which there had existed nothing--absolutely
nothing--except this supposed god.  According to this theory, this god
spent an eternity, so to speak, in an infinite vacuum, and in perfect
idleness.

Admitting that a god did create the universe, the question then arises,
of what did he create it?  It certainly was not made of nothing.
Nothing, considered in the light of a raw material, is a most decided
failure.  It follows, then, that a god must have made the universe out
of himself, he being the only existence. The universe is material, and
if it was made of god, the god must have been material.  With this very
thought in his mind, Anaximander of Miletus said: "Creation is the
decomposition of the infinite."

It has been demonstrated that the earth would fall to the sun, only for
the fact that it is attracted by other worlds, and those worlds must be
attracted by other worlds still beyond them, and so on, without end.
This proves the material universe to be infinite.  If an infinite
universe has been made out of an infinite god, how much of the god is
left?

The idea of a creative deity is gradually being abandoned, and nearly
all truly scientific minds admit that matter must have existed from
eternity.  It is indestructible, and the indestructible cannot be
created.  It is the crowning glory of our century to have demonstrated
the indestructibility and the eternal persistence of force.  Neither
matter nor force can be increased nor diminished. Force cannot exist
apart from matter.  Matter exists only in connection with force, and
consequently a force apart from matter, and superior to nature, is a
demonstrated impossibility.

Force, then, must have also existed from eternity, and could not have
been created.  Matter in its countless forms, from dead earth to the
eyes of those we love, and force, in all its manifestations, from
simple motions to the grandest thought, deny creation and defy control.

Thought is a form of force.  We walk with the same force with which we
think.  Man is an organism that changes several forms of force into
thought-force.  Man is a machine into which we put what we call food,
and produce what we call thought.  Think of that wonderful chemistry by
which bread was changed into the divine tragedy of Hamlet!

A god must not only be material, but he must be an organism, capable of
changing other forms of force into thought-force.  This is what we call
eating.  Therefore, if the god thinks he must eat, that is to say, he
must of necessity have some means of supplying the force with which to
think.  It is impossible to conceive of a being who can eternally
impart force to matter, and yet have no means of supplying the force
thus imparted.

If neither matter nor force were created, what evidence have we, then,
of the existence of a power superior to nature?  The theologian will
probably reply,  "We have law and order, cause and effect, and beside
all this, matter could not have put itself in motion."

Suppose, for the sake of an argument, that there is no being superior
to nature, and that matter and force have existed from eternity.  Now
suppose that two atoms should come together, would there be an effect?
Yes.  Suppose they came in exactly opposite directions with equal
force, they would be stopped, to say the least.  This would be an
effect.  If this is so, then you have matter, force and effect without
a being superior to nature.  Now suppose that two other atoms, just
like the first two, should come together under precisely the same
circumstances, would not the effect be exactly the same?  Yes.  Like
causes, producing like effects, is what we mean by law and order.  Then
we have matter, force, effect, law and order without a being superior
to nature. Now, we know that every effect must also be a cause, and
that every cause must be an effect.  The atoms coming together did
produce an effect, and as every effect must also be a cause, the effect
produced by the collision of the atoms, must, as to something else,
have been a cause.  Then we have matter, force, law, order, cause and
effect without a being superior to nature.  Nothing is left for the
supernatural but empty space.  His throne is a void, and his boasted
realm is without matter, without force, without law, without cause, and
without effect.

But what put all this matter in motion?  If matter and force have
existed from eternity, then matter must have always been in motion.
There can be no force without motion.  Force is forever active, and
there is, and there can be no cessation.  If therefore, matter and
force have existed from eternity, so has motion.  In the whole universe
there is not even one atom in a state of rest.

A deity outside of nature exists in nothing, and is nothing.  Nature
embraces with infinite arms all matter and all force.  That which is
beyond her grasp is destitute of both, and can hardly be worth the
worship and adoration even of a man.

There is but one way to demonstrate the existence of a power
independent of and superior to nature, and that is by breaking, if only
for one moment, the continuity of cause and effect.  Pluck from the
endless chain of existence one little link; stop for one instant the
grand procession, and you have shown beyond all contradiction that
nature has a master.  Change the fact, just for one second, that matter
attracts matter, and a god appears.

The rudest savage has always known this fact, and for that reason
always demanded the evidence of miracle.  The founder of a religion
must be able to turn water into wine--cure with a word the blind and
lame, and raise with a simple touch the dead to life.  It was necessary
for him to demonstrate to the satisfaction of his barbarian disciple,
that he was superior to nature.  In times of ignorance this was easy to
do.  The credulity of the savage was almost boundless.  To him the
marvelous was the beautiful, the mysterious was the sublime.
Consequently, every religion has for its foundation a miracle--that is
to say, a violation of nature--that is to say, a falsehood.

No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a
truth by a miracle.  Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing
but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle
ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one,
and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence
of any power superior to, and independent of nature.

The church wishes us to believe.  Let the church, or one of its
intellectual saints, perform a miracle, and we will believe.  We are
told that nature has a superior.  Let this superior, for one single
instant, control nature, and we will admit the truth of your assertion.

We have heard talk enough.  We have listened to all the drowsy,
idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear.  We have read your bible
and the works of your best minds.  We have heard your prayers, your
solemn groans and your reverential amens.  All these amount to less
than nothing.  We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little
fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and
implore you for just one fact.  We know all about your moldy wonders
and your stale miracles.  We want this year's fact.  We ask only one.
Give us one fact of charity.  Your miracles are too ancient.  The
witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.  Their
reputations for "truth and veracity" in the neighborhood where they
resided is wholly unknown to us.  Give us a new miracle, and
substantiate it by witnesses who still have the cheerful habit of
living in this world.  Do not send us to Jericho to hear the winding
horns, nor put us in the fire with Shadrach, Moshech, and Abednego.  Do
not compel us to navigate the sea with Captain Jonah, nor dine with Mr.
Ezekiel.  There is no sort of use in sending us fox-hunting with
Samson.  We have positively lost interest in that little speech so
eloquently delivered by Balaam's inspired donkey.  It is worse than
useless to show us fishes with money in their mouths, and call our
attention to vast multitudes stuffing themselves with five crackers and
two sardines.  We demand a new miracle and we demand it now.  Let the
church furnish at least one, or forever after hold her peace.

In the olden time, the church, by violating the order of nature, proved
the existence of her God.  At that time miracles were performed with
the most astonishing ease.  They became so common that the church
ordered her priests to desist.  And now this same church--the people
having found so little sense--admits, not only, that she cannot perform
a miracle, but insists--that absence of miracle--the steady, unbroken
march of cause and effect, proves the existence of a power superior to
nature.  The fact is, however, that the indissoluble chain of cause and
effect proves exactly the contrary.

Sir William Hamilton, one of the pillars of modern theology, in
discussing this very subject, uses the following language: "The
phenomena of matter taken by themselves, so far from warranting any
inference to the existence of a god, would on the contrary ground even
an argument to his negation.  The phenomena of a material world are
subjected to immutable laws; are produced and reproduced in the same
invariable succession, and manifest only the blind force of mechanical
necessity."

Nature is but an endless series of efficient causes.  She cannot
create, but she eternally transforms.  There was no beginning; and
there can be no end.

The best minds, even in the religious world, admit that in material
nature there is no evidence of what they are pleased to call a god.
They find their evidence in the phenomena of intelligence, and very
innocently assert that intelligence is above, and in fact, opposed to
nature.  They insist that man, at least, is a special creation; that he
had somewhere in his brain a divine spark, a little portion of the
"Great First Cause."  They say that matter cannot produce thought; but
that thought can produce matter.  They tell us that man has
intelligence, and therefore there must be an intelligence greater than
his.  Why not say, God has intelligence, therefore there must be an
intelligence greater than his?  So far as we know, there is no
intelligence apart from matter.  We cannot conceive of thought, except
as produced within a brain.

The science, by means of which they demonstrate the existence of an
impossible intelligence, and an incomprehensible power, is called
metaphysics or theology.  The theologians admit that the phenomena of
matter tend, at least, to disprove the existence of any power superior
to nature, because in such phenomena we see nothing but an endless
chain of efficient causes--nothing but the force of a mechanical
necessity. They therefore appeal to what they denominate the phenomena
of mind to establish this superior power.

The trouble is, that in the phenomena of mind we find the same endless
chain of efficient causes; the same mechanical necessity. Every thought
must have had an efficient cause.  Every motive, every desire, every
fear, hope and dream must have been necessarily produced.  There is no
room in the mind of a man for providence or change.  The facts and
forces governing thought are as absolute as those governing the motions
of the planets.  A poem is produced by the forces of nature, and is as
necessarily and naturally produced as mountains and seas.  You will
seek in vain for a thought in man's brain without its efficient cause.
Every mental operation is the necessary result of certain facts and
conditions. Mental phenomena are considered more complicated than those
of matter, and consequently more mysterious.  Being more mysterious,
they are considered better evidence of the existence of a god.  No one
infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood,
but from the complex, from the unknown and incomprehensible.  Our
ignorance is God; what we know is science.

When we abandon the doctrine that some infinite being created matter
and force, and enacted a code of laws for their government, the idea of
interference will be lost.  The real priest will then be, not the
mouth-piece of some pretended deity, but the interpreter of nature.
From that moment the church ceases to exist.  The tapers will die out
upon the dusty altar; the moths will eat the fading velvet of pulpit
and pew; the Bible will take its place with the Shastras, Puranas,
Vedas, Eddas, Sagas and Korans, and the fetters of a degrading faith
will fall from the minds of men.

"But," says the religionist "you cannot explain everything; you cannot
understand everything; and that which you cannot explain, that which
you do not comprehend, is my god."

We are explaining more every day.  We are understanding more every day;
consequently your God is growing smaller every day.

Nothing daunted, the religionist then insists that nothing can exist
without a cause, except cause, and that this uncaused cause is God.

To this we again replied: Every cause must produce an effect, because
until it does produce an effect, it is not a cause.  Every effect must
in its turn become a cause.  Therefore, in the nature of things, there
cannot be a last cause, for the reason that a so-called last cause
would necessarily produce an effect, and that effect must of necessity
become a cause.  The converse of these propositions must be true.
Every effect must have had a cause, and every cause must have been an
effect. Therefore, there could have been no first cause.  A first cause
is just as impossible as a last effect.

Beyond the universe there is nothing, and within the universe the
supernatural does not and cannot exist.

The moment these great truths are understood and admitted, a belief in
general or special providence becomes impossible.  From that instant
men will cease their vain efforts to please an imaginary being, and
will give their time and attention to the affairs of this world.  They
will abandon the idea of attaining any object by prayer and
supplication. The element of uncertainty will, in a great measure, be
removed from the domain of the future, and man, gathering courage from
a succession of victories over the obstructions of nature, will attain
a serene grandeur unknown to the disciples of any superstition.  The
plans of mankind will no longer be interfered with by the finger of a
supposed omnipotence, and no one will believe that nations or
individuals are protected or destroyed by any deity whatever.  Science,
freed from the chains of pious custom and evangelical prejudice, will,
within her sphere, be supreme.  The mind will investigate without
reverence and publish its conclusions without fear.  Agassiz will no
longer hesitate to declare the Mosaic cosmogony utterly inconsistent
with the demonstrated truths of geology, and will cease pretending any
reverence for the Jewish scriptures.  The moment science succeeds in
rendering the church powerless for evil, the real thinkers will be
outspoken.  The little flags of truce carried by timid philosophers
will disappear, and the cowardly parley will give place to victory
lasting and universal.

If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of
persons and people, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce. Age
after age, the strong have trampled upon the weak; the crafty and
heartless have ensnared and enslaved the simple and innocent, and
nowhere, in all the annals of mankind, has any god succored the
oppressed.

Man should cease to expect aid from on high.  By this time he should
know that heaven has no ear to hear, and no hand to help. The present
is the necessary child of all the past.  There has been no chance, and
there can be no interference.

If abuses are destroyed, man must destroy them.  If slaves are freed,
man must free them.  If new truths are discovered, man must discover
them.  If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is
done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind, if
the defenseless are protected, and if the right finally triumphs, all
must be the work of man.  The grand victories of the future must be won
by man, and by man alone.

Nature, so far as we can discern, without passion and without
intention, forms, transforms, and retransforms forever.  She neither
weeps nor rejoices.  She produces man without purpose, and obliterates
him without regret.  She knows no distinction between the beneficial
and the hurtful.  Poison and nutrition, pain and joy, life and death,
smiles and tears are alike to her.  She is neither merciful nor cruel.
She cannot be flattered by worship nor melted by tears.  She does not
know even the attitude of prayer. She appreciates no difference between
poison in the fangs of snakes and mercy in the hearts of men.  Only
through man does nature take cognizance of the good, the true, and the
beautiful; and, so far as we know, man is the highest intelligence.

And yet man continues to believe that there is some power independent
of and superior to nature, and still endeavors, by form, ceremony,
supplication, hypocrisy, to obtain its aid.  His best energies have
been wasted in the service of this phantom.  The horrors of witchcraft
were all born of an ignorant belief in the existence of a totally
depraved being superior to nature, acting in perfect independence of
her laws; and all religious superstition has had for its basis a belief
in at least two beings, one good and the other bad, both of whom could
arbitrarily change the order of the universe.  The history of religion
is simply the story of man's efforts in all ages to avoid one of these
powers and to pacify the other.  Both powers have inspired little else
than abject fear. The cold, calculating sneer of the devil, and the
frown of God, were equally terrible.  In any event, man's fate was to
be arbitrarily fixed forever by an unknown power superior to all law,
and to all fact.  Until this belief is thrown aside, man must consider
himself the slave of phantom masters--neither of whom promise liberty
in this world nor in the next.

Man must learn to rely upon himself.  Reading bibles will not protect
him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires, and clothing will.
To prevent famine, one plow is worth a million sermons, and even patent
medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since
the beginning of the world.

Although many eminent men have endeavored to harmonize necessity and
free will, the existence of evil, and the infinite power and goodness
of God, they have succeeded only in producing learned and ingenious
failures.  Immense efforts have been made to reconcile ideas utterly
inconsistent with the facts by which we are surrounded, and all persons
who have failed to perceive the pretended reconciliation, have been
denounced as infidels, atheists and scoffers.  The whole power of the
church has been brought to bear against philosophers and scientists in
order to compel a denial of the authority of demonstration,--and to
induce some Judas to betray Reason, one of the saviors of mankind.

During that frightful period known as the "Dark Ages," Faith reigned,
with scarcely rebellious subject.  Her temples were "carpeted with
knees," and the wealth of nations adorned her countless shrines.  The
great painters prostituted their genius to immortalize her vagaries,
while the poets enshrined them in song. At her bidding, man covered the
earth with blood.  The scales of justice were turned with gold, and for
her use were invented all the cunning instruments of pain.  She built
cathedrals for God, and dungeons for men.  She peopled the clouds with
angels and the earth with slaves.  For centuries the world was
retracing its steps--going steadily back toward, barbaric night!  A few
infidels--a few heretics cried, "Halt!" to the great rabble of ignorant
devotion, and made it possible for the genius of the nineteenth century
to revolutionize the cruel creeds and superstitions of mankind.

The thoughts of man, in order to be of any real worth, must be free.
Under the influence of fear the brain is paralyzed, and instead of
bravely solving a problem for itself, tremblingly adopts the solution
of another.  As long as a majority of men will cringe to the very earth
before some petty prince or king, what must be the infinite abjectness
of their little souls in the presence of their supposed creator and
God? Under such circumstances, what can their thoughts be worth?

The originality of repetition, and the mental vigor of acquiescence,
are all that we have any right to expect from the Christian world. As
long as every question is answered by the word "God," scientific
inquiry is simply impossible.  As fast as phenomena are satisfactorily
explained the domain of the power, supposed to be superior to nature
must decrease, while the horizon of the known must as constantly
continue to enlarge.

It is no longer satisfactory to account for the fall and rise of
nations by saying, "It is the will of God."  Such an explanation puts
ignorance and education upon exact equality, and does away with the
idea of really accounting for anything whatever.

Will the religionist pretend that the real end of science is to
ascertain how and why God acts?  Science, from such a standpoint, would
consist in investigating the law of arbitrary action, and in a grand
endeavor to ascertain the rule necessarily obeyed by infinite caprice.

From a philosophical point of view, science is knowledge of the laws of
life; of the condition of happiness; of the facts by which we are
surrounded, and the relations we sustain to men and things--by means of
which man, so to speak, subjugates nature and bends the elemental
powers to his will, making blind force the servant of his brain.

A belief in special providence does away with the spirit of
investigation, and is inconsistent with personal efforts.  Why should
man endeavor to thwart the designs of God?  "Which of you, with taking
thought, can add to his stature one cubit?"  Under the influence of
this belief, man, basking in the sunshine of a delusion, considers the
lilies of the field and refuses to take any thought for the morrow.
Believing himself in the power of an infinite being, who can, at any
moment, dash him to the lowest hell or raise him to the highest heaven,
he necessarily abandons the idea of accomplishing anything by his own
efforts.  So long as this belief was general, the world was filled with
ignorance, superstition and misery.  The energies of man were wasted in
a vain effort to obtain the aid of this power, supposed to be superior
to nature.  For countless ages, even men were sacrificed upon the altar
of this impossible god.  To please him, mothers have shed the blood of
their own babies; martyrs have chanted triumphant songs in the midst of
flames; priests have gorged themselves with blood; nuns have forsworn
the ecstasies of love; old men have tremblingly implored; women have
sobbed and entreated; every pain has been endured, and every horror has
been perpetrated.

Through the dim long years that have fled, humanity has suffered more
than can be conceived.  Most of the misery has been endured by the
weak, the loving and the innocent.  Women have been treated like
poisonous beasts, and little children trampled upon as though they had
been vermin.  Numberless altars have been reddened, even with the blood
of babies; beautiful girls have been given to slimy serpents; whole
races of men doomed to centuries of slavery, everywhere there has been
outrage beyond the power of genius to express.  During all these years
the suffering have supplicated; the withered lips of famine have
prayed; the pale victims have implored, and heaven has been deaf and
blind.

Of what use have the gods been to man?

It is no answer to say that some god created the world, established
certain laws, and then turned his attention to other matters, leaving
his children, weak, ignorant and unaided, to fight the battle of life
alone.  It is no solution to declare that in some other world this god
will render a few or even all of his subjects happy.  What right have
we to expect that a perfectly wise, good and powerful being will ever
do better than he has done, and is doing?  The world is filled with
imperfections.  If it was made by an infinite being, what reason have
we for saying that he will render it nearer perfect than it now is?  If
the infinite Father allows a majority of his children to live in
ignorance and wretchedness now, what evidence is there that he will
ever improve their condition?  Will god have more power?  Will he
become more merciful?  Will his love for his poor creatures increase?
Can the conduct of infinite wisdom, power and love ever change?  Is the
infinite capable of any improvement whatever.

We are informed by the clergy that this world is a kind of school; that
the evils by which we are surrounded are for the purpose of developing
our souls, and that only by suffering can men become pure, strong,
virtuous and grand.

Supposing this to be true, what is to become of those who die in
infancy?  The little children, according to this philosophy, can never
be developed.  They were so unfortunate as to escape the ennobling
influences of pain and misery, and as a consequence, are doomed to an
eternity of mental inferiority.  If the clergy are right on this
question, none are so unfortunate as the happy, and we should envy only
the suffering and distressed.  If evil is necessary to the development
of man, in this life, how is it possible for the soul to improve in the
perfect joy of paradise?

Since Paley found his watch, the argument of "design" has been relied
upon as unanswerable.  The Church teaches that this world, and all that
it contains, were created substantially as we now see them, that the
grasses, the flowers, the trees, and all animals, including man, were
special creations, and that they sustain no necessary relation to each
other.  The most orthodox will admit that some earth has been washed
into the sea, that the sea has encroached a little upon the land, and
that some mountains may be a trifle lower than in the morning of
creation.  The theory of gradual development was unknown to our
fathers; the idea of evolution did not occur to them.  Our fathers
looked upon the then arrangement of things as the primal arrangement.
The earth appeared to them fresh from the hands of a deity.  They knew
nothing of the slow evolutions of countless years, but supposed that
the almost infinite variety of vegetable and animal forms had existed
from the first.

Suppose that upon some island we should find a man a million years of
age, and suppose that we should find him in the possession of a most
beautiful carriage, constructed upon the most perfect model. And
suppose further, that he should tell us that it was the result of
several hundred thousand years of labor and of thought; that for fifty
thousand years he used as flat a log as he could find, before it
occurred to him that by splitting the log he could have the same
surface with only half the weight; that it took him many thousand years
to invent wheels for this log; that the wheels he first used were
solid, and that fifty thousand years of thought suggested the use of
spokes and tire; that for many centuries he used the wheels without
linch-pins: that it took a hundred thousand years more to think of
using four wheels, instead of two; that for ages he walked behind the
carriage, when going down hill, in order to hold it back, and that only
by a lucky chance he invented the tongue; would we conclude that this
man, from the very first, had been an infinitely ingenious and perfect
mechanic?  Suppose we found him living in an elegant mansion, and he
should inform us that he lived in that house for five hundred thousand
years before he thought of putting on a roof, and that he had but
recently invented windows and doors; would we say that from the
beginning he had been an infinite accomplished and scientific architect.

Does not an improvement in the things created, show the corresponding
improvement in the creator?

Would an infinitely wise, good and powerful God, intending to produce
man, commence with the lowest possible forms of life; with the simplest
organism that can be imagined, and during immeasurable periods of time,
slowly and almost imperceptibly improve upon the rude beginning, until
man was evolved?  Would countless ages thus be wasted in the production
of awkward forms, afterward abandoned?  Can the intelligence of man
discover the least wisdom in covering the earth with crawling, creeping
horrors, that live only upon the agonies and pangs of others?  Can we
see the propriety of so constructing the earth, that only an
insignificant portion of its surface is capable of producing an
intelligent man?  Who can appreciate the mercy of so making the world
that all animals devour animals? so that every mouth is a
slaughter-house, and every stomach a tomb?  Is it possible to discover
infinite intelligence and love in universal and eternal carnage?

What would we think of a father, who should give a farm to his
children, and before giving them possession should plant upon it
thousands of deadly shrubs and vines; should stock it with ferocious
beasts; and poisonous reptiles; should take pains to put a few swamps
in the neighborhood to breed malaria; should so arrange matters, that
the ground would occasionally open and swallow a few of his darlings,
and besides all this, should establish a few volcanoes in the immediate
vicinity, that might at any moment overwhelm his children with rivers
of fire?  Suppose that this father neglected to tell his children which
of the plants were deadly; that the reptiles were poisonous; failed to
say anything about the earthquakes, and kept the volcano business a
profound secret; would we pronounce him angel or fiend?

And yet this is exactly what the orthodox God has done.

According to the theologians, God prepared this globe expressly for the
habitation of his loved children, and yet he filled the forests with
ferocious beasts; placed serpents in every path; stuffed the world with
earthquakes, and adorned its surface with mountains of flame.

Notwithstanding all this, we are told that the world is perfect; that
it was created by a perfect being, and is therefore necessarily
perfect. The next moment, these same persons will tell us that the
world was cursed; covered with brambles, thistles and thorns, and that
man was doomed to disease and death, simply because our poor, dear
mother ate an apple contrary to the command of an arbitrary God.

A very pious friend of mine, having heard that I had said the world was
full of imperfections, asked me if the report was true.  Upon being
informed that it was, he expressed great surprise that any one could be
guilty of such presumption.  He said that, in his judgment, it was
impossible to point out an imperfection.  "Be kind enough," said he,
"to name even one improvement that you could make, if you had the
power." "Well," said I, "I would make good health catching, instead of
disease."

The truth is, it is impossible to harmonize all the ills, and pains,
and agonies of this world with the idea that we were created by, and
are watched over and protected by an infinitely wise, powerful and
beneficent God, who is superior to and independent of nature.

The clergy, however, balance all the real ills of this life with the
expected joys of the next.  We are assured that all is perfection in
heaven--there the skies are cloudless--there all is serenity and peace.
Here empires may be overthrown; dynasties may be extinguished in blood;
millions of slaves may toil 'neath the fierce rays of the sun, and the
cruel strokes of the lash; yet all is happiness in heaven.  Pestilence
may strew the earth with corpses of the loved; the survivors may bend
above them in agony--yet the placid bosom of heaven is unruffled.
Children may expire vainly asking for bread; babies may be devoured by
serpents, while the gods sit smiling in the clouds.  The innocent may
languish unto death in the obscurity of dungeons; brave men and heroic
women may be changed to ashes at the bigot's stake, while heaven is
filled with song and joy. Out on the wide sea, in darkness and in
storm, the shipwrecked struggle with the cruel waves, while the angels
play upon their golden harps. The streets of the world are filled with
the diseased, the deformed and the helpless; the chambers of pain are
crowded with the pale forms of the suffering, while the angels float
and fly in the happy realms of day.  In heaven they are too happy to
have sympathy; too busy singing to aid the imploring and distressed.
Their eyes are blinded; their ears are stopped and their hearts are
turned to stone by the infinite selfishness of joy.  The saved mariner
is too happy when he touches the shore to give a moment's thought to
his drowning brothers.  With the indifference of happiness, with the
contempt of bliss, heaven barely glances at the miseries of earth.
Cities are devoured by the rushing lava; the earth opens and thousands
perish; women raise their clasped hands towards heaven, but the gods
are too happy to aid their children.  The smiles of the deities are
unacquainted with the tears of men.  The shouts of heaven drown the
sobs of earth.

Having shown how man created gods, and how he became the trembling
slave of his own creation, the questions naturally arise: How did he
free himself even a little, from these monarchs of the sky, from these
despots of the clouds, from this aristocracy of the air? How did he,
even to the extent that he has, outgrow his ignorant, abject terror,
and throw off, the yoke of superstition?

Probably, the first thing that tended to disabuse his mind was the
discovery of order, of regularity, of periodicity in the universe. From
this he began to suspect that everything did not happen purely with
reference to him.  He noticed, that whatever he might do, the motions
of the planets were always the same; that eclipses were periodical, and
that even comets came at certain intervals.  This convinced him that
eclipses and comets had nothing to do with him, and that his conduct
had nothing to do with them.  He perceived that they were not caused
for his benefit or injury.  He thus learned to regard them with
admiration instead of fear.  He began to suspect that famine was not
sent by some enraged and revengeful deity but resulted often from the
neglect and ignorance of man. He learned that diseases were not
produced by evil spirits.  He found that sickness was occasioned by
natural causes, and would be cured by natural means.  He demonstrated,
to his own satisfaction at least, that prayer is not a medicine.  He
found by sad experience that his gods were of no practical use, as they
never assisted him, except when he was perfectly able to help himself.
At last, he began to discover that his individual action had nothing
whatever to do with strange appearances in the heavens; that it was
impossible for him to be bad enough to cause a whirlwind, or good
enough to stop one.  After many centuries of thought, he about half
concluded that making mouths at a priest would not necessarily cause an
earthquake.  He noticed, and no doubt with considerable astonishment,
that very good men were occasionally struck by lightning, while very
bad ones escaped.  He was frequently forced to the painful conclusion
(and it is the most painful to which any human being ever was forced)
that the right did not always prevail. He noticed that the gods did not
interfere in behalf of the weak and innocent.  He was now and then
astonished by seeing an unbeliever in the enjoyment of most excellent
health.  He finally ascertained that there could be no possible
connection between an unusually severe winter and his failure to give
sheep to a priest. He began to suspect that the order of the universe
was not constantly being changed to assist him because he repeated a
creed. He observed that some children would steal after having been
regularly baptized.  He noticed a vast difference between religions and
justice, and that the worshipers of the same God took delight in
cutting each other's throats.  He saw that these religious disputes
filled the world with hatred and slavery.  At last he had the courage
to suspect, that no God at any time interferes with the order of
events.  He learned a few facts, and these facts positively refused to
harmonize with the ignorant superstitions of his fathers.  Finding his
sacred books incorrect and false in some particulars, his faith in
their authenticity began to be shaken; finding his priests ignorant on
some points, he began to lose respect for the cloth.  This was the
commencement of intellectual freedom.

The civilization of man has increased just to the same extent that
religious power has decreased.  The intellectual advancement of man
depends upon how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new
truth.  The Church never enabled a human being to make even one of
these exchanges; on the contrary, all her power has been used to
prevent them.  In spite, however, of the Church, man found that some of
his religious conceptions were wrong.  By reading his bible, he found
that the ideas of his God were more cruel and brutal than those of the
most depraved savage.  He also discovered that this holy book was
filled with ignorance, and that it must have been written by persons
wholly unacquainted with the nature of the phenomena by which we are
surrounded; and now and then, some man had the goodness and courage to
speak his honest thoughts.  In every age some thinker, some doubter,
some investigator, some hater of hypocrisy, some despiser of sham, some
brave lover of the right, has gladly, proudly and heroically braved the
ignorant fury of superstition for the sake of man and truth.  These
divine men were generally torn in pieces by the worshipers of the gods.
Socrates was poisoned because he lacked reverence for some of the
deities.  Christ was crucified by the religious rabble for the crime of
blasphemy.  Nothing is more gratifying to a religionist than to destroy
his enemies at the command of God.  Religious persecution springs from
a due admixture of love towards God and hatred towards man.

The terrible religious wars that inundated the world with blood tended
at least to bring all religion into disgrace and hatred. Thoughtful
people began to question the divine origin of a religion that made its
believers hold the rights of others in absolute contempt.  A few began
to compare Christianity with the religions of heathen people, and were
forced to admit that the difference was hardly worth dying for.  They
also found that other nations were even happier and more prosperous
than their own.  They began to suspect, that their religion, after all,
was not of much real value.

For three hundred years the Christian world endeavored to rescue from
the "Infidel" the empty sepulchre of Christ.  For three hundred years
the armies of the cross were baffled and beaten by the victorious hosts
of an impudent impostor.  This immense fact sowed the seeds of distrust
throughout all Christendom, and millions began to lose confidence in a
God who had been vanquished by Mohammed. The people also found that
commerce made friends where religion made enemies, and that religious
zeal was utterly incompatible with peace between nations or
individuals. The discovered that those who loved the gods most were apt
to love men least; that the arrogance of universal forgiveness was
amazing; that the most malicious had the effrontery to pray for their
enemies, and that humility and tyranny were the fruit of the same tree.

For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and
women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant
religious mass on the other.  This is the war between Science and
Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom,
to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have
appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown,
and to misery hereafter.  The few have said, "Think!" The many have
said, "Believe!"

The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first
doubt, man has continued to advance.  Men began to investigate, and the
church began to oppose.  The astronomer scanned the heavens, while the
church branded his grand forehead with the word, "Infidel"; and now,
not a glittering star in all the vast expanse bears a Christian name.
In spite of all religion, the geologist penetrated the earth, read her
history in books of stone, and found hidden within her bosom, souvenirs
of all the ages.  Old ideas perished in the retort of the chemist,
useful truths took their places.  One by one religious conceptions have
been placed in the crucible of science, and thus far, nothing but dross
has been found.  A new world has been discovered by the microscope;
everywhere has been found the infinite; in every direction man has
investigated and explored, and nowhere, in earth or stars, has been
found the footstep of any being superior to or independent of nature.
Nowhere has been discovered the slightest evidence of any interference
from without.  These are the sublime truths that enable man to throw
off the yoke of superstition.  These are the splendid facts that
snatched the sceptre of authority from the hands of priests.

In the vast cemetery called the past are most of the religions of men,
and there, too, are nearly all their gods.  The sacred temples of India
were ruins long ago.  Over column and cornice; over the painted and
pictured walls, cling and creep the trailing vines. Brahma, the golden,
with four heads and four arms; Vishnu, the sombre, the punisher of the
wicked, with his three eyes, his crescent, and his necklace of skulls;
Siva, the destroyer, red with seas of blood; Kali, the goddess;
Draupadi, the white-armed, and Chrishna, the Christ, all passed away
and left the thrones of heaven desolate.  Along the banks of the sacred
Nile, Isis no longer wandering weeps, searching for the dead Osiris.
The shadow of Typhon's scowl falls no more upon the waves.  The sun
rises as of yore, and his golden beams still smite the lips of Memnon,
but Memnon is as voiceless as the Sphinx.  The sacred fanes are lost in
desert sands; the dusty mummies are still waiting for the resurrection
promised by their priests, and the old beliefs, wrought in curiously
sculptured stone, sleep in the mystery of a language lost and dead.
Odin, the author of life and soul, Vili and Ve, and the mighty giant
Ymir, strode long ago from the icy halls of the North; and Thor, with
iron glove and glittering hammer, dashes mountains to the earth no
more. Broken are the circles and cromlechs of the ancient Druids;
fallen upon the summits of the hills, and covered with the centuries'
moss, are the sacred cairns.  The divine fires of Persia and of the
Aztecs, have died out in the ashes of the past, and there is none to
rekindle, and none to feed the holy flames.  The harp of Orpheus is
still; the drained cup of Bacchus has been thrown aside; Venus lies
dead in stone, and her white bosom heaves no more with love.  The
streams still murmur, but no naiads bathe; the trees still wave, but in
the forest aisles no dryads dance. The gods have flown from high
Olympus.  Not even the beautiful women can lure them back, and Danee
lies unnoticed, naked to the stars.  Hushed forever are the thunders of
Sinai; lost are the voices of the prophets, and the land once flowing
with milk and honey is but a desert and waste.

One by one, the myths have faded from the clouds; one by one, the
phantom host has disappeared, and one by one facts, truths and
realities have taken their places.  The supernatural has almost gone,
but the natural remains.  The gods have fled, but man is here.

Nations, like individuals, have their periods of youth, of manhood and
decay.  Religions are the same.  The same inexorable destiny awaits
them all.  The gods created by the nations must perish with their
creators. They were created by men, and like men, they must pass away.
The deities of one age are the by-words of the next. The religion of
one day and country, is no more exempt from the sneer of the future
than others have been.  When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the
world's throne. When the scepter passed to Egypt, Isis and Osiris
received the homage of mankind.  Greece, with her fierce valor, swept
to empire, and Zeus put on the purple of authority.  The earth trembled
with the tread of Rome's intrepid sons, and Jove grasped with mailed
hand the thunderbolts of heaven. Rome fell, and Christians from her
territory, with the red sword of war, carved out the ruling nations of
the world, and now Christ sits upon the old throne.  Who will be his
successor?

Day by day, religious conceptions grow less and less intense.  Day by
day, the old spirit dies out of book and creed.  The burning
enthusiasm, the quenchless zeal of the early church have gone, never,
never to return.  The ceremonies remain, but the ancient faith is
fading out of the human heart.  The worn out arguments fail to
convince, and denunciations that once blanched the faces of a race,
excite in us only derision and disgust.  As time rolls on, the miracles
grow mean and small, and the evidences our fathers thought conclusive
utterly fail to satisfy us.  There is an "irrepressible conflict"
between religion and science, and they cannot peaceably occupy the same
brain nor the same world.

While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all
religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for
the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this
discord will result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some
mysterious way become a good, and that above and over all there is a
being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify everyone of the
children of men; but for those who heartlessly try to prove that
salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain; that
the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill life with fear and
death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the tomb, it is
impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt and scorn.

Reason, Observation and Experience--the Holy Trinity of Science--have
taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is
now, and the way to be happy is to make others so.  This is enough for
us.  In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any
possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of,
nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel.
Until then, let us stand erect.

Notwithstanding the fact that infidels in all ages have battled for the
rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of
liberty and justice, we are constantly charged by the Church with
tearing down without building again.  The Church should by this time
know that it is utterly impossible to rob men of their opinions.  The
history of religious persecutions fully establishes the fact that the
mind necessarily resists and defies every attempt to control it by
violence.  The mind necessarily clings to old ideas until prepared for
the new.  The moment we comprehend the truth, all erroneous ideas are
of necessity cast aside.

A surgeon once called upon a poor cripple and kindly offered to render
him any assistance in his power.  The surgeon began to discourse very
learnedly upon the nature and origin of disease; of the curative
properties of certain medicines; of the advantages of exercise, air and
light, and of the various ways in which health and strength could be
restored.  These remarks were so full of good sense, and discovered so
much profound thought and accurate knowledge, that the cripple,
becoming thoroughly alarmed, cried out,  "Do not, I pray you, take away
my crutches.  They are my only support, and without them, I should be
miserable, indeed."  "I am not going," said the surgeon,  "to take away
your crutches.  I am going to cure you, and then you will throw the
crutches away yourself."

For the vagaries of the clouds, the infidels propose to substitute the
realities of the earth; for superstition, the splendid demonstrations
and achievements of science; and for the theological tyranny, the
chainless liberty of thought.

We do not say we have discovered all; that our doctrines are the all in
all in truth.  We know of no end to the development of man. We cannot
unravel the infinite complications of matter and force. The history of
one monad is as unknown as that of the universe; one drop of water is
as wonderful as all the seas; one leaf, as all the forests; and one
grain of sand, as all the stars.

We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We
are not forgoing fetters for our children, but we are breaking those
our fathers made for us.  We are the advocates of inquiry, of
investigation and thought.  This of itself, is an admission that we are
not perfectly satisfied with all our conclusions.  Philosophy has not
the egotism of faith.  While superstition builds walls and creates
obstructions, science opens all the highways of thought. We do not
pretend to have circumnavigated everything, and to have solved all
difficulties, but we do believe that it is better to love men than to
fear gods, that it is grander and nobler to think and investigate for
yourself than to repeat a creed.  We are satisfied that there can be
but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.  We
do not expect to accomplish everything in our day; but we want to do
what good we can, and to render all the service possible in the holy
cause of human progress. We know that doing away with gods and
supernatural persons and powers is not an end.  It is a means to an
end; the real end being the happiness of man.

Felling forests is not the end of agriculture.  Driving pirates from
the sea is not all there is of commerce.

We are laying the foundations of a grand temple of the future--not the
temple of all the gods, but of all the people--wherein, with
appropriate rites, will be celebrated the religion of Humanity. We are
doing what little we can to hasten the coming of the day when society
shall cease producing millionaires and mendicants--gorged indolence and
famished industry--truth in rags, and superstition robed and crowned.
We are looking for the time when the useful shall be the honorable; and
when REASON, throned upon the world's brain, shall be the King of
Kings, and God of Gods.





INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON GHOSTS.



Ladies and Gentlemen: In the first place, allow me to tender my sincere
thanks to the clergy of this city.  I feel that I am greatly indebted
to them for this magnificent audience.  It has been said, and I believe
it myself, that there is a vast amount of intolerance in the church of
today, but when twenty-four clergymen, three of whom, I believe, are
bishops, act as my advance agents, without expecting any remuneration,
or reward in this world, I must admit that perhaps I was mistaken on
the question of intolerance.  And I will say, further, that against
those men I have not the slightest feeling in the world; every man is
the product of his own surroundings; he is the product of every
circumstance that has ever touched him; he is the product to a certain
degree of the religion and creed of his day, and when men show the
slightest intolerance I blame the creed, I blame the religion, I blame
the superstition that forced them to do so.  I do not blame those men.

Allow me to say, further, that this world is not, in my judgment, yet
perfect.  I am doing, in a very feeble way, to be sure, but I am still
endeavoring, according to my Idea, to make this world just a little
better; to give a little more liberty to men, a little more liberty to
women.  I believe in the government of kindness; I believe in truth, in
investigation, in free thought.  I do not believe that the hand of want
will be eternally extended in the world; I do not believe that the
prison will forever scar the ground; I do not believe that the shadow
of the gallows will forever curse the earth; I do not believe that it
will always be true that the men who do the most work will have the
least to wear and the least to eat.  I do believe that the time will
come when liberty and morality and justice, like the rings of Saturn,
will surround the world; that the world will be better, and every true
man and every free man will do what he can to hasten the coming of the
religion of human advancement.

I understand that for the thousands and thousands of years that have
gone by, all questions have been settled by religion.  I understand
that during all this time the people have gotten their information from
the sacerdotal class--from priests.  I know that when India was supreme
they worshipped Brahma and Vishnu, and that when Rome held in its hand
the red sword of war they worshipped Jove, and I know now that our
religion has swept to the top.  Any man living in India a few hundred
or thousand years ago would have said, this is the only true religion.
Why? Because here is the only true civilization.  A man afterward
living in Egypt would have said, this is the only true religion,
because we have the best civilization; a Greek in Athens would have
said this is the only true religion, and a Roman would have said we
have the true religion, and now those religions all having died,
although they were all true religions, we say ours is the only
religion, because we are the greatest commercial nation in the world.

There will come other nations; there will come other religions. Man has
made every religion in this world, in my judgment, and the religion,
has been good or bad according as the men who made it were good or bad.
If they were savages and barbarians, they made a God like the Jehovah
of the Jews; if they were civilized, if they were kind and tender, they
filled the heavens with kindness and love.  Every man makes his own
God. Show me the God a man worships, and I will tell you what kind of a
man he is.  Every one makes his own God, every one worships his own
God; and if you are a civilized man you will have a civilized God, and
we have been civilizing ours for hundreds and hundreds of years.  He is
getting better every day.

I am going to tell you tonight just exactly what I think.  The other
lecture I delivered here was my conservative lecture; this is my
radical one!  We even hear it suggested that our religion, our Bible,
has given us all we have of prosperity and greatness and grandeur.  I
deny it!  We have become civilized in spite of it, and I will show you
tonight that the obstruction that every science has had is what we have
been pleased to call our religion--or superstition.  I had a
conversation with a gentleman once--and these gentlemen are always
mistaking something that goes along with a thing for the cause of the
thing--and he stated to me that his particular religion was the cause
of all advancement.  I said to him: "No, Sir; the causes of all
advancement, in my judgment, are plug hats and suspenders."  And I said
to him: "You go to Turkey, where they are semi-barbarians, and you
won't find a pair of suspenders or a plug hat in all that country; you
go to Russia, and you will find now and then a pair of suspenders at
Moscow or St. Petersburg; you go on down till you strike Austria, and
black hats begin; then you go on to Paris, Berlin and New York, and you
will find everybody wears suspenders and everybody wears black hats.
Wherever you find education and music there you will find black hats
and suspenders."  He said that any man who said to him that plug hats
and suspenders had done more for mankind than the Bible and religion he
would not talk to.

As a matter of fact, we are controlled today by men who do not exist.
We are controlled today by phenomena that never did exist.  We are
controlled by ghosts and dead men, and in the grasp of death is a
scepter that controls the living present.  I propose that we shall
govern ourselves!  I propose that we shall let the past go, and let the
dead past bury the dead past.  I believe the American people have
brains enough, and nerve enough, and courage enough, to control and
govern themselves, without any assistance from dust or ghosts. That is
my doctrine, and I am going to do what I can while I live to increase
that feeling of independence and manhood in the American people.--We
can control ourselves.  I believe in the gospel of this world; I
believe in happiness right here; I do not believe in drinking skim milk
all my life with the expectation of butter beyond the clouds.  I
believe in the gospel, I say, in this world.  This is a mighty good
world.  There are plenty of good people in this world.  There is lots
of happiness in this world and, I say, let us, in every way we can,
increase it.  I envy every man who is content with his lot, whether he
is poor or whether he is rich.  I tell you, the man that tries to make
somebody else happy, and who owns his own soul, nobody having a
mortgage or deed of trust upon his manhood or liberty--this world is a
pretty good world for such a man.  I do not care: I am going to say my
say, whether I make money or grow poor; no matter whether I get high
office or walk along the dusty highway of the common.  I am going to
say my say, and I had rather be a farmer and live on forty acres of
land--live in a log cabin that I built myself, and have a little grassy
path going down to the spring, so that I can go there and hear the
waters gurgling, and know that it is coming out from the lips of the
earth, like a poem, whispering to the white pebbles--I would rather
live there, and have some hollyhocks at the corner of the house, and
the larks singing and swinging in the trees, and some lattice over the
window, so that the sunlight can fall checkered on the babe in the
cradle.  I had rather live there, and have the freedom of my own brain;
I had rather do that than live in a palace of gold, and crawl, a slimy
hypocrite, through this world.  Superstition has done enough harm
already; every religion, nearly, suspects everything that is pleasant,
everything that is joyous, and they always have a notion that God feels
best when we feel worst.  They have chained the Andromeda of joy to the
cold rock of ignorance and fear, there to be devoured by the dragon of
superstition.  Church and State are two vultures that have fed upon the
heart of chained Prometheus.  I say, let the human race have a chance
let every man think for himself and express that thought.  There is no
wrath in the serene heavens; there is no scowl in the blue of the sky.
Upon the throne of the universe tyranny does not sit as a king.

The speaker here took from his pocket a pair of spectacles, and
adjusted them, saying: I am sorry to admit it; I have got to come to
it.  I hate to put on a pair of spectacles, but the other day, as I was
putting them on, a thought struck me.  I see progress in this.  To
progress is to overcome the obstacles of nature, and in order to
overcome this obstacle of the loss of sight man invented spectacles.
Spectacles led men to the telescope, with which he read all the starry
heavens; and had it not been for the failure of sight we wouldn't have
seen a millionth part that we have.  In the first place, we owe nothing
but truth to the dead. I am going to tell the truth about them.  There
are three theories by which men account for all phenomena--for
everything that happens: First, the supernatural.  In the olden time,
everything that happened some deity produced, some spirit, some devil,
some hobgoblin, some dryad, some fairy, some spook, something except
nature. First, then, the supernatural; and a barbarian, looking at the
wide, mysterious sea, wandering through the depths of the forest,
encountering the wild beasts, troubled by strange dreams, accounted for
everything by the action of spirits, good and bad.  Second, the
supernatural and natural.  There is where the religious world is
today--a mingling of the supernatural and natural, the idea being that
God created the world and imposed upon men certain laws, and then let
them run, and if they ever got into any trouble then he would do a
miracle, and accomplish any good that he desired to do.  Third--and
that is the grand theory--the natural.  Between these theories there
has been from the dawn of civilization a conflict.  In this great war
nearly all the soldiers have been in the ranks of the supernatural.
The believers in the supernatural insist that matter is controlled and
directed entirely by powers from without.  The naturalists maintain
that nature acts from within; that nature is not acted upon; that the
universe is all there is; that nature, with infinite arms, embraces
everything that exists, and that the supposed powers beyond the limits
of the materially real are simply ghosts.

You say, ah! this is materialism! this is the doctrine of matter! What
is matter?  I take a handful of earth in my hands, and into that dust I
put seeds, and arrows from the eternal quiver of the sun smite it, and
the seeds grow and bud and blossom, and fill the air with perfume in my
sight.  Do you understand that?  Do you understand how this dust and
these seeds and that light and this moisture produced that bud and that
flower and that perfume?  Do you understand that any better than you do
the production of thought?  Do you understand that any better than you
do a dream? Do you understand that any better than you do the thoughts
of love that you see in the eyes of the one you adore?  Can you explain
it? Can you tell what matter is?  Have you the slightest conception?
Yet you talk about matter as though you were acquainted with its
origin; as though you had compelled, with clenched hands, the very
rocks to give up the secret of existence?  Do you know what force is?
Can you account for molecular action?  Are you familiar with chemistry?
Can you account for the loves and the hatreds of the atoms?  Is there
not something in matter that forever excludes you? Can you tell what
matter really is? Before you cry materialism, you had better find what
matter is.  Can you tell of anything without a material basis?  Is it
possible to imagine the annihilation of a single atom?  Is it possible
for you to conceive of the creation of a single atom?  Can you have a
thought that is not suggested to you by what you call matter?  Did any
man or woman or child ever have a solitary thought, dream or
conception, that was not suggested to them by something they had seen
in nature? Can you conceive of anything the different parts of which
have been suggested to you by nature?  You can conceive of an animal
with the hoofs of a bison, with the pouch of a kangaroo, with the head
of a buffalo, with the tail of a lion, with the scales of a fish, with
the wings of a bird, and yet every part of this impossible monster has
been suggested to you by nature. You say time, therefore you can think
eternity.  You say pain, therefore you can think hell. You say
strength, therefore you can think omnipotence.  You say wisdom,
therefore you can think infinite wisdom. Everything you see, everything
you can dream of or think of, has been suggested to you by your
surroundings, by nature.  Man cannot rise above nature; below nature
man cannot fall.  Imagine, if you please, the creation of a single
atom.  Can any one here imagine the creation out of nothing of one
atom?  Can any one here imagine the destruction of one atom?  Can you
imagine an atom being changed to nothing?  Can you imagine nothing
being changed to an atom?  There is not a solitary person here with an
imagination strong enough to think either of the creation of an atom or
of the annihilation of an atom.

Matter and the universe are the same yesterday, today and forever.
There is just as much matter in the universe today as there ever was,
and as there ever will be; there is just as much force and just as much
energy as there ever was or ever will be; but it is continually taking
different shapes and forms; one day it is a man, another day it is
animal, another day it is earth, another day it is metal, another day
it is gas, it gains nothing and it loses nothing.  Our fathers
denounced materialism and accounted for all phenomena how?  By the
caprice of gods and devils.  For thousands of years it was believed
that ghosts, good ghosts, bad ghosts, benevolent and malevolent, in
some mysterious way produced all phenomena; that disease and health,
happiness and misery, fortune and misfortune, peace and war, life and
death, success and failure, were but arrows shot by those ghosts or
shadowy phantoms, to reward or punish mankind; that they were
displeased or pleased by our actions, that they blessed the earth with
harvest or cursed it with famine; that they fed or starved the children
of men; that they crowned or uncrowned kings; that they controlled war;
that they gave prosperous voyages, allowing the brave mariner to meet
his wife and children inside the harbor bar, or strewed the sad shore
with wrecks of ships and the bodies of men.  Formerly these ghosts were
believed to be almost innumerable.  Earth, air and water were filled
with these phantoms, but in modern times they have greatly decreased in
number, because the second proposition that I stated, the supernatural
and the natural, has generally been adopted, but the remaining ghosts
are supposed to perform the same functions as of yore.

Let me say right here that the object of every religion ever made by
man has been to get on the good side of supposed powers; has been to
petition the gods to stop the earthquakes, to stop famine, to stop
pestilence.  It has always been something that man should do to prevent
being punished by the powers of the air or to get from them some
favors. It has always been believed that these ghosts could in some way
be appeased; that they could be bettered by sacrifices, by prayer, by
fasting, by the building of temples and cathedrals, by shedding the
blood of men and beasts, by forms, by ceremonies, by kneelings, by
prostrations and flagellations, by living alone in the wild desert, by
the practice of celibacy, by inventing instruments of torture, by
destroying men, women and children, by covering the earth with
dungeons, by burning unbelievers and by putting chains upon the
thoughts and manacles upon the lips of men, by believing things without
evidence, by believing things against evidence, by disbelieving and
denying demonstrations, by despising facts, by hating reason, by
discouraging investigation, by making an idiot of yourself--all these
have been done to appease the winged monsters of the air.

In the history of our poor world no horror has been omitted, no infamy
has been left undone by believers in ghosts, and all the shadows were
born of cowardice and malignity; they were painted by the pencil of
fear upon the canvas of ignorance by that artist called Superstition.
From these ghosts our fathers received their information.  These ghosts
were the schoolmasters of our ancestors. They were the scientists, the
philosophers, the geologists, the legislators, the astronomers, the
physicians, the metaphysicians and historians of the past.

Let me give you my definition of metaphysics, that is to say, the
science of the unknown, the science of guessing.  Metaphysics is where
two fools get together, and each one admits that neither can prove, and
both say, "Hence we infer."  That is the science of metaphysics.  For
this these ghosts were supposed to have the only experience and real
knowledge; they inspired men to write books, and the books were sacred.
If facts were found to be inconsistent with these books, so much the
worse for the facts, and especially for the discoverers of these facts.
It was then and still is believed that these sacred books are the basis
of the idea of immortality, to give up the idea that these books were
inspired is and to renounce the idea of immortal life.  I deny it!  Men
existed before books; and all the books that were ever written were
written, in my judgment, by men, and the idea of immortality was not
born of a book, but was born of the man who wrote the book.  The idea
of immortality, like the great sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human
heart, beating its countless waves of hope and joy against the shores
of time, and was not born of any book, nor of any religion, nor of any
creed; it was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and
flow beneath the clouds and mists of doubt and darkness as long as love
kisses the lips of death.  It is the rainbow of hope shining upon the
tears of grief.  We love, therefore we wish to live, and the foundation
of the idea of immortality is human affection and human love, and I
have a thousand times more confidence in the affections of the human
heart, in the deep and splendid feelings of the human soul than I have
in any book that ever was or ever can be written by mortal man.

From the books written by those ghosts we have at least ascertained
that they knew nothing whatever of the world in which we live. Did they
know anything about any other?  Upon every point where contradiction is
possible, the ghosts have been contradicted.  By these ghosts, by these
citizens of the air, by this aristocracy of the clouds the affairs of
government were administered all authority to govern came from them.
The emperors, kings and potentates, every one of them, had the divine
petroleum poured upon his head, the kerosene of authority.

The emperors, king and potentates had communications from the phantoms.
Man was not considered as the source of power; to rebel against the
king was to rebel against the ghosts, and nothing less than the blood
of the offenders could appease the invisible phantoms and by the
authority of the ghosts man was crushed and slayed and plundered.  Many
toiled wearily in the sun and storm that a few favorites of the ghosts
might live in idleness, and many lived in huts and caves and dens that
the few might dwell in palaces, and many clothed themselves with rags
that a few might robe themselves in purple and gold, and many crept and
cringed and crawled that a few might tread upon their necks with feet
of iron. From the ghosts men received not only authority but
information. They told us the form of the earth; they informed us that
eclipses were caused by the sins of man, especially the failure to pay
tithes that the universe was made in six days; that gazing at the sky
with a telescope was dangerous; that trying to be wise beyond what they
had written was born of a rebellious and irreverent spirit; they told
us there was no virtue like belief; no crime like doubt, that
investigation was simply impudence, and the punishment therefore
violent torment; they not only told us all about this world but about
two others, and if their statements about the other two are as true as
they were about this, no one can estimate the value of their
information.

For countless ages the world was governed by ghosts, and they spared no
pains to change the eagle of the human intellect into a bat of
darkness. To accomplish this infamous purpose, to drive the love of
truth from the human heart; to prevent the advancement of mankind to
shut out from the world every ray of intellectual light to pollute
every mind with superstition, the power of kings, the cunning and
cruelty of priests, and the wealth of nations were used.

In order to show you the information we got from the ghosts, and the
condition of the world when the ghosts were the kings, let me call your
attention to this: During these years of persecution, ignorance,
superstition and slavery, nearly all the people, the kings, lawyers and
doctors, learned and unlearned, believed in that frightful production
of ignorance, of fear and faith, called witchcraft.  Witchcraft today
is religion carried out.  They believed that man was the sport and prey
of devils; that the very air was thick with these enemies of man, and,
with few exceptions, this hideous belief was universal.  Under these
conditions progress was almost impossible.  Fear paralyzed the brain.

Progress is born of courage.  Fear believes, courage doubts.  Fear
falls upon the earth and prays; courage stands erect and thinks. Fear
retreats; courage advances.  Fear is barbarism, courage is
civilization.  Fear believes in witchcraft; courage in science and in
eternal law.  The facts upon which this terrible belief rested were
proved over and over again in nearly every court in Europe.  Thousands
confessed themselves guilty, admitted they had sold themselves to the
devil.  They gave the particulars of the sale; told what they said and
what the devil replied.  They confessed themselves guilty when they
knew that confession was death; knew that their property would be
confiscated and their children left to beg their bread.  This is one of
the miracles of history, one of the strangest contradictions of the
human mind. Without doubt they really believed themselves guilty.

In the first place, they believed in witchcraft as a fact, and when
charged with it, they became insane.  They had read the account of the
witch of Endor calling up the dead body of Samuel. He is an old man; he
has his mantle on.  They had read the account of Saul stooping to the
earth and conversing with the spirit that had been called from the
region of space by a witch.  They had read a command from the Almighty,
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and they believed the world
was full of witches, or else the Almighty Would not have made a law
against them.  They believed in witchcraft, and when they were charged
with it, they probably became insane, and in their insanity they
confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted,
charged with a crime they could not disprove.  Like a man in quicksand,
every effort only sunk them deeper.  Caught in this frightful web, at
the mercy of the devotees of superstition, hope fled and nothing
remained but the insanity of confession.

The whole world appeared insane.  In the time of James I, a man was
burned for causing a storm at sea, with the intention of drowning one
of the royal family, but I do not think it would have been much of a
crime if he had been really guilty.  How could he disprove it?  How
could he show that he did not cause a storm at sea?  All storms were at
that time supposed to be inspired by the devil; the people believed
that all storms were caused by him, or by persons whom he assisted.  I
implore you to remember that the men who believed these things wrote
our creeds and our confessions of faith, and it is by their dust that I
am asked to kneel and pay implicit homage, instead of investigating;
and I implore you to recollect that they wrote our creeds.

A woman was tried and convicted before Sir Matthew Hale, one of the
greatest judges and lawyers of England, for having caused children to
vomit crooked pins.  Think of that!  The learned judge charged the
intelligent jury that there was no doubt as to the existence of
witches, that it was established by all history and expressly taught by
the Bible.  The woman was hung and her body was burned.  Sir Thomas
Moore declared that to give up witchcraft was to throw away the sacred
scriptures.  John Wesley, too, was a firm believer in ghosts, and
insisted upon their existence after all laws upon the subject had been
repealed in England, and I beg of you to remember that John Wesley was
the founder of the Methodist Church.  In New England a woman was
charged with being a witch and with having changed herself into a fox;
while in that condition she was attacked and bitten by some dogs, and a
committee of three men was ordered by the Court to examine this woman.
They removed her clothing, and searched for what they were pleased to
call witch-spots--that is to say, spots into which a needle could be
thrust without giving pain; they reported to the Court that such spots
were found.  She denied that she had ever changed herself into a fox.
On the report of the committee she was found guilty, and she was
actually executed by our Puritan fathers, the gentlemen who braved the
danger of the deep for the sake of worshiping God and persecuting their
fellow men.  I belong to their blood, and the best thing I can say
about them, and that which rises like a white shaft to their eternal
honor, is that they were in favor of education.

A man was attacked by a wolf; he defended himself and succeeded in
cutting off one of the animal's paws, and the wolf ran away; he put it
in his pocket and carried it home; there he found his wife with one of
her hands gone, and he took that paw from his pocket and put it upon
her arm, and it assumed the appearance of a human hand, and he charged
his wife with being a witch.  She was tried, she confessed her guilt,
and she was hung and her body was burned! My! is it possible?  Did not
somebody say something against such an infamous proceeding?  Yes, they
did!  There was a Young Men's Association who invited a man to come and
give his ideas upon the subject.

He denounced it.  He said it was outrageous, that it was nonsensical,
that it was infamous and the moment he went away the young men met and
passed a resolution that he had deceived them; and the clergy at that
time protested and said, of course, let the man think, if you call that
kind of stuff thinking.

But there was one man belonging to this Association who had the courage
to stand by the truth.

Whether he believed in what the speaker said or not, he had that
manliness; and I take this opportunity to thank from the bottom of my
heart a man.  I have no idea he agrees with me except in this: Whatever
you do, do it like a man and be honest about it.

People were burned for causing frost in summer; for destroying crops
with hail; for causing storms--for making cows go dry; for souring
beer; for putting the devil in emptyings so that they would not rise.
The life of no one was secure.  To be charged was to be convicted.
Every man was at the mercy of every other.  This infamous belief was so
firmly seated in the minds of the people, that, to express a doubt as
to its existence was to be suspected yourself.  They believed that
animals were often taken possession of by devils, and they believed
that the killing of the animal would destroy the devil.  They
absolutely tried, convicted and executed dumb beasts.

At Vail, in 1470, a rooster was tried upon the charge of having laid an
egg, and the clergy said they had no doubt of it.  Rooster eggs were
used only in making witch-ointment.  This everybody knew. The rooster
was convicted, and with all due solemnity, he was burned in the public
square.

So a hog and six pig died for having killed and partially eaten a
child. The hog was convicted, but the pigs, on account of their extreme
youth, were acquitted.

As late as 1740, a cow, charged with being possessed of a devil, was
tried and was convicted.  They used to exorcise rats, snakes and
vermin; they used to go through the alleys and streets and fields and
warn them to leave within a certain number of days, and if they did not
leave, they threatened them with certain pains and penalties which they
proceeded to recount.

But let us be careful how we laugh about those things; let us not pride
ourselves too much on the progress of our age.  We must not forget that
some of our people are yet in the same intelligent business.  Only a
little while ago the Governor of Minnesota appointed a day of fasting
and prayer to see if the Lord could not be induced to kill the
grasshoppers--or send them into some other State.

About the close of the fifteenth century was the excitement in regard
to witchcraft, and Pope Innocent the Eighth issued a bull directing the
inquisitors to be vigilant in searching out and punishing all guilty of
this crime.  Forms for the crime were regularly issued.  For two
hundred and fifty years the church was busy in punishing the impossible
crime of witchcraft by burning, hanging and torturing men, women and
little children.

Protestants were as active as Catholics; and in Geneva five hundred
witches were burned at the stake in three months, and one thousand were
executed in one year in the diocese of Couro; at least one hundred
thousand victims suffered in Germany, the last execution being in
Galesburgh, and taking place in 1794, and the last in Switzerland,
1780. In England statutes were passed from Henry VI to James I,
defining the crime and punishment, and the last act passed in the
British Parliament was when Lord Bacon was a member of the house.

In 1716 Mrs. Hicks and daughter, nine years of age, were hung for
selling their souls to the devil; and raising a storm at sea by pulling
off their stockings and making a lather of soap.  In England it has
been estimated that at least 30,000 were hung or burned.  The last
victim executed in Scotland was 1722.  She was an innocent old woman
who had so little idea of her condition, that she rejoiced at the sight
of the fire destined to consume her to ashes.  She had a daughter, lame
in her hands, a circumstance accounted for from the fact that the witch
had been used to transfer her daughter into a pony and get her shod by
the devil!  Intelligent ancestors!

In 1692 nineteen persons were executed in Salem, Massachusetts, for the
crime of witchcraft.  It was thought in those days that men and women
made contracts with the devil, and those contracts were confirmed at a
meeting of witches and ghosts, over which the devil presided; these
contracts in some cases were for a few years, others for life.  General
assemblages of witches were held once a year.  To these they rode from
great distances on brooms and dogs, and there they did homage to the
prince of hell and offered him sacrifices.

In 1836 the populace of Holland plunged into the sea a woman reputed to
be a sorceress, and as the miserable woman persisted in rising to the
surface, she was pronounced guilty, and was beaten to death.  It was
believed that the devil could transform people into any shape he
pleased, and whoever denounced this idea was denounced as an Infidel;
that the believers in witchcraft appealed to the devil; that with the
devil were associated innumerable spirits, who ranged over the world
endeavoring to torment mankind; that these spirits possessed a power
and wisdom transcending the limits of human faculties.  They believed
the devil could carry persons hundreds of miles in a few seconds; they
believed this because they knew that Christ had been carried by the
devil, in the same manner, into a high mountain, and placed upon a
pinnacle.  According to their account, the prince of the air had
absolutely taken the God of this infinite Universe, the Creator of all
its shining, wheeling stars--he had been absolutely taken by the devil
to a pinnacle of the temple, and there had been tempted by the devil to
cast himself to the earth.

Take from the church itself the threat and fear of hell and it becomes
an extinct volcano.  With the doctrine of hell taken from the Church,
that is the end of the fall of man, that is the end of the scheme of
atonement.  Take from them the idea of an eternal place of torment, and
the Church is thrown back simply upon facts.

And Dean Stanley, the leading ecclesiastic of Great Britain, only the
other day in Winchester Abbey, said science will be the only theology
of the future.  Morality is the only religion of the years to come.
Not withstanding all the infamous things laid to the charge of the
Church, we are told that the civilization of today is the child of what
we are pleased to call superstition. Let me call your attention to what
they received from their fears of these ghosts.  Let me give you an
outline of the sciences as taught by those philosophers.  There is one
thing that a man is interested in, if he is in anything, and that is in
the science of medicine.  A doctor is, so to speak, in partnership with
Nature. He is a preserver if he is worthy of the name.  And now I want
to show what they have gotten from these ghosts upon the science of
medicine.

According to them, all of the diseases were produced as a punishment by
the good ghosts, or out of pure malignity by the bad ones.  There were,
properly speaking, no diseases; the sick were simply possessed by
ghosts.  The science of medicine consisted in knowing how to persuade
these ghosts to vacate the premises and for thousands of years all
diseases were treated with incantations, hideous noises, with the
beating of drums and gongs; everything was done to make the position of
a ghost as unpleasant as possible; and they generally succeeded in
making things so disagreeable that if the ghost did not leave, the
patient died.  These ghosts were supposed to be different in rank,
power and dignity.  Now, then, a man pretended to have won the favor of
some powerful ghost who gave him power over the little ones.  Such a
man became a very great physician.  It was found that a certain kind of
smoke was exceedingly offensive to the nostrils of your ordinary ghost.
With this smoke the sick room would be filled until the ghost vanished
or the patient died.  It was also believed that certain words, when
properly pronounced, were the most effective weapons, for it was for a
long time supposed that Latin words were the best, I suppose because
Latin was a dead language.  For thousands of years medicine consisted
in driving the devils out of men.  In some instances bargains and
promises were made with the ghosts.  One case is given where a
multitude of devils traded a man off for a herd of swine.  In this
transaction the devils were the losers, the swine having immediately
drowned themselves in the sea.  This idea of disease appears to have
been almost universal and is not yet extinct.  The contortions of the
epileptic, the strange twitching of those afflicted with cholera, were
all seized as proof that the bodies of men were filled with vile and
malignant spirits.  Whoever endeavored to account for these things by
natural causes; whoever endeavored to cure disease by natural means was
denounced as an Infidel. To explain anything was a crime.  It was to
the interest of the sacerdotal class that all things should be
accounted for by the will and power of God and the devil.  The moment
it is admitted that all phenomena are within the domain of the natural,
and that all the prayers in the world cannot change one solitary fact,
the necessity for the priest disappears.  Religion breathes the idea of
miracles.  Take from the minds of men the idea of the supernatural, and
superstition ceases to exist; for this reason the Church has always
despised the man who explains the wonderful.  The moment that it began
to be apparent that prayer could do nothing for the body, the priest
shifted his ground and began praying for the soul.

After the devil was substantially abandoned in the practice of
medicine, and when it was admitted that God had nothing to do with
ordinary coughs and colds, it was still believed that all the diseases
were sent by Him as punishment for the people; it was thought to be a
kind of blasphemy to even stay the ravages of pestilence.  Formerly,
when a pestilence fell upon a people, the arguments of the priest were
boundless.  He told the people that they had refused to pay their
tithes, and they had doubted some of the doctrines of the church, that
in their hearts they had contempt for some of the priests of the Lord,
and God was now taking his revenge, and the people, for the most part,
believed this issue of falsehood, and hastened to fall upon their knees
and to pour out their wealth upon the altars of hypocrisy.

The Church never wanted disease to be absolutely under the control of
man.  Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preached a sermon
against vaccination.  His idea was that if God had decreed that through
all eternity certain men should die of small pox, it was a frightful
sin to endeavor to prevent it; that plagues and pestilence were
instruments in the hands of God with which to gain the love and worship
of mankind; to find the cure for the disease was to take the punishment
from the Church.  No one tries to cure the ague with prayer because
quinine has been found to be altogether more reliable.  Just as soon as
a specific is found for a disease, that disease is left out of the list
of prayer. The number of diseases with which God from time to time
afflicts mankind is continually decreasing, because the number of
diseases that man can cure is continually increasing.  In a few years
all diseases will be under the control of man.  The science of medicine
has but one enemy--superstition.  Man was afraid to save his body for
fear he would lose his soul.  Is it any wonder that the people in those
days believed in and taught the infamous doctrine of eternal
punishment, that makes God a heartless monster and man a slimy
hypocrite and slave?

The ghosts were also historians, and wrote the grossest absurdities.
They wrote as though they had been eye witnesses of every occurrence.
They told all the past, they predicted all the future, with an
impudence that amounted to sublimity.  They said that the Tartars
originally came from hell, and that they were called Tartars because
that was one of the names of hell.  These gentlemen accounted for the
red on the breasts of robins from the fact that those birds used to
carry water to the unhappy infants in hell.  Other eminent historians
say that Nero was in the habit of vomiting frogs.  When I read that, I
said some of the croakers of the present day would be better for such a
vomit.  Others say that the walls of a city fell down in answer to
prayer.  They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals;
that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that
he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had
slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were
rewarded for having written the only reliable history of their country.
These are the men from whom we get our creeds and our confessions of
faith.

In all the histories of those days there is hardly a truth.  Facts were
not considered of any importance.  They wrote, and the people believed
that the tracks of Pharaoh's chariot were still visible upon the sands
of the Red Sea, and that they had been miraculously preserved as
perpetual witnesses of the miracles that had been performed, and they
said to any man who denied it, "Go there and you will find the tracks
still upon the sand."  They accounted for everything as the work of
good and evil spirits; with cause and effect they had nothing to do.
Facts were in no way related to each other.  God, governed by infinite
caprice, filled the world with miracles and disconnected events, and
from his quiver came the arrows of pestilence and death.  The moment
the idea is abandoned that everything in this universe is natural--that
all phenomena are the necessary links in the endless chain of
being--the conception of history becomes impossible that the ghost of
the present is not the child of the past; the present is not the mother
of the future. In the domain of superstition all is accident and
caprice; and do not, I pray you, forget that the writers of our creeds
and confessions of faith believed this to be a world of chance.
Nothing happens by accident; nothing happens by chance.  In the wide
universe everything is necessarily produced, every effect has behind it
a cause, every effect is in its turn a cause, and there is in the wide
domain of the infinite not room enough for a miracle.

When I say this, I mean this is my idea.  I may be wrong, but that is
my idea.  It was believed by our intelligent ancestors that all law
derived its greatness and force from the fact that it had been
communicated to man by ghosts.  Of course, it is not pretended that the
ghosts told everybody the law, but they told it to a few, and the few
told it to the people, and the people, as a rule, paid them exceedingly
well for the trouble.  It was a long time before the people commenced
making laws for themselves, and, strange as it may appear, most of
their laws are vastly superior to the ghost article. Through the web
and woof of human legislation gradually began to run and shine and
glitter the golden thread of justice.

During these years of darkness it was believed that, rather than see an
act of injustice done, rather than see the guilty triumph, some ghost
would interfere and I do wish, from the bottom of my heart, that that
was the truth.  There never was forced upon my heart a more frightful
conviction than this--the right does not always prevail; there never
was forced upon my mind a more cruel conclusion than this--innocence is
not always a sufficient shield. I wish it was.  I wish, too, that man
suffered nothing but that which he brings upon himself and yet I find
that in nine districts in India, between the 1st day of last January
and the 1st day of June, 2,800,000 people starved to death, and that
little children, with their lips upon the breasts of famine, died,
wasted away. And why, simply because a little while before the wind did
not veer the one hundredth part of a degree, and send clouds over the
country, freighted with rain, freighted with love and joy.  But if that
wind had just turned that way there would have been happy men, women
and children, all clad in the garments of health.  I wish that I could
know in my heart that there was some power that would see to it that
men and women got exact justice somewhere.  I do wish that I knew--the
right would prevail--that innocence was an infinite shield.

During these years it was believed that rather than see an act of
injustice done some ghost would interfere.  This belief, as a rule,
gave great satisfaction to the victorious party, and, as the other man
was dead, no complaint was ever made by him.  This doctrine was a
sanctification of brute force and chance.  Prisoners were made to grasp
hot irons, and if it burned them their guilt was established.  Others
were tied hands and feet and cast into the sea, and if they sank, the
verdict of guilt was unanimous; if they did not sink then they said
water is such a pure element that it refuses to take a guilty person,
and consequently he is a witch or wizard.  Why, in England, persons
accused of crime could appeal to the cross, and to a piece of
sacramental bread.  If he could swallow this without choking he was
acquitted.  And this practice was continued until the time of King
Edward, who was choked to death; after which it was discontinued.

Ghosts and their followers always took delight in torturing with
unusual pain any infraction of their laws, and generally death was the
penalty. Sometimes, when a man committed only murder, he was permitted
to flee to a place of refuge--murder being only a crime against
man--but for saying certain words, or denying certain doctrines, or for
worshiping wrong ghosts, or for failing to pray to the right one, or
for laughing at a priest, or for saying that wine was not blood, or
bread was not flesh, or for failing to regard rams' horns as artillery,
or for saying that a raven as a rule, was a poor landlord, death,
produced by all the ways that ingenuity or hatred could devise, was the
penalty suffered by these men.  I tell you tonight law is a growth; law
is a science. Right and wrong exist in the nature of things.  Things
are not right because they are commanded; they are not wrong because
they are prohibited.  They are prohibited because we believe them
wrong; they are commended because we believe them right.  There are
real crimes enough without creating artificial ones.  All progress in
legislation for a thousand years has consisted in repealing the laws of
the ghosts.  The idea of right and wrong is born of man's capacity to
enjoy and suffer.  If man could not suffer, if he could not inflict
injury upon his brother, if he could neither feel nor inflict
punishment, the idea of law, the idea of right, the idea of wrong,
never could have entered into his brain.  If man could not suffer, if
he could not inflict suffering, the word conscience never would have
passed the lips of man.  There is one good--happiness. There is one
sin--selfishness.  All laws should be for the preservation of the one
and the destruction of the other.  Under the regime of the ghosts the
laws were not understood to exist in the nature of things; they were
supposed to be irresponsible commands, and these commands were not
supposed to rest upon reason; they were simply the product of arbitrary
will.  These penalties for the violations of those laws were as cruel
as the penalties were absurd.  There were over two hundred offenses for
which man was punished with death.  Think of it! And these laws are
said to have come from a most merciful God.  And yet we have become
civilized to that degree in this country that in the State of New York
there is only one crime punishable with death. Think of it!  Did I not
tell you that we were now civilizing our gods?  The tendency of those
horrible laws, the tendency of those frightful penalties, was to blot
the idea of justice from the human soul.  Now, I want to show you how
perfectly every department of human knowledge, or rather of ignorance,
was saturated with superstition.  I will for a moment refer to the
science of language.

It was thought by our fathers that Hebrew was the original language;
that it was taught to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by the
Almighty himself.  Every fact inconsistent with that idea was thrown
away. According to the ghosts, the trouble at the Tower of Babel
accounted for the fact that all the people did not speak the Hebrew
language.  The Babel question settled all questions in the science of
language.  After a time so many facts were found to be so inconsistent
with the Hebrew idea that it began to fall into disrepute, and other
languages began to be used.  Andrew Kent published a work on the
science of language, in which he stated that God spoke to Adam, and
Adam answered, in Hebrew, and that the serpent probably spoke to Eve in
French.  In 1580 another celebrated work was published at Antwerp, in
which the whole matter was put at rest, showing beyond a doubt that the
language spoken in Paradise was neither more nor less than plain
Holland Dutch.  Another celebrated writer, a contemporary of Sir Isaac
Newton, discouraged the idea that all languages could be traced to one;
he maintained that language was of natural growth; that we speak as
naturally as we grow; we talk as naturally as sings a bird, or as
blooms and blossoms a flower. Experience teaches us that this be so;
words are continually dying and continually may being born--words are
the garments of thought.  Through the lapse of time some were as rude
as the skins of wild beasts, and others pleasing and cultured like silk
and gold.  Words have been born of hatred and revenge, of love and self
sacrifice and fear, of agony and joy the stars have fashioned them, and
in them mingled the darkness and the dawn.

Every word that we get from the past is, so to speak, a mummy robed in
the linen of the grave.  They are the crystallizations of human
history, of all that man enjoyed, of all that man has suffered, his
victories and defeats, all that he has lost and won.  Words are the
shadows of all that has been; they are the mirrors of all that is. The
ghosts also enlightened our fathers in astronomy and geology. According
to them the world was made out of nothing, and a little more nothing
having been taken than was used in the construction of the world, the
stars were made out of the scraps that were left over.  Cosmos, in the
sixth century, taught that the stars were impelled by angels, who
carried them upon their shoulders, rolled them in front of them, or
drew them after. He also taught that each angel who pushed a star took
great pains to observe what the other angels were doing, so that the
relative distances between the stars might always remain the same.

He stated that this world was a vast body of water, with a strip of
land on the outside; that Adam and Eve lived on the outer strip; that
their descendants were drowned on the outer strip, all except Noah and
his family; he accounted for night and day by saying that on the outer
strip of land was a mountain, around which the sun revolved, producing
darkness when it was hidden from sight, and daylight when it emerged;
he also declared the earth to be flat. This he proved by many passages
from the Bible; among other reasons for believing the earth to be flat
he referred to a passage in the New Testament, which says that Christ
shall come again in glory and power, and every eye shall see him, and
said, now, if the world is round how are the people on the other side
going to see Christ when he comes?  That settled the question, and the
church not only indorsed this book but declared that whoever believed
either less or more was a heretic and would be dealt with as such.

In those blessed days ignorance was a king and science was an outcast.
The church knew that the moment the earth ceased to be the center of
the universe, and became a mere speck in the starry sphere of
existence, every religion would become a thing of the past. In the name
and by the authority of the ghosts, men enslaved their fellowmen; they
trampled upon the rights of women and children.  In the name and by the
authority of ghosts, they bought and sold each other.  They filled
heaven with tyrants and the earth with slaves. They filled the present
with intolerance and the future with horror. In the name and by the
authority of the ghosts, they declared superstition to be the real
religion.  In the name and by the authority of the ghosts, they
imprisoned the human mind; they polluted the conscience, they subverted
justice, and they sainted hypocrisy.  I have endeavored in some degree
to show you what has been and always will be when men are governed by
superstition.

When they destroy the sublime standard of reason; when they take the
words of others and do not investigate them themselves, even the great
men of those days appear nearly as weak as the most ignorant.  One of
the greatest men of the world, an astronomer second to none, discoverer
of the three great laws that explain the solar system, was an
astrologer and believed that he could predict the career of a man by
finding what star was in the ascendant at his birth.  He believed in
what is called the music of the spheres, and he ascribed the qualities
of the music--alto, bass, tenor and treble--to certain of the planets.
Another man kept an idiot, whose words he put down and then put them
together in such a manner as to make promises, and waited patiently to
see that they were fulfilled.  Luther believed he had actually seen the
devil and discussed points of theology with him.  The human mind was
enchained. Every idea, almost, was a mystery.  Facts were looked upon
as worthless; only the wonderful was worth preserving.  Devils were
thought to be the most industrious beings in the universe, and with
these imps every occurrence of an unusual character was connected.
There was no order, certainty; everything depended upon ghosts and
phantoms, and man, for the most part, considered himself at the mercy
of malevolent spirits. He protected himself as best he could with holy
water, and with tapers, and wafers, and cathedrals.  He made noises to
frighten the ghosts and music to charm them; he fasted when he was
hungry and he feasted when he was not; he believed everything
unreasonable; he humbled himself; he crawled in the dust; he shut the
doors and windows; and excluded every ray of light from his soul; and
he delayed not a day to repair the walls of his own prison; and from
the garden of the human heart they plucked and trampled into the bloody
dust the flowers and blossoms; they denounced man as totally depraved;
they made reason blasphemy; they made pity a crime; nothing so
delighted them as painting the torments and tortures of the damned.
Over the worm that never dies they grew poetic. According to them, the
cries ascending from hell were the perfume of heaven.

They divided the world into saints and sinners, and all the saints were
going to heaven, and all the sinners yonder.  Now, then, you stand in
the presence of a great disaster.  A house is on fire, and there is
seen at a window the frightened face of a woman with a babe in her
arms, appealing for help;  humanity cries out: "Will someone go to the
rescue?"  They do not ask for a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Catholic;
they ask for a man; all at once there starts from the crowd one that
nobody ever suspected of being a saint; one may be, with a bad
reputation; but he goes up the ladder and is lost in the smoke and
flame; and a moment after he emerges, and the great circles of flame
hiss around him; in a moment more he has reached the window; in another
moment, with the woman and child in his arms, he reaches the ground and
gives his fainting burden to the bystanders and the people all stand
hushed for a moment, as they always do at such times, and then the air
is rent with acclamations.  Tell me that that man is going to be sent
to hell, to eternal flames, who is willing to risk his life rather than
a woman and child should suffer from the fire one moment!  I despise
that doctrine of hell!  Any man that believes in eternal hell is
afflicted with at least two diseases--petrifaction of the heart and
petrifaction of the brain.

I have seen upon the field of battle a boy sixteen years of age struck
by a fragment of a shell; I have seen him fall; I have seen him die
with a curse upon his lips and the face of his mother in his heart.
Tell me that his soul will be hurled from the field of battle where he
lost his life that his country might live--where he lost his life for
the liberties of man--tell me that he will be hurled from that field to
eternal torment!  I pronounce it an infamous lie.  And yet, according
to these gentlemen, that is to be the fate of nearly all the splendid
fellows in this world.

I had in my possession a little while ago a piece of fresco that used
to adorn a church at Stratford-on-Avon, the place where Shakespeare
lived, and there was a picture representing the morning of the
resurrection and people were getting out of their graves and devils
were grabbing them by their heels.  And there was an immense monster,
with jaws open so wide that a man could walk down its throat, and the
flames were issuing therefrom, and there were devils driving people in
droves down the throat of this monster; and there was an immense kettle
in which they had put these men, and the fire was being stirred under
it, and hot pitch was being poured on top, and little devils were
setting it on fire and then on the walls there were hundreds hung up by
their tongues to hooks and nails; and then the saved--there were some
five or six saved--upon the horizon, and they had a most self-satisfied
grin of "I told you so."

At the risk of being tiresome, I have said that I have to show the
direction of the human mind in slavery, the effects of widespread
ignorance, and the result of fear.  I want to convince you that every
form of slavery, physical or mental, is a viper that will finally fill
with poison the breast of any man alive.  I want to show you that there
should be republicanism in the domain of thought as well as in civil
government.  The first step toward progress is for man to cease to be
the slave of the creatures of his creation. Men found at last that the
event is more valuable than the prophecy, especially if it never comes
to pass.  They found that diseases were not produced by spirits; that
they could not be cured by frightening them away.  They found that
death was as natural as life.  They began to study the anatomy and
chemistry of the human body, and they found that all was natural, and
the conjurer and the sorcerer were dismissed, and the physician and
surgeon were employed.  They learned that being born under a star or
planet had nothing to do with their luck; the astrologer was discharged
and the astronomer took his place.  They found that the world had swept
through the constellation for millions of ages.  They found that
diseases were produced as easily as grass, and were not sent as
punishment on men for failing to believe a creed.  They found that man,
through intelligence, could take advantage of the affairs of nature;
that he could make the waves, the winds, the flames, and the lightnings
slaves at his bidding to administer to his wants; they found the ghosts
knew nothing of benefit to man; that they were entirely ignorant of
history; that they were bad doctors and worse surgeons; that they knew
nothing of the law and less of justice that they were poor politicians;
that they were tyrants, and that they were without brains and utterly
destitute of hearts.

The condition of this world during the dark ages shows exactly the
result of enslaving the souls of men.  In those days there was no
liberty.  Liberty was despised, and the laborer was considered but
little above the beast.  Ignorance, like a vast cowl, covered the brain
of the world; superstition ran riot, and credulity sat upon the throne
of the soul.  Murder and hypocrisy were the companions of man, and
industry was a slave.  Every country maintained that it was no robbery
to take the property of Mohammedans by force, and no murder to kill the
owner.  Lord Bacon was the first man who maintained that a Christian
country was bound to keep its plighted faith with a Mohammedan nation.
Every man who could read or write was suspected of being a heretic in
those days.  Only one person in 40,000 could read or write.  All
thought was discouraged.  The whole earth was ruled by the mitre and
sceptre, by the altar and throne, by fear and force, by ignorance and
faith, by ghouls and ghosts.  In the 15th century the following law was
in force in England:  "Whosoever reads the Scripture in the mother
tongue shall forfeit land, cattle, life and goods, for themselves and
their heirs forever, and should be condemned for heretics to God,
enemies to the crown, and traitors to the land."

During the period this law was in force, thirty-nine were hanged and
their bodies burned.  In the 16th century men were burned because they
failed to kneel to a procession of monks.  Even the Reformers, so
called, had no idea of liberty only when in the minority; the moment
they were clothed with power, they began to exterminate with fire and
sword.  Castillo--and I want you to recollect it--was the first
minister in the world that declared in favor of universal toleration.
Castillo was pursued by John Calvin like a wild beast.  Calvin said
that such a monstrous doctrine he crucified Christ afresh, and they
pursued that man until he died; recollect it!  They can't do that
now-a-days!  You don't know how splendid I feel about the liberty I
have.  The horizon is filled with glory and the air is filled with
wings.  If there are any in this world who think they had better not
tell what they really think because it will take bread from their
little children, because it will take clothing from their
families--don't do it! don't make martyrs of yourselves!  I don't
believe in martyrdom! Go right along with them; go to church and say
amen as near the right place as you can.  I will do your talking for
you.  They can't take the bread away from me.  I will talk.  Bodemus, a
lawyer of France, wrote a few words in favor of freedom of conscience.
Montaigne was the first to raise his voice against torture in France;
but what was the voice of one man against the terrible cry of ignorant,
infatuated, malevolent millions!  I intend to do what little I can, and
I am going to do it kindly.  I am going to appeal to reason and to
charity, to justice, to science, and to the future. For my part, I
glory in the fact that in the New World, in the United States, liberty
of conscience was first granted to man, and that the Constitution of
the United States was the first great decree entered in the high court
of human equity forever divorcing Church and State. It is the grandest
step ever taken by the human race and the Declaration of Independence
was the first document that retired ghosts from politics.  It is the
first document that said authority does not come from the phantoms of
the air; authority is not from that direction; it comes from the people
themselves.  The Declaration of Independence enthroned man and
dethroned the phantoms.  You will ask what has caused this change in
three hundred years.  I answer, the inventions and discoveries of the
few; the brave thoughts and heroic utterances of the few; the
acquisition of a few facts; getting acquainted with our mother, Nature.
Besides this, you must remember that every wrong in some way, tends to
abolish itself.  It is hard to make a lie last always. A lie will not
fit the truth; it will only fit another lie told on purpose to fit it.
Nothing but truth lives.

The nobles and the kings quarreled; the priests began to dispute, and
the millions began to get their rights.  In 1441 printing was
discovered.  At that time the past was a vast cemetery, without an
epitaph.  The ideas of men had mostly perished in the brains that had
produced them.  Printing gives an opening for thought; it preserves
ideas; it made it possible for a man to bequeath to the world the
wealth of his thoughts.  About the same time, or a little before, the
Moors had gone into Europe, and it can be truthfully said that science
was thrust into the brain of Europe upon the point of a Moorish lance.
They gave us paper, and what is printing without paper?

A bird without wings.  I tell you paper has been a splendid thing.

The discovery of America, whose shores were trod by the restless feet
of adventure and the people of every nation--out of this strange
mingling of facts and fancies came the great Republic. Every fact has
pushed a superstition from the brain and a ghost from the cloud.  Every
mechanical art is an educator; every loom, every reaper, every mower,
every steamboat, every locomotive, every engine, every press, every
telegraph is a missionary of science and an apostle of progress; every
mill, every furnace with its wheels and levers, in which something is
made for the convenience, for the use and the comfort and the
well-being of man, is my kind of church, and every schoolhouse is a
temple. Education is the most radical thing in this world.  To teach
the alphabet is to inaugurate a revolution; to build a schoolhouse is
to construct a fort; every library is an arsenal filled with the
weapons and ammunition of progress; every fact is a monitor with sides
of iron and a turret of steel.  I thank the inventors and discoverers.
I thank Columbus and Magellan.  I thank Locke and Hume, Bacon and
Shakespeare. I thank Fulton and Watt, Franklin and Morse, who made
lightning the messenger of man.  I thank Luther for protesting against
the abuses of the Church, but denounce him because he was an enemy of
liberty. I thank Calvin for writing a book in favor of religious
freedom, but I abhor him because he burned Servetus.  I thank the
Puritans for saying that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, and
yet I am compelled to admit that they were tyrants themselves.  I thank
Thomas Paine because he was a believer in liberty.  I thank Voltaire,
that great man who for half a century was the intellectual monarch of
Europe, and who, from his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the
finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom.  I thank the
inventors, I thank the discoverers, the thinkers and the scientists,
and I thank the honest millions who have toiled.  I thank the brave men
with brave thoughts. They are the Atlases upon whose broad and mighty
shoulders rests the grand fabric of civilization; they are the men who
have broken, and are still breaking, the chains of superstition.

We are beginning to learn that to swap off a superstition for a fact,
to ascertain the real, is to progress.  All that gives us better bodies
and minds and clothes and food and pictures, grander music, better
heads, better hearts, and that makes us better husbands and wives and
better citizens, all these things combined produce what we call the
progress of the human race.  Man advances only as he overcomes the
obstacles of nature.  It is done by labor and thought.  Labor is the
foundation. Without great labor it is impossible to progress.  Without
labor on the part of those who conduct all great industries of life, of
those who battle with the obstacles of the sea, on the part of the
inventors, the discoverers, and the brave, heroic thinkers, no surplus
is produced; and from the surplus produced by labor, spring the schools
and universities, the painters, the sculptors, the poets, the hopes,
the loves and the aspirations of the world.

The surplus has given us the books.  It has given us all there is of
beauty and eloquence.  I am aware there is a vast difference of opinion
as to what progress is, and that many denounce my ideas. I know there
are many worshipers of the past.  They see no beauty in anything from
which they do not blow the dust of ages with the breath of praise.
They see nothing like the ancients; no orators, poets or statesmen like
those who have been dust for thousands of years.

In a sermon on a certain evening, some time ago, the Rev. Dr. Magee of
Albany, N. Y., stated that Colonel Ingersoll, referring to Jesus
Christ, called him a "dirty little Jew."  I denounce that as a dirty
little lie.

I have as much reverence for any man who ever did what he believed was
right, and died in order to benefit mankind, as any man in this world.
Do they treat an opponent with fairness?  Are they investigating?  Do
they pull forward or do they hold back?  Is science indebted to the
Church for a single fact?  Let us know what it is.  What church has
been the asylum for a persecuted truth? What reform has been
inaugurated by the Church?  Did the Church abolish slavery?  No.  Who
commenced it? Such men as Garrison and Pillsbury and Wendel Phillips.
They were the titans that attacked the monster, and not a solitary one
of them ever belonged to a church.  Has the Church raised its voice
against war?  No. Are men restrained by superstition?  Are men
restrained by what you call religion?  I used to think they were not;
now I admit they are.  No man has ever been restrained from the
commission of a real crime, but from an artificial one he has.  There
was a man who committed murder.  They got the evidence, but he
confessed that he did it.  "What did you do it for?"  "Money."   "Did
you get any money?"  "Yes."  "How much?" "Fifteen cents."   "What kind
of a man was he?"  "A laboring man I killed."  "What did you do with
the money?"   "I bought liquor with it." "Did he have anything else?"
"I think he had some meat and bread." "What did you do with that?"   "I
ate the bread and threw away the meat; it was Friday."  So you see it
will restrain in some things.

Just to the extent that man has freed himself from the dominion of
ghosts he has advanced; to that extent he has freed himself from the
tyrant's poison. Man has found that he must give liberty to others in
order to have it himself.  He has found that a master is a slave; that
a tyrant is also a slave.  He has found that governments should be
administered by men for men; that the rights of all are to be
protected; that woman is at least the equal for man; that men existed
before books; that all creeds were made by men; that the few have a
right to contradict what the pulpit asserts; that man is responsible to
himself and to others.  True religion must be free; without liberty the
brain is a dungeon and the mind the convict.  The slave may bow and
cringe and crawl, but he cannot worship, he cannot adore.  True
religion is the perfume of the free and grateful air.  True religion is
the subordination of the passions to the intellect.  It is not a creed;
it is a life.  The theory that is afraid of investigation is not
deserving of a place in the human mind.

I do not pretend to tell what all the truth is.  I do not pretend to
have fathomed the abyss, nor to have floated on outstretched wings
level with the heights of thought.  I simply plead for freedom. I
denounce the cruelties and horrors of slavery.  I ask for light and air
for the souls of men.  I say, take off those chains--break those
manacles--free those limbs--release that brain.  I plead for the right
to think--to reason--to investigate.  I ask that the future may be
enriched with the honest thoughts of men.  I implore every human being
to be a soldier in the army of progress.  I will not invade the rights
of others.  You have no right to erect your toll-gates upon the
highways of thought.  You have no right to leap from the hedges of
superstition and strike down the pioneers of the human race.  You have
no right to sacrifice the liberties of man upon the altars of ghosts.
Believe what you may; preach what you desire; have all the forms and
ceremonies you please; exercise your liberties in your own way, and
extend to all others the same right.

I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the
world.  I attack slavery.  I ask for room--room for the human mind.

Why should we sacrifice a real world that we have for one we know not
of?  Why should we enslave ourselves?  Why should we forge fetters for
our own hands?  Why should we be the slaves of phantoms--phantoms that
we create ourselves?  The darkness of barbarism was the womb of these
shadows.  In the light of science they cannot cloud the sky forever.
They have reddened the hands of man with innocent blood.  They made the
cradle a curse, and the grave a place of torment.

They blinded the eyes and stopped the ears of the human race. They
subverted all the ideas of justice by promising infinite rewards for
finite virtues, and threatening infinite punishment for finite offenses.

I plead for light, for air, for opportunity.  I plead for individual
independence.  I plead for the rights of labor and of thought.  I plead
for a chainless future.  Let the ghosts go--justice remains. Let them
disappear--men, women and children are left.  Let the monster fade
away--the world remains, with its hills and seas and plains, with its
seasons of smiles and frowns, its Springs of leaf and bud, its Summer
of shade and flower, its Autumn with the laden boughs, when

          The withered banners of the corn are still,
          And gathered fields are growing strangely wan,
          While Death, poetic Death, with hands that color
          Whate'er they touch, weaves in the Autumn wood
          Her tapestries of gold and brown.

The world remains, with its Winters and homes and firesides, where grow
and bloom the virtues of our race.  All these are left; and music, with
its sad and thrilling voice, and all there is of art and song and hope,
and love and aspiration high.  All these remain. Let the ghosts go--we
will worship them no more.

Man is greater than these phantoms.  Humanity is grander than all the
creeds, than all the books.   Humanity is the great sea, and these
creeds and books and religions are but the waves of a day. Humanity is
the sky, and these religions and dogmas and theories are but the mists
and clouds, changing continually, destined finally to melt away.

Let the ghosts go.  We will worship them no more.  Let them cover their
eyeless sockets with their fleshless hands, and fade forever from the
imaginations of men.





INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON HELL



Ladies and Gentlemen: The idea of a hell was born of revenge and
brutality on the one side, and cowardice on the other. In my judgment
the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too
magnanimous to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell. I have
no respect for any human being who believes in it. I have no respect
for the man who will pollute the imagination of childhood with that
infamous lie. I have no respect for the man who will add to the sorrows
of this world with the frightful dogma. I have no respect for any man
who endeavors to put that infinite cloud, that infinite shadow, over
the heart of humanity. I want to be frank with you. I dislike this
doctrine, I hate it, I despise it; I defy this doctrine. For a good
many years the learned intellects of christendom have been examining
into the religions of other countries in the world, the religions of
the thousands that have passed away. They examined into the religions
of Egypt, the religion of Greece, the religion of Rome and of the
Scandinavian countries. In the presence of the ruins of those religions
the learned men of christendom insisted that those religions were
baseless, that they are fraudulent. But they have all passed away.
While this was being done the christianity of our day applauded, and
when the learned men got through with the religions of other countries
they turned their attention to our religion. By the same mode of
reasoning, by the same methods, by the same arguments that they used
with the old religions, they were overturning the religion of our day.
Why? Every religion in this world is the work of man. Every one! Every
book has been written by man. Men existed before the books. If books
had existed before man, I might admit there was such a thing as a
sacred volume.

In my judgment man has made every religion and made every book. There
is another thing to which I wish to call your attention. Man never had
an idea; man will never have an idea, except those supplied to him by
his surroundings. Every idea in the world that man has, came to him by
nature. Man cannot conceive of anything the hint of which you have not
received from your surroundings. You can imagine an animal with the
hoof of a bison, with the pouch of the kangaroo, with the wings of an
eagle, with the beak of a bird, and with the tail of the lion; and yet
every point of this monster you borrowed from nature. Every thing you
can think of--every thing you can dream of, is borrowed from your
surroundings--everything. And there is nothing on this earth coming
from any other sphere whatever. Man has produced every religion in the
world. And why? Because each generation bodes forth the knowledge and
the belief of the people at the time it was made, and in no book is
there any knowledge found, except that of the people who wrote it. In
no book is there found any knowledge, except that of the time in which
it was written. Barbarians have produced, and always will produce
barbarian religions. Barbarians have produced, and always will produce
ideas in harmony with their surroundings, and all the religions of the
past were produced by barbarians--every one of them. We are making
religions today. We are making religions to-night. That is to say, we
are changing them, and the religion of to-day is not the religion of
one year ago. What changed it? Science has done it; education and the
growing heart of man has done it. We are making these religions every
day, and just to the extent that we become civilized ourselves will we
improve the religion of our fathers. If the religion of one hundred
years ago, compared with the religion of to-day is so low, what will it
be in one thousand years?

If we continue making the inroads upon orthodoxy which we have been
making during the last twenty-five years, what will it be fifty years
from to-night? It will have to be remonetized by that time, or else it
will not be legal tender. In my judgment, every religion that stands by
appealing to miracles is dishonor. [sic]  Every religion in the world
has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that
they all tell the truth--about others. Why? Suppose Mr. Smith should
tell Mr. Brown that he--Smith--saw a corpse get out of the grave, and
that when he first saw it, it was covered with the worm's of death, and
that in his presence it was reclothed in healthy, beautiful flesh. And
then suppose Mr. Brown should tell Mr. Smith, "I saw the same thing
myself. I was in a graveyard once, and I saw a dead man rise." Suppose
then that Smith should say to Brown, "You're a liar," and Brown should
reply to Smith, "And you're a liar," what would you think? It would
simply be because Smith, never having seen it himself, didn't believe
Brown; and Brown, never having seen it, didn't believe Smith had. Now,
if Smith had really seen it, and Brown told him he had seen it too,
then Smith would regard it as a corroboration of his story, and he
would regard Brown as one of his principal witnesses. But, on the
contrary, he says, "You never saw it." So, when man says, "I was upon
Mount Sinai, and there I met God, and he told me, 'Stand aside and let
me drown these people';" and another man says to him, "I was upon a
mountain, and there I met the Supreme Brahma," and Moses says, "That's
not true," and contends that the other man never did see Brahma, and he
contends that Moses never did see God, that is in my judgment proof
that they both speak truly.

Every religion, then, has charged every other religion with having been
an unmitigated fraud; and yet, if any man had ever seen the miracle
himself, his mind would be prepared to believe that another man had
seen the same thing. Whenever a man appeals to a miracle he tells what
is not true. Truth relies upon reason, and the undeviating course of
all the laws of nature.

Now, we have a religion--that is, some people have. I do not pretend to
have religion myself. I believe in living for this world--that's my
doctrine--in living here, now, to-day, to-night--that's my doctrine, to
make everybody happy that you can. Now, let the future take care of
itself and if I ever touch the shores of another world I will be just
as ready and anxious to get into some remunerative employment as
anybody else. Now, we have got in this country a religion which men
have preached for about eighteen hundred years, and just in proportion
as their belief in that religion has grown great, men have grown mean
and wicked; just in proportion as they have ceased to believe it, men
have become just and charitable.  And if they believe it to-night as
they once believed it, I wouldn't be allowed to speak in the city of
New York. It is from the coldness and infidelity of the churches that I
get my right to preach; and I say it to their credit. Now we have a
religion. What is it? They say in the first place that all this vast
universe was created by a deity. I don't know whether it was or not.
They say, too, that had it not been for the first sin of Adam there
would never have been any devil in this world, and if there had been no
devil there would have been no sin, and if there had been no sin there
never would have been any death. For my part I am glad there was
Somebody had to die to give me room, and when my turn comes I'll be
willing to let somebody else take my place. But whether there is
another life or not, if there is any being who gave me this, I shall
thank him from the bottom of my heart, because, upon the whole, my life
has been a joy. Now they say, because of this first sin all men were
consigned to eternal hell. And this because Adam was our
representative. Well, I always had an idea that my representative ought
to live somewhere about the same time I do. I always had an idea that I
should have some voice in choosing my representative. And if I had a
voice I never should have voted for the old gentleman called Adam. Now
in order to regain man from the frightful hell of eternity, Christ
himself came to this world and took upon himself flesh, and in order
that we might know the road to eternal salvation he gave us a book, and
that book is called the Bible, and whenever that Bible has been read
men have immediately commenced cutting each others' throats. Wherever
that Bible has been circulated, they have invented inquisitions and
instruments of torture, and they commenced hating each other with all
their hearts. But I am told now, we are all told that this Bible is the
foundation of civilization, but I say that this Bible is the foundation
of Hell, and we never shall get rid of the dogma of hell until we get
rid of the idea that it is an inspired book. Now, what does the Bible
teach? I am not going to talk about what this minister or that minister
says it teaches; the question is "ought a man to be sent to eternal
hell for not believing this Bible to be the work of a Merciful Father?"
and the only way to find out is to read it; and a very few people do
read it now. I will read a few passages. This is the book to be read in
the schools, in order to make our children charitable and good; this is
the book that we must read in order that our children may have ideas of
mercy, charity and justice. Does the Bible teach mercy? Now be honest,
I read: "I will make mine arrows drunk with blood; and the sword shall
devour flesh." (Deut. xxxii, 42.) Pretty good start for a merciful God!
"That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies and the
tongue of thy dogs in the same." (Ps. lxviii, 23.) Again: "And the Lord
thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little;
thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field
increase upon thee." (Deut. vii, 22.)

"But the Lord thy God shall deliver them  unto thee, and shall destroy
them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.

"And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt
destroy their name from under heaven; there shall no man be able to
stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them." (Deut. vii, 23, 24.)

"So Joshua came, and all the people of war with him, against them by
waters of Merom suddenly; and they fell upon them.

"And the lord delivered them into the hand of Israel, who smote them,
and chased them unto great Zidon, and unto Misrephothimaim, and unto
the valley of Mizpeh eastward; and they smote them, until they left
them none remaining.

"And Joshua did unto them as the Lord bade him; he houghed their
horses, and burnt their chariots with fire.

"And Joshua at that time turned back, and took Hazor, and smote the
king thereof with the sword; for Hazor beforetime was the head of all
those kingdoms.

"And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the
sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe; and
he burnt Hazor with fire.

"And all the cities of those kings, and all the kings of them, did
Joshua take, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and he utterly
destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the Lord commanded.

"But as for the cities that stood still in their strength, Israel burnt
none of them, save Hazor only; that did Joshua burn.

"And all the spoil of these cities and the cattle, the children of
Israel took for a prey unto themselves, but every man they smote with
the edge of the sword [Brave!] until they had destroyed them, neither
left they any to breathe. [As the moral god had commanded them.]

"As the Lord commanded Moses, his servant, so did Moses command Joshua,
and so did Joshua; he left nothing undone of all that the Lord
commanded Moses.

"So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south country,
and all the land of Goshen, and the valley of the same.

"Even from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir; even unto Baalgad in
the valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon; and all their kings he took,
and smote them, and slew them.

"Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.

"There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, save
the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gideon; all other they took in battle.

"For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts, that they should come
against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly, and that
they might have no favor, but that he might destroy them, as the Lord
commanded Moses.

"And at that time came Joshua, and cut off the Anakims from the
mountains, from Hebron, for Debit, from Anab, and from all the
mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua
destroyed them utterly with their cities.

"There was none of the Anakims left in the land of the children of
Israel, only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod there remained.

"So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord said
unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according
to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war."
(Josh. xi, 7 to 23.)

"When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim
peace unto it.

"And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee,
then it shall be that all the people that is found therein shall be
tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

"And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against
thee, then thou shalt besiege it.

"And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou
shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword.

"But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in
the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and
thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath
given thee.

"Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from
thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

"But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give
thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

"But thou shalt utterly destroy them." (Deut. xx, 10-17.)

Neither the old men nor the women, nor the maidens,  nor the
sweet-dimpled babe, smiling upon the lap   of his mother, were to be
spared.

"And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord  God of Israel [a merciful
god indeed]. Put every  man his sword by his side, and go in and out
from  gate to gate through-out the camp, and slay every man his
brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor."
(Exod. xxxii, 27.)

Now recollect, these instructions were given to an army of invasion,
and the people who were slayed were guilty of the crime of fighting for
their homes. Oh, most merciful God! The old testament is full of
curses, vengeance, jealousy and hatred, and of barbarity and brutality.
Now do you not for one moment believe that these words were written by
the most merciful God. Don't pluck from the heart the sweet flowers of
piety and crush them by superstition. Do not believe that God ever
ordered the murder of innocent women and helpless babes. Do not let
this supposition turn your hearts into stone. When anything is said to
have been written by the most merciful God, and the thing is not
merciful, then I deny it, and say he never wrote it. I will live by the
standard of reason, and if thinking in accordance with reason takes me
to perdition, then I will go to hell with my reason rather that to
heaven without it.

Now does this bible teach political freedom, or does it teach political
tyranny? Does it teach a man to resist oppression? Does it teach a man
to tear from the throne of tyranny the crowned thing and robber called
a king? Let us see [Reading:]

"Let every soul be subject to the higher powers: For there is no power
but of God, the powers that  are ordained of God." (Rom. xii, 1.)

All the kings, and princes, and governors, and  thieves and robbers
that happened to be in authority were placed there by the infinite
father of all!

"Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of
God."

And when George Washington resisted the power of George the Third he
resisted the power of God. And when our fathers said, "Resistance to
tyrants is obedience to God," they falsified the bible itself.

"For he is the minister of God to thee for   good. But if thou do that
which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain; for he
is the minister of God, revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth
evil.

"Wherefore ye must needs be subject not only for wrath, but also for
conscience sake." (Rom. xiii, 4, 5.)

I deny this wretched doctrine. Wherever the sword of rebellion is drawn
to protect the rights of man, I am a rebel. Wherever the sword of
rebellion is drawn to give man liberty, to clothe him in all his just
rights, I am on the side of that rebellion. I deny that the rulers are
crowned by the Most High; the rulers are the people, and the presidents
and others are but the servants of the people. All authority comes from
the people, and not from the aristocracy of the air. Upon these texts
of scripture which I have just read rest the thrones of Europe, and
these are the voices that are repeated from age to age by brainless
kings and heartless kings.

Does the bible give woman her rights? Is this bible humane? Does it
treat woman as she ought to be treated, or is it barbarian? Let us see.

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection." (1 Timothy ii,
11.)


If a woman would know anything let her ask her husband. Imagine the
ignorance of a lady who had only that source of information!

"But I suffer not a woman to teach, not to   usurp authority over the
man, but to be in silence.  For Adam was first formed, then Eve. [What
magnificent reason!]"

"And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, was in the
transgression." [Splendid!]

"But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ; and
the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God." That
is to say, there is as much difference between the woman and man as
there is between Christ and man. This is the liberty of woman.

"For the man is not of the woman, but the woman is of the man." It was
the man's cut till that was taken, not the woman's. "Neither was the
man created for the woman." Well, what was he created for? "But the
woman was created for the man. Wives, submit yourselves unto your
husbands, as unto the Lord." There's Liberty!

"For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of
the church; and he is the savior of the body.

"Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ so let the wives be to
their own husbands in everything."

Good again! Even the savior didn't put man and woman upon an equality.
The man could divorce the wife, but the wife could not divorce the
husband, and according to the old testament, the mother had to ask for
forgiveness for being the mother of babes. Splendid!

Here is something from the old testament: "When thou goest forth to war
against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into
thine hands, and thou has taken them captive.

"And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and has a desire unto
her, that thou wouldst have her to thy wife.

"Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her
head, and pare her nails." (Deut. xxi, 10-12.)

That is in self-defense, I suppose!

This sacred book, this foundation of human liberty,  of morality, does
it teach concubinage and polygamy?  Read the thirty-first chapter of
Numbers, read the  twenty-first chapter of Deuteronomy, read the
blessed lives of Abraham, of David or of Solomon, and then tell me that
the sacred scripture does not teach polygamy and concubinage! All the
language of the world is not sufficient to express the infamy of
polygamy; it makes man a beast and woman a stone. It destroys the
fireside and makes virtue an outcast. And yet it is the doctrine of the
bible--the doctrine defended by Luther and Melanchthon! It takes from
our language those sweetest words, father, husband, wife, and mother,
and takes us back to barbarism, and fills our hearts with the crawling,
slimy serpents of loathsome lust.

Does the bible teach the existence of devils? Of course it does. Yes,
it teaches not only the existence of a good being, but a bad being.
This good being had to have a home; that home was heaven. This bad
being had to have a home; and that home was hell. This hell is supposed
to be nearer to earth than I would care to have it, and to be peopled
with spirits, spooks, hobgoblins, and all the fiery shapes with which
the imagination of ignorance and fear could people that horrible place;
and the bible teaches the existence of hell and this big devil and all
these little devils. The bible teaches the doctrine of witchcraft and
makes us believe that there are sorcerers and witches, and that the
dead could be raised by the power of sorcery. Does anybody believe it
now?

"Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me   a woman that hath a
familiar spirit, that I may  go to her, and inquire of her. And his
servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar
spirit at Endor.

"And Saul disguised himself and put on other raiment, and he went, and
two men with him, and they came to the woman by night; and he said, I
pray thee, divine unto me by the familiar spirit, and bring me him up
whom I shall name unto thee. [That was a pretty good spiritual seance.]

"And the woman said unto him, Behold, thou knowest what Saul hath done,
how he hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards,
out of the land; wherefore then layest thou a snare for my life to
cause me to die?

"And Saul sware to her by the Lord, saying, As the Lord liveth there
shall no punishment happen to thee for this thing.

"Then said the woman, Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he said,
Bring me up Samuel.

"And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice; and the
woman spake to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou art
Saul.

"And the king said unto her, Be not afraid; for what sawest thou? And
the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.

"And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old man
cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it
was Samuel, and he stooped with his face to the ground, and bowed
himself." (1 Saml. xxviii, 7-14.)

In another place he declares that witchcraft is an abomination unto the
Lord. He wanted no rivals in this business. Now what does the new
testament teach?

"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into    the wilderness to be
tempted of the devil.

"And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward
an hungered. [sic]

"And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God,
command that these stones be made bread.

"But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

"Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a
pinnacle of the temple,

"And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, Hell cast thyself down,
for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee; and
in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy
foot against a stone.

"Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God." (Matt. iv, 1 7.)

Is it possible that anyone can believe that the devil absolutely took
God almighty, and put him on the pinnacle of the temple, and endeavored
to persuade him to jump down? Is it possible?

"Again the devil taketh him up into an exceeding  high mountain and
showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

"And Saith unto him, All these things will I  give thee, if thou will
fall down and worship me.

"Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written,
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."
(Matt. iv, 8-10.)

Now, the devil must have known at that time that  he was God, and God
at that time must have known   that the other was the devil. How could
the latter be conceived to have the impudence to promise God a world in
which he did not have a tax-title to an inch of land?

"Then the devil leaveth him; and, behold, angels  came and ministered
unto him." (Matt. iv, 11.)

"And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of
the Gadarines.

"And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of
the tombs a man with an unclean spirit,

"Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no,
not with chains,

"Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the
chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in
pieces; neither could any man tame him,

"And always, night and day, he was in the  mountains and tombs, crying
and cutting himself with stones.

"But when he saw Jesus afar off, he came and worshiped him.

"And cried with a loud voice and said, What have I to do with thee,
Jesus, thou Son of the Most High God? I adjure thee by God, that thou
torment me not.

"(For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.)

"And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered saying, My name is
Legion: for we are many.

"And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the
country.

"Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine
feeding.

"And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine that
we may enter into them.

"And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out,
and entered into the swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep
place into the sea (they were about two thousand), and were choked in
the sea." (Mark v, 1-13.)

Now I will ask a question: Should reasonable men, in the nineteenth
century in the United States of America, believe that that was an
actual occurrence? If my salvation depends upon believing that, I am
lost. I have never experienced the signs by which it is said a believer
may be known. I deny all the witch stories in this world. These fables
of devils have covered the world with blood; they have filled the world
with fear, and I am going to do what I can to free the world of these
insatiate monsters, small and great; they have filled the world with
monsters, they have made the world a synonym of liar and ferocity. And
it is this book that ought to be read in all the schools--this book
that teaches man to enslave his brother! If it is larceny to steal the
result of labor, how much more is it larceny to steal the laborer
himself?

"Moreover,  of  the  children of the strangers that do sojourn among
you, of them shall ye buy,  and of their families that are with you,
which  they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession.

"And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you,
to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever;
but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one
over another with rigor." (Lev. xxv, 45, 46.)

Why? Because they are not as good as you will buy of the heathen
roundabout.

Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them.

"If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve; and in the
seventh he shall go  out free for nothing.

"If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he were
married, then his wife shall go out with him.

"If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him sons or
daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he
shall go out by himself.

"And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and
my children; I will not go out free.

"Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring
him to the door, or unto the door-post; and his master shall bore his
ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him forever." (Exod. xxi,
1-6.)

This is the doctrine which has ever lent itself to the chains of
slavery, and makes a man imprison himself rather than desert his wife
and children. I hate it.

Now, listen to the new testament, the tidings of great joy for all
people!

"Servants, be obedient to them that are your  masters according to the
flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto
Christ.

"Not with eye-service, as men pleasers; but as the servants of Christ,
doing the will of God from the heart." (Eph. vi, 5, 6.) trembling, in
singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.

"Not with eye-service, as men pleasers; but as the servants of Christ,
doing the will of God from the heart." (Eph. vi, 5,6.) Splendid
doctrine.

"Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the
good and gentle, but also to the froward.

"For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure
grief, suffering wrongfully." (1 Peter ii, 18, 19.)

"Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh."

He was afraid they might not work all the time, so he adds:

"Not with the eye-service, as men pleasers, but in the singleness of
heart fearing God."

Read the twenty-first chapter of Exodus, 7 to  11.

"And if a man sell his daughter to be a maid servant, she shall not go
out as the men-servants  do.

"If she please not her master, who hath betrothed  her to himself, then
shall he let her be redeemed; to sell her unto a strange nation he
shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her. And if
he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the
manner of daughters.

"If he take him another wife, her food, her raiment and her duty of
marriage shall he not diminish.

"And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free
without money."

"Servant

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/8140