 Ingersoll's Lecture on the Great Infidels. Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing grander in this world than to rescue from the leprosy of slander a great and splendid name. There is nothing nobler than to benefit our benefactors. The infidels of one age have been the ariel saints of the next. The destroyers of the old have always been the creators of the new. The old passes away and the new becomes old. There is in the intellectual world as in the material decay and growth, and even by the sunken grave of age stand youth and joy. The history of progress is written in the lives of infidels. Political rights have been preserved by traitors, intellectual rights by infidels. To attack the kings was treason, to dispute the priests blasphemy. The sword and cross have always been allies, they defended each other. The throne and altar are twins, vultures born of the same egg. It was James I who said, no king, no bishop, no church, no crown, no tyrant in heaven, no tyrant on earth. Every monarchy that has disgraced the world, every despotism that has covered the cheeks of men with fear, has been copied after the supposed despotism of hell. The king owned the bodies and the priest owned the souls. One lived on taxes and the other on arms. One was a robber and the other a beggar. The history of the world will not show you one charitable beggar. He who lives on charity never has anything to give away. The robbers and beggars controlled not only this world but the next. The king made laws, the priest made creeds. With bowed backs the people received and bore the burdens of the one and with the open mouth of wonder the creed of the other. If any aspired to be free they were crushed by the king and every priest was a hero who slaughtered the children of the brave. The king ruled by force, the priest by fear and by the Bible. The king said to the people, God made you peasants and me a king. He clothed you in rags and housed you in hovels. Upon me he put robes and gave me a palace. Such is the justice of God. The priest said to the people, God made you ignorant and vile, me holy and wise. O be me or God will punish you here and hereafter. Such is the mercy of God. Infidels are the intellectual discoverers. Infidels have sailed the unknown sea and have discovered the isles and continents in the vast realms of thought. What would the world have been had Infidels never existed? What the Infidel is in religion the inventor is in mechanics. What the Infidel is in religion the man willing to fight the hosts of tyranny is in the political world. An Infidel is a gentleman who has discovered a fact and is not afraid to tell about it. There has been for many thousands of years an idea prevalent that in some way you can prove whether the theories defended or advanced by a man are right or wrong by showing what kind of a man he was, what kind of a life he lived, and what manner of death he died. There is nothing to this. It makes no difference what the character of the man was who made the first multiplication table. It is absolutely true, and whenever you find an absolute fact it makes no difference who discovered it. The golden rule would have been just as good if it had been first whispered by the devil. It is good for what it contains, not because a certain man said it. Gold is just as good in the hands of crime as in the hands of virtue. Whatever it may be it is gold. A statement made by a great man is not necessarily true. A man entertains certain opinions and then he is proscribed because he refuses to change his mind. He is burned to ashes, and in the midst of the flames he cries out that he is of the same opinion still. Saints then say that he has sealed his testimony with his blood and that his doctrines must be true. All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of any one opinion. Martyrdom as a rule establishes the sincerity of the martyr, not the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false independently of the man who entertains them. Truth cannot be affected by opinion. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it the truth. No Christian will admit that any amount of heroism displayed by a Mormon is sufficient to show that Joseph Smith was an inspired prophet. All the courage and culture, all the poetry and art of ancient Greece do not even tend to establish the truth of any myth. The testimony of the dying concerning some other world, or in regard to the supernatural, cannot be any better than that of the living. In the early days of Christian experience an intrepid faith was regarded as a testimony in favor of the church. No doubt in the arms of death many a one went back and died in the lay of the old faith. After a while Christians got to dying and clinging to their faith, and then it was that Christians began to say, no man can die serenely without clinging to the cross. According to the theologians God has always punished the dying who did not happen to believe in him. As long as men did nothing except to render their fellow men wretched, God maintained the strictest neutrality. But when some honest man expressed a doubt as to the Jewish scriptures, or prayed to the wrong God, or to the right God by the wrong man, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon this dying man, and from his body tore his wretched soul. There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has been paralyzed, or the innocent have been shielded by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every day, and God has no time to prevent them. He is too busy numbering hairs, and matching sparrows. He is listening for blasphemy. He is looking for persons who laugh at priests. He is examining baptismal registers. He is watching professors in colleges who begin to doubt the geology of Moses, or the astronomy of Joshua. All kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable serenity. As a rule there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast discredit upon his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife and oldest son. Now and then in the history of the world there has been a man of genius, a man of intellectual honesty. These men have denounced the superstition of their day. They were honest enough to tell their thoughts. Some of them died naturally in their beds, but it would not do for the church to admit that they had died peaceably. That would show that religion was not necessary in the last moments. The first grave, the first cathedral, the first corpse was the first priest. If there was no death in the world there would be no superstition. The church has taken great pains to show that the last moments of all infidels have been infinitely wretched. Upon this point Catholics and Protestants have always stood together. They are no longer men, they become hyenas, they dig open graves, they devour the dead. It is an auto-duffet presided over by God and his angels. These men believed in the accountability of men in the practice of virtue and justice. They believed in liberty, but they did not believe in the inspiration of the Bible. That was their crime. In order to show that infidels died overwhelmed with remorse and fear they have generally selected from all the infidels since the days of Christ until now five men, the Emperor Julian, Bruno, Diderot, David Hume, and Thomas Paine. They forget that Christ himself was not a Christian, that he did what he could to tear down the religion of his day, that he held the temple in contempt. I like him because he held the old Jewish religion in contempt because he had sense enough to say that doctrine was not true. In vain have their columniators been called upon to prove their statements. They simply charge it, they simply relate it, but that is no evidence. The Emperor Julian did what he could to prevent Christians destroying each other. He held pomp and pride in contempt. In battle with the Persians he was mortally wounded, feeling that he had but a short time to live he spent his last hours in discussing with his friends the immortality of the soul. He declared that he was satisfied with his conduct and that he had no remorse to express for any act he had ever done. The first great infidel was Giordano Bruno. He was born in the year of Grace, 1550. He was a Dominican friar, a Catholic, and afterwards he changed his mind. The reason he changed was because he had a mind. He was a lover of nature and said to the poor hermits in their caves, to the poor monks in their monasteries, to the poor nuns in their cells, come out in the glad fields, come and breathe the fresh free air, come and enjoy all the beauty there is in the world. There is no God who can be made happier by you being miserable. There is no God who delights to see upon the human face the tears of pain, of grief, of agony. Come out and enjoy all there is of human life. Enjoy progress, enjoy thought, enjoy being somebody and belonging to yourself. He revolted at the idea of transubstantiation. He revolted at the idea that the eternal God could be in a wafer. He revolted at the idea that you could make the trinity out of dough, bake God in an oven, as you would a biscuit. I should think he would have revolted. The idea of a man devouring the creator of the universe by swallowing a piece of bread. And yet that is just as sensible as any of it. Those who, when spitten on one cheek turned the other, threatened to kill this man, he fled from his native land and was a vagabond in nearly every nation of Europe. He declared that he fought not what men really believed, but what they pretended to believe. And you know, that is the business I am in. I am simply saying what other people think. I am furnishing clothes for their children. I am putting on exhibition their offspring, and they like to hear it. They like to see it. We have passed midnight in the history of the world. Bruno was driven from his native country because he taught the rotation of the earth. You can see what a dangerous man he must have been in a well-regulated monarchy. You see, he had found a fact, and a fact has the same effect upon religion that dynamite has upon a Russian czar. A fellow with a new fact was suspected and arrested, and they always thought they could destroy it by burning him. But they never did. All the fires of martyrdom never destroyed one truth. All the churches of the world have never made one lie true. Germany and France would not tolerate Bruno. According to the Christian system, this world was the center of everything. The stars were made out of what little God happened to have left when he got the world done. God lived up in the sky, and they said this earth must rest upon something. And finally science passed its hand clear under, and there was nothing. It was self-existent in infinite space. Then the church began to say they didn't say it was flat, not so awful flat, it was kind of rounding. According to the ancient Christians, God lived from all eternity and never worked but six days in his whole life, and then had the impudence to tell us to be industrious. I heard of a man going to California over the plains, and there was a clergyman on board, and he had a great deal to say, and finally he fell in conversation with the 49er, and the latter said to the clergyman, Do you believe that God made this world in six days? Yes I do. They were then going along the Humboldt, says he, Don't you think he could put in another day to advantage right around here? Bruno went to England and delivered lectures at Oxford. He found that there was nothing taught there but superstition, and so called Oxford the wisdom of learning. Then they told him they didn't want him anymore. He went back to Italy, where there was a kind of fascination that threw him back to the very doors of the Inquisition. He was arrested for teaching that there were other worlds, and that stars are suns around which revolve other planets. He was in prison for six years. During those six years Galileo was teaching mathematics. Six years in a dungeon. Then he was tried, denounced by the Inquisition, excommunicated, condemned by brute force, pushed upon his knees while he received the benediction of the church, and on the 16th of February in the year of our Lord 1600 he was burned at the stake. He believed that the world is animated by an intelligent soul, the cause of force but not of matter, that matter and force have existed from eternity, that this force lives in all things, even in such as appear not to live, in the rock as much as in the man, that matter is the mother of forms and the grace of forms, that the matter and force together constitute God. He was a pantheist, that is to say he was an atheist. He had the courage to die for what he believed to be right. The murder of Bruno will never in my judgment be completely and perfectly revenged, until from the city of Rome shall be swept every vestige of priests and pope, until from the shapeless ruins of Saint Peter's the crumbled Vatican and the fallen cross of Rome rises a monument sacred to the philosopher, the benefactor and the martyr Bruno. Voltaire was born in 1694. When he was born the natural was about the only thing that the church did not believe in. Monks sold amulets and the priests cured in the name of the church. The worship of the devil was actually established, which today is the religion of China. They say God is good, he won't bother you, Joss is the one. They offered him gifts and try and soften his heart, so in the Middle Ages the poor people tried to see if they could not get a shortcut and trade directly with the devil, instead of going round about through the church. In these days witnesses were cross examined with instruments of torture. Voltaire did more for human liberty than any other man who ever lived or died. He appealed to the common sense of mankind. He held up the great contradictions of the sacred scriptures in a way that no man once having read him could forget. For one I thank Voltaire for the liberty I am enjoying this moment. How small a man a priest looked when he pointed his finger at him. How contemptible a king. Toward the last of May 1778 it was whispered in Paris that Voltaire was dying. He expired with the most perfect tranquility. There have been constructed most shameless lies about the death of this great and wonderful man, compared with whom all his columniators living or dead were but dust and vermin. From his throne at the foot of the Alps he pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. He was the pioneer of his century. In 1771 in Scotland David Hume was born. Scotch Presbyterianism is the worst form of religion that has ever been produced. The Scotch Kirk had all the faults of the Church of Rome without a redeeming feature. The Church hated music, despised painting, abhorred statuary and held architecture in contempt. Anything touched with humanity, with the weakness of love, with the dimple of joy, was detested by the Scotch Kirk. God was to be feared. God was infinitely practical. No nonsense about God. They used to preach four times a day. They preached on Friday before the Sunday upon which they partook of the sacrament, and then on Saturday four sermons on Sunday and two or three on Monday to sober up on. They were bigoted and heartless. One case will illustrate. In the beginning of this 19th century a boy 17 years of age was indicted at Edinburgh for blasphemy. He had given it as his opinion that Moses had learned magic in Egypt and had fooled the Jews. They proved that on two or three occasions when he was real cold he jocularly remarked that he wished he was in hell so that he could warm up. He was tried convicted and sentenced to be hanged. He recanted. He even wrote that he believed the whole business and that he just said it for pure devilment. It made no difference. They hung him and his bruised and bleeding corpse was denied to his own mother who came and besought them to let her take her boy home. That was Scotch Presbyterianism. If the devil had been let loose in Scotland he would have improved that country at that time. David Hume was one of the few Scotchmen who was not owned by the church. He had the courage to examine things for himself and to give his conclusion to the world. His life was unstained by an unjust act. He did not, like Abraham, turn a woman from his door with his child in her arms. He did not, like King David, murder a man that he might steal his wife. He didn't believe in Scotch Presbyterianism. I don't see how any good man ever did. Just think of going to the Day of Judgment, if there is one, and standing up before God and admitting without a blush that you have lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian. I would expect the next sentence would be Departee cursed in everlasting fire. Hume took the ground that a miracle could not be used as evidence until you had proved the miracle. Of course, that excited the church. Why? Because they could not prove one of them. How are you going to prove a miracle? Who saw it? And who would know a devil if he did see him? Hume insisted that at the bottom of all good is something useful, that after all human happiness was the great object, end and aim of life. That virtue was not a termigant with sunken cheeks and frightful eyes, but was the most beautiful thing in the world, and would strew your path with flowers from the cradle to the grave. When he died, they gave an account of how he had suffered. They knew that the horrors of death would fall upon him, and that God would get his revenge. But his attending physician said that his death was the most serene and most perfectly tranquil of any he had ever seen. Adam Smith said he was as near perfect as the frailty incident to humanity would allow human being to be. The next is Benedict Spinoza, a Jew, born in Amsterdam in 1768. He studied theology and asked the rabbis too many questions, and talked too much about what he called reason. And finally he was excommunicated from the synagogue, and became an outcast at the age of twenty-four without friends. Cursed, anathematized, bearing upon his forehead the mark of Cain, he undertook to solve the problem of the universe. To him the universe was one. The infinite embraced the all. That all was God. He was right. The universe is all there is, and if God does not exist in the universe, he exists nowhere. The idea of putting some little Jewish Jehovah outside the universe, as if to say that from an eternity of idleness he woke up one morning and thought he would make something. The propositions of Spinoza are as luminous as the stars, and his demonstrations, each one of them, is a Gibraltar, behind which logic sits laughing at all the sophistries of theological thought. In every relation of life he was just, true, gentle, patient, loving, affectionate. He died in 1812. In his life of forty-four years he had climbed to the very highest alpine of human thought. He was a great and splendid man, an intellectual hero, one of the benefactors, one of the titans of our race. And now I will say a few words about our infidels. We had three, to say the least of them, Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson. In their day the colonies were filled with superstition and the Puritans with the spirit of persecution. Law, savage, ignorant, and malignant had been passed in every colony for the purpose of destroying intellectual liberty. Manly freedom was unknown. The Toleration Act of Maryland tolerated only chickens, not thinkers, not investigators. It tolerated faith, not brains. The charity of Roger Williams was not extended to one who denied the Bible. Let me show you how we have advanced. Suppose you took every man and woman out of the penitentiary in New England, and shipped them to a new country where man before had never trod, and told them to make a government, and constitution, and a code of laws for themselves. I say to-night that they would make a better constitution and a better code of laws than any that were made in any of the original thirteen colonies of the United States. Not that they are better men, not that they are more honest, but that they have got more sense. They have been touched with the dawn of the eternal day of liberty that will finally come to this world. They would have more respect for others' rights than they had at that time. But the churches were jealous of each other, and we got a constitution without religion in it from the mutual jealousies of the church, and from the genius of men like Payne, Franklin, and Jefferson. We are indebted to them for a constitution without a God in it. They knew that if you put God in there, an infinite God, there wouldn't be any room for the people. Our fathers retired Jehovah from politics. Our fathers, under the directions and leadership of those infidels, said all power comes from the consent of the governed. George Washington wanted to establish a church by law in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson prevented it. Under the guarantee of liberty of conscience which was given, our legislation has improved, and it will not be many years before all laws touching liberty of conscience, except it may be in the state of Delaware, will be blotted out, and when that time comes, we or our children may thank the infidels of 1776. The church never pretended that Franklin died in fear. Franklin wrote no books against the Bible. He thought it useless to cast the pearls of thought before the swine of his generation. Jefferson was a statesman. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of a university, father of a political body, president of the United States, a statesman, and a philosopher. He was too powerful for the churches of his day. Payne attacked the Trinity and the Bible both. He had done these things openly. His arguments were so good that his reputation got bad. I want you to recollect tonight that he was the first man who wrote these words, the United States of America. I want you to know tonight that he was the first man who suggested the Federal Constitution. I want you to know that he did more for the actual separation from Great Britain than any man that ever lived. I want you to know that he did as much for liberty with his pen as any soldier did with his sword. I want you to know that during the Revolution his crisis was the pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. I want you to know that his common sense was the one star in the horizon of despotism. I want you to know that he did as much as any living man to give our free flag to the free air. He was not content to waste all his energies here. When the volcano covered Europe with the shreds of robes and broken fragments of thrones, Payne went to France. He was elected by four constituencies. He had the courage to vote against the death of Louis and was imprisoned. He wrote to Washington, the President, and asked him to interfere. Washington threw the letter in the wastebasket of forgetfulness. When Payne was finally released, he gave his opinion of George Washington, and under such circumstances I say a man can be pardoned for having said even unjust things. The eighteenth century was crowning its gray hairs with the reeds of progress, and Thomas Payne said, I will do something to liberate mankind from superstition. He wrote the age of reason. For his good he wrote it too soon, for hours not a day too quick. From that moment he was a despised and columnated man. When he came back to this country, he could not safely walk the streets for fear of being mobbed. Under the Constitution he had suggested his rights were not safe. Under the flag that he had helped give to heaven, with which he had enriched the air, his liberty was not safe. Is it not a disgrace to us that all the lies that have been told about him and will be told about him are a perpetual disgrace? I tell you that upon the grave of Thomas Payne, the churches of America have sacrificed their reputation for veracity. Who can hate a man with a creed? I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for immortality. I believe in the equality of man, and that religious duty consists in doing justice, in doing mercy, and in endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be faithful to himself. One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests. Man has no property in man, and the key of heaven is in the keeping of no saint. Grand, splendid, brave man, with some faults, with many virtues. The world is better because he lived, and if Thomas Payne had not lived, I could not have delivered this lecture here to-night. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of this world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes from the day of Pentecost to the last election done as much for human liberty as Thomas Payne? What would the world be now, if Infidels had never been? Infidels have been the flower of all this world, recollect by Infidels I mean every man who has made an intellectual advance. By orthodox I mean a gentleman who is petrified in his mind, whopping around intellectually, simply to save the funeral expenses of his soul. Infidels are the creditors of all the years to come. They have made this world fit to live and without them the human brain would be as empty as the chronicles soon will be. Unless they preach something that the people want to hear, it is not a crime to benefit our fellow man intellectually. The churches point to their decayed saints and their crumbled popes and say, do you know more than all the ministers that ever lived? And without the slightest egotism or blush I say yes and the name of Humboldt outweighs them all. The men who stand in the front rank, the men who know most of the secrets of nature, the men who know most are today the advanced Infidels of this world. I have lived long enough to see the brand of intellectual inferiority on every orthodox brain. End of Ingersoll's lecture on The Great Infidels. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Ingersoll's lecture on The Great Infidels from the book Lectures of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, read for you by Ted DeLorm in Fortmill, South Carolina, during June 2007. Ingersoll's lecture on Talmajian Theology. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Ingersoll's lecture on Talmajian Theology from the book Lectures of Colonel R. G. Ingersoll. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing can be more certain than that no human being can by any possibility control his thought. We are in this world. We see, we hear, we feel, we taste, and everything in nature makes an impression upon the brain. And that wonderful something enthroned there with these materials weaves what we call thought. And the brain can no more help thinking than the heart can help beating. The blood pursues its old accustomed round without our will. The heart beats without asking leave of us, and the brain thinks in spite of all that we can do. This being true, no human being can justly be held responsible for his thought any more than for the beating of his heart, any more than for the course pursued by the blood, any more than for breathing air. And yet for thousands of years thought has been thought to be a crime, and thousands and millions have threatened us with eternal fire if we give the product of that brain. Each brain in my judgment is a field where nature sows the seeds of thought, and thought is the crop that man reaps, and it certainly cannot be a crime to gather. It certainly cannot be a crime to tell it which simply amounts to the right to sell your crop or to exchange your product for the product of some other man's brain. That is all it is. Most brains, at least some, are rather poor fields, and the orthodox worst of all. That field produces mostly sorrel and mullin, while there are fields which, like the tropic world, are filled with growth, and where you find the vine and palm, royal children of the sun and brain. I then stand simply for absolute freedom of thought, absolute, and I don t believe if there be a god, that it will be or can be pleasing to him to see one of his children afraid to express what he thinks. And if I were god, I never would cease making men until I succeeded in making one grand enough to tell his honest opinion. Now there has been a struggle, you know, a long time between the believers in the natural and the supernatural, between gentlemen who are going to reward us in another world and those who propose to make life worth living here and now. In all ages the priest, the medicine man, the magician, the astrologer, in other words, gentlemen who have traded upon the fear and ignorance of their fellow man in all countries, they have sought to make their living out of others. There was a time when a god presided over every department of human interest when a man about to take a voyage bribed the priest of Neptune so that he might have a safe journey, and when he came back he paid more telling the priest that he was infinitely obliged to him, that he had kept waves from the sea and storms in their caves, and so when one was sick he went to a priest. When one was about to take a journey he visited a priest of Mercury. If he were going to war he consulted the representative of Mars. We have gone along. When the poor agriculturist plowed his ground and put in the seed he went to the priest of some god and paid him to keep off the frost, and the priest said he would do it, but added the priest, you must have faith. If the frost came early he said, you didn't have faith. And besides all that he says to him, anything that has happened badly after all was for your good. Well we found out day by day that a good boat for the purpose of navigating the sea was better than prayers, better than the influence of priests, and you had better have a good captain attending to business than thousands of priests assure praying. We also found that we could cure some diseases, and just as soon as we found that we could cure diseases we dismissed the priest. We have left him out now of all of them, except it may be cholera and smallpox. When visited by a plague some people get frightened enough to go back to the old idea. Go back to the priest, and the priest says it has been sent as a punishment. Well sensible people began to look about. They saw that the good died as readily as the bad. They saw that this disease would attack the dimpled child in the cradle, and allow the murderer to go unpunished. And so they began to think in time that it was not sent as a punishment, that it was a natural result, and so the priest stepped out of medicine. In agriculture we needed him no longer. He has nothing to do with the crops. All the clergymen in this world can never get one drop of rain out of the sky, and all the clergymen in the civilized world could not save one human life if they tried it. Oh, but they say we do not expect a direct answer to prayer. It is the reflex action we are after. It is like a man endeavoring to lift himself up by the straps of his boots. He will never do it, but he will get a great deal of useful exercise. The missionary goes to some pagan land, and there he finds a man praying to a god of stone, and it excites the wrath of the missionary. I ask you tonight, does not that stone god answer prayer just as well as ours? Does he not cause rain? Does he not delay frost? Does he not snatch the ones that we love from the grasp of death precisely the same as ours? Yet we have ministers that are still engaged in that business. They tell us that they have been called, that they do not go at their profession as other people do, but they are called, that god looking over the world carefully selects his priests, his ministers, and his exorters. I don't know. They say their calling is sacred. I say to you tonight that every kind of business that is honest, that a man engages in for the purpose of feeding his wife and children, for the purpose of building up his home, for the purpose of feeding and clothing the ones he loves, that business is sacred. They tell us that statesmen and poets, philosophers, heroes, and scientists and inventors come by chance, that all other departments depend entirely upon luck, but when god wants exorters he selects. They also tell us that it is infinitely wicked to attack the Christian religion, and when I speak of the Christian religion I do not refer especially to the Christianity of the New Testament. I refer to the Christianity of the Orthodox Church, and when I refer to the clergy I refer to the clergy of the Orthodox Church. There was a time when men of genius were in the pulpits of the Orthodox Church, that time is past. When you find a man with brains now occupying an Orthodox pulpit, you will find him touched with heresy, every one of them. How do they get most of these ministers? There will be a man in the neighborhood not very well, not having constitution enough to be wicked, and it instantly suggests itself to everybody who sees him that he would make an excellent minister. There are so many other professions, so many cities to be built, so many railways to be constructed, so many poems to be sung, so much music to be composed, so many papers to edit, so many books to read, so many splendid things, so many avenues to distinction and glory, so many things beckoning from the horizon of the future to every great and splendid man that the pulpit has to put up with the leavings. Ravellings. Selvage. These preachers say, how can any man be wicked and infamous enough to attack our religion and take from the world the solace of Orthodox Christianity? What is that solace? Let us be honest, what is it? If the Christian religion be true, the grandest, greatest, noblest of the world are now in hell, and the narrowest and meanest are now in heaven. Humboldt, the Shakespeare of science, the most learned man of the most learned nation, with a mind grand enough to grasp not simply this globe, but this constellation, a man who shed light upon the whole earth, a man who honored human nature and who won all his victories on the field of thought, that man pure and upright noble beyond description, if Christianity be true, is in hell this moment. That is what they call solace. Tidings of great joy. Laplace, who read the heavens like an open book, who enlarged the horizon of human thought, is there too. Beethoven, master of melody and harmony, who added to the joy of human life, and who has borne upon the wings of harmony and melody millions of spirits to the height of joy, with his heart still filled with melody, he is in hell today. Robert Burns, poet of love and liberty, and from his heart, like a spring gurgling and running down the highways, his poems have filled the world with music, they have added luster to human love, the man who in four lines gave all the philosophy of life. To make a happy fireside climb for weens and wife is the true pathos and sublime of human life. He is there with the rest. Charles Dickens, whose genius will be a perpetual shield, saving thousands and millions of children from blows, who did more to make us tender with children than any other writer that ever touched a pin. He is there with the rest, according to our Christian religion. A little while ago there died in this country a philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man of the loftiest ideal, a perfect model of integrity, whose mind was like a placid lake and reflected truths like stars. If the Christian religion be true, he is in perdition today. And yet he sowed the seeds of thought and raised the whole world intellectually, and longfellow whose poems tender as the dawn have gone into millions of homes, not an impure, not a stained word in them all. But he was not a Christian. He did not believe in the tidings of great joy. He didn't believe that God so loved the world that he intended to damn most everybody. And now he has gone to his reward. And Charles Darwin, a child of nature, one who knew more about his mother than any other child she ever had. What is philosophy? It is to account for phenomena by which we are surrounded. That is, to find the hidden cord that unites everything. Charles Darwin threw more light upon the problem of human existence than all the priests who ever lived, from Melchisedec to the Last Exorter. He would have traversed this globe on foot had it been possible to have found one new fact, or to have corrected one error that he had made. No nobler man has lived, no man who has studied with more reverence, and by reverence I mean simply one who lives and studies for the truth. No man who studied with more reverence than he. And yet, according to the Orthodox religion, Charles Darwin is in hell. Consolation. So if Christianity be true, Shakespeare, the greatest man who ever touched this planet within whose brain were the fruits of all thought past, the seeds of all to be, Shakespeare, who was an intellectual ocean toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the aisles and continents of thought received their dew and rain. That man who has added more to the intelligence of the world than any other who ever lived, that man whose creations will live as long as man has imagination, and who has given more happiness upon the stage, and more instruction than has flown from all the pulpits of this earth. That man is in hell, too. And Harriet Martino, who did as much for English liberty as any man, brave and free, she is there. George Elliot, the greatest woman the English-speaking people ever produced. She is with the rest. And this is called tidings of great joy. Who are in heaven? How could there be much of a heaven without the men I have mentioned? The great men who have endeavored to make the world grander. Such men as Voltaire, such men as Diderot, such men as the Encyclopedist, such men as Hume, such men as Bruno, such men as Thomas Paine. If Christianity is true, that man who spent his life in breaking chains is now wearing the chains of God. That man who wished to break down the prison walls of tyranny is now in the prison of the most merciful Christ. It will not do. I can hardly express to you today my contempt for such a doctrine, and if it be true, I make my choice today and I prefer hell. Who is in heaven? John Calvin? John Knox? Jonathan Edwards? Torquemata, the builders of dungeons, the men who have obstructed the march of the human race. These are the men who are in heaven. And who else? Those who never had brain enough to harbor a doubt. And they ask me, how can you be wicked enough to attack the Christian religion? Oh, but they say God will never forgive you if you attack the Orthodox religion. Now when I read the history of this world and when I think of the experience of my fellow men, when I think of the millions living in poverty, and when I know that in the very air we breathe and in the sunlight that visits our homes, there lurks an assassin ready to take our lives, and even when we believe we are in the fullness of health and joy, they are undermining us with their contagion. When I know that we are surrounded by all these evils and when I think of what man has suffered, I do not wonder if God can forgive man, but I often ask myself, can man forgive God? There is another thing. Some of these ministers have talked about me and have made it their business to say unpleasant things. Among others the Reverend Mr. Talmadge of Brooklyn, a man of not much imagination but of most excellent judgment, charges that I am a blasphemer, a frightful charge, terrible if true. What is blasphemy? It is a sin as I understand against God. Is God infinite? He is, so they say. He is infinite, absolutely conditionless. Can I injure the conditionless? No. Can I sin against anything that I cannot injure? No. That is a perfectly plain proposition. I can injure my fellow man because he is a conditioned being, and I can help to change those conditions. He must have air, he must have food, he must have clothing, he must have shelter. But God is conditionless, and I cannot by any possibility affect him. Consequently I cannot sin against him, but I can sin against my fellow man so that I ought to be a thousand times more careful of doing injustice than of uttering blasphemy. There is no blasphemy but injustice, and there is no worship except the practice of justice. It is a thousand times more important that we should love our fellow men than that we should love God. It is better to love wife and children than to love Jesus Christ. He is dead, they are alive. I can make their lives happy and fill all their hours with the fullness of joy. That is my religion, and the holiest temple ever erected beneath the stars is the home. The holiest altar is the fireside. What is this blasphemy? First it is a geographical question. There was a time when it was blasphemy in Jerusalem to say that Christ was God. In this country it is now blasphemy to say that he was not. It is blasphemy in Constantinople to deny that Mohammed was the prophet of God. It is blasphemy here to say that he was. It is a geographical question. You cannot tell whether it is blasphemy or not without looking at the map. What is blasphemy? It is what the mistake says about the fact. It is what the last year's leaf says about this year's bud. It is the last cry of the defeated priest. Blasphemy is the little breastwork behind which hypocrisy hides, behind which mental impotency feels safe. There is no blasphemy but the avowal of thought, and he who speaks what he thinks blasphemes. That I have had the hardyhood, it doesn't take much, to attack the sacred scriptures. I have simply given my opinion, and yet they tell me that that book is holy, that you can take rags, make pulp, put ink on it, bind it in leather, and make something holy. The Catholics have a man for a pope. The Protestants have a book. The Catholics have the best of it. If they elect an idiot, he will not live forever, and it is impossible for us to get rid of the barbarisms in our book. The Catholics said we will not let the common people read the Bible. That was right. If it is necessary to believe it in order to get to heaven, no man should run the risk of reading it. To allow a man to read the Bible on such conditions is to set a trap for his soul. The right way is never to open it. And when you get to the day of judgment, and they ask you if you believe it, say, yes, I have never read it. The Protestant gives the book to a poor man and says, read it. You are at liberty to read it. Well, suppose I don't believe it when I get through. Then you will be damned. No man should be allowed to read it on those conditions, and yet Protestants have done that infinitely cruel thing. If I thought it was necessary to believe it, I would say never read another line in it, but just believe it and stick to it. And yet these people really think that there is something miraculous about the book. They regard it as a fetish, a kind of amulet, a something charmed that will keep off evil spirits or bad luck, stop bullets, and do a thousand handy things for the preservation of life. I heard a story upon that subject. You know that thousands of them are printed in the Sunday school book. Here is one they don't print. There was a poor man who had belonged to the church, but he got cold, and he rather neglected it, and he had bad luck in his business, and he went down and down and down until he hadn't a dollar, not a thing to eat. And his wife said to him, John, this comes of you having abandoned the church. This comes of your having done away with family worship. Now I beg of you, let's go back. Well John said it wouldn't do any harm to try, so he took down the Bible, blew the dust off it, read a little from a chapter, and had family worship. As he was putting it up, he opened it again, and there was a ten-dollar bill between the leaves. He rushed out to the butchers and bought meat, to the grocers and bought tea and bread and butter and eggs, and rushed back home and got them cooked, and the house was filled with the perfume of food, and he sat down at the table, tears in every eye and a smile on every face. She said, what did I tell you? Just then there was a knock on the door, and in came a constable who arrested him for passing a ten-dollar counterfeit bill. They tell me that I ought not to attack the Bible, that I have misrepresented it, and among other things that I have said that according to the Bible the world was made of nothing. Well what was it made of? They say God created everything, consequently there must have been nothing when he commenced. If he didn't make it of nothing, what did he make it of? Where there was nothing, he made something. Yes, out of what? I don't know. This doctor of divinity, and I should think such a divinity would need a doctor, says that God made the universe out of his omnipotence. Why not out of his omniscience, or his omnipresence? Omnipotence is not a raw material. It is the something to work raw material with. Omnipotence is simply all-powerful, and what good would strength do with nothing? The weakest man ever born could lift as much nothing as God, and he could do as much with it after he got it lifted. And yet a doctor of divinity tells me that this world was made of omnipotence. And right here let me say I find even in the mind of the clergyman the seeds of infidelity. He is trying to explain things. This is a bad symptom. The greater the miracle, the greater the reward for believing it. God cannot afford to reward a man for believing anything reasonable. Why, even the scribes and Pharisees would believe a reasonable thing. Do you suppose God is to crown you with eternal joy and give you a musical instrument for believing something where the evidence is clear? No, sir. The larger the miracle the more grace. And let me advise the ministers of Chicago and of this country never to explain a miracle. It cannot be explained. If you succeed in explaining it, the miracle is gone. If you fail, you are gone. My advice to the clergy is use assertion. Just say it is so. And the larger the miracle the greater the glory reaped by the eternal. And yet this man is trying to explain, pretending that he had some raw material of some kind on hand. And then I objected to the fact that he didn't make the sun until the fourth day, and that consequently the grass could not have grown, could not have thrown its mantle of green over the shoulders of the hill, and that the trees would not blossom and cast their shade upon the sod without some sunshine. And what does this man say? Why, that the rocks when they crystallized emitted light, even enough to raise a crop by. And he says vegetation might have depended on the glare of volcanoes in the moon. What do you think would be the fate of agriculture depending on the glare of volcanoes in the moon? Then he says the aurora borealis. Why, you couldn't raise cucumbers by the aurora borealis? And he says liquid rivers of molten granite. I would like to have a farm on that stream. He guesses everything of the kind, except lightning bugs and foxfire. Now think of that explanation in the last half of the 19th century by a minister. The truth is the gentleman who wrote the account knew nothing of astronomy, knew as little as the modern preacher does, just about the same. And if they don't know more about the next world than they do about this, it is hardly worthwhile talking with them on the subject. There was a time, you know, when the minister was the educated man in the country, and when, if you wanted to know anything, you asked him. Now you do if you don't. So I find this man expounding the flood, and he says it was not very wet. He begins to doubt whether God had water enough to cover the whole earth. Why not stand by his book? He says that some of the animals got into the ark to keep out of the wet. I believe that is the way the Democrats got to the polls last Tuesday. Another divine says that God would have drowned them all, but it was purely for the sake of economy that he saved any of them. Just think of that. According to this Christian religion, all the people in the world were totally depraved through the fall, and God found he could not do anything with them. So he drowned them. Now if God wanted to get up a flood big enough to drown sin, why did he not get up a flood big enough to drown the snake? That was his mistake. Now these people say that if Jonah had walked rapidly up and down the whale's belly, he would have avoided the action of its gastric juice. Imagine Jonah sitting in the whale's mouth on the back of a molar tooth. And yet this Doctor of Divinity would have us believe that the infinite God of the universe was sitting under his gourd and made the worm that was at the root of Jonah's vine. Great business. David is said to have been a man after God's own heart, and if you will read the 28th chapter of Chronicles, you will find that David died full of years and honors. So I find in the great book of prophecy concerning Solomon, he shall reign in peace and quietness. He shall be my son, and I shall be his father, and I will preserve his kingdom. Was that true? It won't do, but they say God couldn't do away with slavery suddenly, nor with polygamy all at once, that he had to do it gradually, that if he had told this man you mustn't have slaves, and one man that he must have one wife, and one wife that she must have one husband, he would have lost the control over them notwithstanding all the miraculous power. Is it not wonderful that when they did all these miracles nobody paid any attention to them? Isn't it wonderful that in Egypt when they performed these wonders, when the waters were turned into blood, when the people were smitten with disease and covered with the horrible animals, isn't it wonderful that it had no influence on them? Do you know why all these miracles didn't affect the Egyptians? They were there at the time. Isn't it wonderful too that the Jews who had been brought from bondage had followed a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, who had been miraculously fed, and for whose benefit water had leaked from the rocks and followed them up and downhill through all their journeying? Isn't it wonderful when they had seen the earth open and their companions swallowed, when they had seen God himself right in robes of flame from Sinai's crags, when they had seen him talking face to face with Moses? Isn't it a little wonderful that he had no more influence over them? They were there at the time, and that is the reason they didn't mind it. They were there. And yet with all these miracles this God could not prevent polygamy and slavery. Was there no room on the two tables of stone to put two more commandments? Better have written them on the back then. Better have left the others all off and put these two on. Man shall not enslave his brother. You shall not live on unpaid labor, and the one man shall have the one wife. If these two had been written and the other ten left off, it would have been a thousand times better for this world. But they say God works gradually. No hurry about it. He is not gradual about keeping Sunday, because if he met a man picking up sticks, he killed him. But in other things he is gradual. Suppose we wanted now to break certain cannibals of eating missionaries, wanted to stop them from eating them raw. Of course we would not tell them in the first place it was wrong. That would not do. We would induce them to cook them. That would be the first step towards civilization. We would have them stew them. We would not say it is wrong to eat missionaries, but it is wrong to eat missionaries raw. Then, after they began stewing them, we would put in a little mutton. Not enough to excite suspicion, but just a little, and so day by day we would put in a little more mutton and a little less missionary, until in about what the Bible calls the fullness of time, we would have clear mutton and no missionary. That is God's way. The next great charge against me is that I have disgraced my parents by expressing my honest thoughts. No man can disgrace his parents that way. I want my children to express their real opinions, whether they agree with mine or not. I want my children to find out more than I have found, and I would be gratified to have them discover the errors I have made. And if my father and mother were still alive, I feel and know that I am pursuing a course of which they would approve. I am true to my manhood. But think of it. Suppose the father of Dr. Talmage had been a Methodist and his mother an Infidel. Then what? Would he have to disgrace them both to be a Presbyterian? The disciples of Christ, according to this doctrine, disgraced their parents. The founder of every new religion, according to this doctrine, was a disgrace to his father and mother. Now there must have been a time when a Talmage was not a Presbyterian, and the one that left something else to join that church disgraced his father and mother. Why, if this doctrine be true, do they send missionaries to other lands and ask those people to disgrace their parents? If this doctrine be true, nobody has religious liberty except foundlings, and it should be written over every foundling hospital home for religious liberty. It won't do. What is the next thing I have said? I have taken the high ground, and I take it again today, that the Bible has only words of humiliation for woman. The Bible treats woman as the slave, the surf of man, and wherever that book is believed in thoroughly, woman is a slave. It is the infidelity in the church that gives her what liberty she has today. Oh, but says the gentleman, think of the heroines in the Bible. How could a book be opposed to woman which has pictured such heroines? Well, that is a good argument. Let's answer it. Who are the heroines? He tells us the first is Esther. Who was she? Esther is a very peculiar book, and the story is about this. Ahasuerus was a king. His wife's name was Vashti. She didn't please him. He divorced her and advertised for another. A gentleman by the name of Mordecai had a good-looking niece, and he took her to market. Her name was Esther. I don't feel like reading the whole of the second chapter. It is sufficient to say she was selected. After a time there was a gentleman by the name of Haman, who I should think was in the cabinet, according to the story, and this man Mordecai began to put on considerable style because his niece was the king's wife. And he would not bow, or he would not rise, or he would not meet this gentleman with marks of distinguished consideration. So he made up his mind to have him hung. Then they got out an order to kill the Jews, and this Esther went to see the king. In those days they believed in the Bismarckian style of government. All power came from the king, not from the people. If anybody went to see this king without an invitation, and he failed to hold out his scepter to him, the person was killed just to preserve the dignity of the monarch. When Esther arrived, he held out the scepter, and thereupon she induced him to send out another order for the fellows who were to kill the Jews, and they killed seventy-five thousand or eighty thousand of them. And they came back and said, kill Haman and his ten sons, and they hung the family up. That is all there is to the story, and yet this Esther is held up as a model of womanly grace and tenderness, and there is not a more infamous story in the literature of the world. The next heroine is Ruth. I admit that is a very pretty story, but Ruth was guilty of more things that would be deemed indiscreet than any girl in Brooklyn. That is all there is about Ruth. The next heroine is Hannah, and what do you suppose was the matter with her? She made a coat for her boy, that's all. I have known a woman make a whole suit. The next heroine was Abigail. She was the wife of Natal. King David had a few soldiers with him, and he called at the house of Natal, and asked if he could not get food for his men. Abigail went down to give him something to eat, and she was very much struck with David. David evidently fancied her. Natal died within a week. I think he was poisoned. David and Abigail were married. If that had happened in Chicago, there would have been a coroner's jury and an inquest. But that is all there was to that. The next is Dorcas. She was in the New Testament. She was real good to the ministers. Those ladies have always stood well with the church. She was real good to the poor. She died one day, and you never hear of her again. Then there was that person that was raised from the dead. I would like to know from a person that had recently been raised from the dead, where he was when he was wanted, what he was travelling about, and what he was engaged in. I cannot imagine a more interesting person than one that has just been raised from the dead. Lazarus comes from the tomb, and I think sometimes that there must be a mistake about it, because when they come to die again, thousands of people would say, Why, he knows all about it! Would it not be noted if a man had two funerals? Now then, these are all the heroines to show you how little they thought of woman in that day. In the days of the Old Testament, they did not even tell us when the mother of us all, Eve, died, nor where she is buried, nor anything about it. They do not even tell us where the mother of Christ sleeps, nor when she died. Never is she spoken of after the morning of the resurrection. He who descended from the cross went not to see her, and the son had no word for the broken-hearted mother. The story is not true. I believe Christ was a great and good man, but he had nothing about him miraculous, except the courage to tell what he thought about the religion of his day. The New Testament in relating what occurred between Christ and his mother mentions three instances, once when they thought he had been lost in Jerusalem, when he said to them, Was she not that I must be about my father's business? Next at the marriage of Cana, when he said to the woman, What have I to do with thee? Words which he never said, and again from the cross, Mother, behold thy son, and to the disciple, behold thy mother. So of Mary Magdalene. In some respects, there is no character in the New Testament that so appeals to us as loving Christ. First at the sepulchre, and yet when he meets her after the resurrection, he had for her the comfort only of the chilling words, Touch me not. I don't believe it. There were thousands of heroic women then. There are heroic women now. Think of the women who cling to fallen and disgraced husbands day by day, until they reached a gutter and who stooped down to lift them from that position and raise them up to be men once more. Every country is civilized in proportion as it honors woman. There are women in England working in mines, deformed by labor, that would become wild beasts were it not for the love they bear for home. Can you find among the women of the New Testament any women that can equal the women born of Shakespeare's brain? You can find no woman like Isabella, where reason and purity blend into perfect truth. No woman like Juliet, where passion and purity meet like red and white within the bosom of a flower. No woman like Imogene, who said, What is it to be false? No woman like Cordelia, that would not show her wealth of love in hope of gain. Nor like Hermione, who bore the cross of shame for years. Nor like Miranda, who told her love as the flower exposes its bosom to the sun. Nor like Desdemona, who was so pure that she could not suspect that another could suspect her of a crime. And we are told that woman sinned first and man second. That man was made first and woman not till afterwards. The idea is that we could have gotten along without the woman well enough, but they could never have gotten along without us. I tell you that love is better than piety. Love is better than all the ceremonial worship of the world, and it is better to love something than to believe anything on this globe. So this minister seeking a mark to throw an arrow somewhere, trying to find some little place in the armour, charges me with having disparaged Queen Victoria. That, you know, is next to blasphemy. Well, I never did anything of the kind, never said a word against her in my life. Neither as wife or mother or queen. Never doubted but that she is a good woman enough. And I have always admitted that her reputation was good in the neighbourhood where she resides. I never had any other opinion. All I said in the world was, I was endeavouring to show that we are now to have the aristocracy of brain and heart. That is all. And I said, speaking of Louis Napoleon, he was not satisfied with simply being an emperor and having a little crown on his head, but wanted to prove that he had something in his head. So he wrote the Life of Julius Caesar, and that made him a member of the French Academy. And speaking of King William, upon whose head is the Divine Petroleum of Authority, I asked how he would like to exchange brains with Heckel, the philosopher. Then I went over to England and said, Queen Victoria wears the garment of power, given her by blind fortune, by eyeless chance. George Elliot is arrayed in robes of glory, woven in the loom of her own genius. Thereupon I am charged with disparaging a woman. And this priest, in order to get even with me, digs open the grave of George Elliot, and endeavours to stain her unresisting dust. He calls her an adulterous, the vilest word in the languages of men, and he does it because she hated the Presbyterian creed, because she, according to his definition, was an atheist, because she lived without faith, and died without fear, because she grandly bore the taunts and slanders of the Christian world. George Elliot carried tenderly in her heart the faults and frailties of her race. She saw the highway of eternal right through all the winding paths, where folly vainly stalks with thorn-pierced hands the fading flowers of selfish joy. And whatever you may think or I may think of the one mistake in all her sad and loving life, I know and feel that in the court where her conscience sat as judge, she stood acquitted, pure as light and stainless as a star. George Elliot has joined the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of this world, and her wondrous lines, her touching poems, will be read hundreds of years after every sermon in which a priest has sought to stain her name, shall have vanished utterly from human speech. How appropriate here was some slight change, the words of Laertes at Ophelia's grave, lay her in the earth, and from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violates spring. I tell thee, priest and minister, a ministering angel shall this woman be, when thou liest howling. I have no words with which to express my loathing hatred and condemnation of the man who will stain a noble woman's grave. The next argument in favor of these sacred scriptures is the argument of numbers, and this minister congratulates himself that the infidels could not carry a precinct or a county or a state in the United States. Well, I tell you they can come proportionately near it, just in proportion that that part of the country is educated. The whole world doesn't move together in one life. There has to be some man to take a step forward, and the people follow, and when they get where that man was, some other Titan has taken another step, and you can see him there on a great mountain of progress. That is why the world moves. There must be pioneers, and if nobody is right except he who is with the majority, then we must turn and walk toward the setting sun. He says we will settle this by suffrage. The Christian religion was submitted to a popular vote in Jerusalem, and what was the result? Crucify him, an infamous result, showing that you can't depend on the vote of barbarians. But I am told that there are three hundred million Christians in the world. Well, what of it? There are more Buddhists, and they say, what a number of Bibles are printed, more Bibles than any other book. Does this prove anything? True, because more of them? Suppose you should find published in the New York Herald something about you, and you should go to the editor and tell him that is a lie, and he should say that can't be the Herald has the largest circulation of any paper in the world. Three hundred millions of Christians, and here are the nations that prove the truth of Christianity. Russia, 80 million Christians. I am willing to admit it, a country without freedom of speech, without freedom of press, a country in which every mouth is a Bastille and every tongue a prisoner for life, a country in which assassins are the best men in it. They call that Christian. Girls, sixteen years of age, for having spoken in favor of human liberty, are now working in Siberian minds. That is a Christian country. Only a little while ago, a man shot at the emperor twice. The emperor was protected by his armor. The man was convicted, and they asked him if he wished religious consolation. No. Do you believe in a God? No. If there was a God, there would be no Russia. Sixteen millions of Christians in Spain, Spain that never touched a shore except as a robber, Spain that took the golden silver of the New World, and used it as an engine of oppression in the old. A country in which cruelty was worshiped, in which murder was prayer, a country where flourished the Inquisition. I admit Spain is a Christian country. If you don't believe it, I do. Read the history of Holland. Read the history of South America. Read the history of Mexico. A chapter of cruelty beyond the power of language to express. I admit that Spain is Orthodox. If you will go there, you will find the man who robs you and asks God to forgive you. A country where infidelity hasn't made much headway, but thank God where there is even yet a dawn, where there are such men as Castellar and others, who begin to see that one schoolhouse is equal to three cathedrals, and one teacher worth all the priests. Italy is another Christian nation, with twenty-eight million Christians. In Italy lives the only authorized agent of God, the Pope. For hundreds of years Italy was the beggar of the earth, and held out both hands. Gold and silver flowed from every land into her palms, and she became covered with nunneries, monasteries, and the pilgrims of the world. Italy was sacred dust. Her soil was a perpetual blessing. Her sky was an eternal smile. Italy was guilty not simply of the death of the Catholic Church, but Italy was dead and buried, and would have been in her grave still had it not been for Mazini, Garibaldi, and Kavor. When the prophecy of Garibaldi shall be fulfilled, when the priests with spades in their hands shall dig ditches to drain the pontine marshes, when the monasteries shall be factories, when the whirling wheels of industry shall drown the drowsy and hypocritical prayers, then and not till then will Italy be great and free. Italy is the only instance in our history and in the history of the world so far as we know of the resurrection of a nation. She is the first fruits of them that sleep. Portugal is another Christian country. She made her living in the slave trade for centuries. I admit that all the blessings that that country enjoyed flowed naturally from Catholicism, and we believe in the same scriptures. If you don't believe it, read the history of the persecution of the Jewish people. I admit that Germany is a Christian nation, that is, Christians are in power. When the bill was introduced for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of the Jews, Bismarck spoke against it and said, Germany is a Christian nation, and therefore we cannot pass the bill. Austria is another Christian nation. If you don't believe it, read the history of Hungary, and if you still have doubts, read the history of the partition of Poland. But there is one good thing in that country. They believe in education, and education is the enemy of ecclesiasticism. Every thoroughly educated man is his own church, and his own pope, and his own priest. They tell me that the United States, our country, is Christian. I deny it. It is neither Christian nor pagan. It is human. Our fathers retired all the gods from politics. Our fathers laid down the doctrine that the right to govern comes from the consent of the governed, and not from the clouds. Our fathers knew that if they put an infinite God in the Constitution, there would be no room left for the people. Our fathers used the language of Lincoln, and they made a government for the people, by the people. This is not a Christian country. Some gentlemen said how about Delaware? I told him there was a man in Washington some twenty or thirty years ago who came there and said he was a revolutionary soldier and wanted a pension. He was so bent and bowed over that the wind blew his shoestrings into his eyes. They asked him how old he was, and he said fifty years. Why, good man, you can't get a pension because the war was over before you were born. You mustn't fool us. Well, said he, I'll tell you the truth. I lived sixty years in Delaware, but I never count it, and hope God won't. And these Christian nations which have been brought forward as the witnesses of the truth of the Scriptures owe twenty-five billion dollars, which represents Christian war, Christian canon, Christian shot, and Christian shell. The sum is so great that the imagination is dazed in its contemplation. That is the result of loving your neighbor as yourself. The next great argument brought forward by these gentlemen is the persecution of the Jews. We are told in the nineteenth century that God has the Jews persecuted simply for the purpose of establishing the authenticity of the Scriptures, and every Jewish home burned in Russia throws light on the Gospel, and every violated Jewish maiden is another evidence that God still takes an interest in the Holy Scriptures. That is their doctrine. They are fulfilling prophecy. The Christian grasps the Jew, strips him, robs him, makes him an outcast, and then points to him as a fulfillment of prophecy. And we are today laying the foundation of future persecution. We are teaching our children the monstrous falsehood that Jews crucified God, and the nation consented. They crucified a good man. What nation has not? What race has not? Think of the number killed by the Presbyterians by the Catholics. Every sect with maybe two or three exceptions have crucified their fellows, and every race has burned its greatest and its best. And yet we are filling the minds of children with hatred of the Jewish people. It is a poor business. Ah, but they say these people are cursed by God. I say they never had any good fortune until the Jehovah of the Bible deserted them. Whenever they have had a reasonable chance, they have been the most prosperous people in the world. I never saw one begging. I never saw one in the criminal dock. For hundreds of years, they were not allowed to own any land. For hundreds of years, they were not allowed to work at any trade. They were driven simply to dealing in money and in precious stones and things of that character. And by a kind of poetic justice they have today the control of the money of the world. I am glad to see that kings and emperors go to the offices of the Jews with their hats in their hands to have their notes discounted. And yet I am told by clergymen that all this infamy has been kept up simply to establish the truth of the gospel. I despise such doctrine as long as the liberty of one Jew is unsafe. My liberty is not secure. Liberty for all and not until then will the liberty of any be assured. Ah, but says this man, nobody ever died cheerfully for a lie. The Jewish people have suffered persecution for sixteen hundred years and they have suffered it cheerfully. If this doctrine is true, then Judaism must be true and Christianity must be false. But martyrdom doesn't prove the truth if the martyr knows it. It simply proves the barbarity of his persecutors and has no sincerity. That is all it proves. But you must remember that this gentleman who believes in this doctrine is a Presbyterian, and why should a Presbyterian object? After a few hundred years of burning, he expects to enjoy the eternal Autodauphée of hell, an Autodauphée that will be presided over by God and his angels, and they will be expected to applaud. He is a Presbyterian, and what is that? It is the worst religion of this earth. I admit that thousands and millions of Presbyterians are good people, no man ever being half so bad as his creed. I am not attacking them. I am attacking their creed. I am attacking what this religion calls tidings of great joy. And according to that, hundreds of billions and billions of years ago, our fate was irrevocably and forever fixed, and God in the secret councils of his own inscrutable will made up his mind whom he would save and whom he would damn. When thinking of that God, I always think of the mistake of a Methodist preacher during the war. He commenced the prayer and never did one more appropriate for the Presbyterian God or the Methodist go up, O thou great and unscrupulous God. This Presbyterian believes that billions of years before that baby in the cradle, that little dimpled child, basking in the light of a mother's smile was born, God had made up his mind to damn it. And when Talmud looks at one of those children who will probably be damned, he is cheerful about it. He enjoys it. That is Presbyterianism, that God made man and damned him for his own glory. If there is such a God, I hate him with every drop of my blood, and if there is a heaven, it must be where he is not. Now think of that doctrine. Only a little while ago there was a ship from Liverpool out eighty days with its rudder washed away. For ten days nothing to eat, nothing but the bare decks and hunger. And the captain took a revolver in his hand and put it to his brain and said, Some of us must die for the others, and it might as well be I. One of his companions grabbed the pistol and said, Captain, wait, wait one more day, we can live another day. And the next morning the horizon was rich with a sail, and they were saved. And yet if Presbyterianism is true, if that man had put the bullet through his infinitely generous brain so that his comrades could have eaten of his flesh and reached their homes and felt about their necks, the dimpled arms of children, and the kisses of wives upon their lips, if Presbyterianism be true, God had a constable ready there to clutch that soul and thrust it down to eternal hell. Tidings of great joy. And yet this is religion. Why, if that doctrine be true, every soldier in the Revolutionary War who died not a Christian has been damned, every one in the War of 1812 who kept our flag upon the sea if he died not a Christian has been damned, and every one in the Civil War who fought to keep our flag in heaven not a Christian, and the ones who died in Andersonville and Libby, not Christians, are now in the prison of God, where the famine of Andersonville and Libby would be regarded as a joy. Orthodox Christianity. Why, we have an account in the Bible, it comes from the other world, from both countries, from heaven and from hell. Let us see what it is. Here is a rich man who dies. The only fault about him was he was rich, no other crime was charged against him. We are told that the rich man died, and when he lifted up his eyes he found no sympathy. Yet even in hell he remembered his five brethren and prayed that someone should be sent to them so that they should not come there. I tell you I had rather be in hell with human sympathy than in heaven without it. The Bible is not inspired and ministers know nothing about another world. They don't know. I am satisfied there is no world of eternal pain. If there is a world of joy so much the better, I have never put out the faintest star of human hope that ever trembled in the night of life. There was a time when I was not. After that I was. Now I am. And it is just as probable that I will live again as it was that I could have lived before I did. Let it go. Ah, but what will life be? The world will be here. Men and women will be here. The page of history will be open. The walls of the world will be adorned with art. The niches with sculpture. Music will be here. And all there is of life and joy. And there will be homes here and the fireside. And there will be a common hope without a common fear. Love will be here. And love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. Love was the first to dream of immortality. Love is the morning and evening star. It shines upon the child. It sheds its radiance upon the peaceful tomb. Love is the mother of beauty. The mother of melody. For music is its voice. Love is the builder of every hope. The kindler of every fire on every hearth. Love is the enchanter. The magician that changes worthless things to joy. And makes right royal kings and queens out of common clay. Love is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart. Without that divine passion, without that divine sway, we are less than beasts. And with it, earth is heaven. And we are gods. End of Ingersoll's lecture on Talmajan theology. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. From the book, lectures of Colonel R.G. Ingersoll, read for you by Ted DeLorm in Fort Mill, South Carolina, during June 2007. Ingersoll's Oration at a Child's Grave. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Ingersoll's Oration at a Child's Grave, from the collection, Lectures of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll. In a remote corner of the Congressional Cemetery at Washington, a small group of people with uncovered heads were ranged around a newly opened grave. They included Detective and Mrs. George O. Miller and family and friends, who had gathered to witness the burial of the former's bright little son, Harry. As the casket rested upon the trestles, there was a painful pause, broken only by the mother's sobs, until the undertaker advanced toward a stout, florid, complexioned gentleman in the party, and whispered to him the words being inaudible to the lookers on. This gentleman was Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, a friend of the Millers, who had attended the funeral at their request. He shook his head when the undertaker first addressed him, and then said suddenly, does Mrs. Miller desire it? The undertaker gave an affirmative nod. Mr. Miller looked appealingly toward the distinguished orator, and then Colonel Ingersoll advanced to the side of the grave, made a motion denoting a desire for silence, and in a voice of exquisite cadence delivered one of his characteristic eulogies for the dead. The scene was intensely dramatic, a fine drizzling rain was falling, and every head was bent, and every ear turned to catch the impassioned words of eloquence and hope that fell from the lips of the famed orator. Colonel Ingersoll was unprotected by either hat or umbrella. His invocation thrilled his hearers with awe, each eye that had previously been bedimmed with tears brightening and sobs becoming hushed. The Colonel said, my friends, I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world where life and death are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet what all have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth patriarchs and babes sleep side by side. Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We cannot tell. We do not know which is the greatest blessing, life or death. We cannot say that death is not good. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else a dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate. The child dying in its mother's arms before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch. Every cradle asks us whence, and every coffin wither. The poor barbarian weeping above his dead can answer the question as intelligently and satisfactorily as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those who press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. Maybe a common faith treads from out the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness, and I should rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not. Another life is not unless we know and love again the ones who love us here. They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave need have no fear. The largest and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be tells us that death even at its worst is only perfect rest. We know that through the common wants of life the needs and duties of each hour their grief will lessen day by day until at last these graves will be to them a place of rest and peace almost of joy. There is for them this consolation the dead do not suffer. If they live again their lives will surely be as good as ours. We have no fear we are all children of the same mother and the same fate awaits us all. We too have our religion and it is this help for the living hope for the dead end of Ingersoll's oration at a child's grave. Ingersoll at his brother's grave a most exquisite yet one of the most sad and mournful sermons. The funeral of honorable Eben C. Ingersoll, brother of Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll of Illinois, took place at his residence in Washington D.C. June 2, 1879. The ceremonies were extremely simple consisting merely of viewing the remains by relatives and friends and a funeral oration by Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, brother of the deceased. A large number of distinguished gentlemen were present including Secretary Sherman, Assistant Secretary Hawley, Senators Blaine, Voorhees, Paddock, Allison, Logan, Honorable Thomas Henderson, Governor Pound, Honorable William M. Morrison, General Jeffries, General Williams, Colonel James Fishback, and others. The pallbearers were Senators Blaine, Voorhees, David Davis, Paddock, and Allison, Colonel Ward, H. Lamon, Honorable Jeremiah Wilson of Indiana, and Honorable Thomas A. Boyd of Illinois. Soon after Mr. Ingersoll began to read his eloquent characterization of the dead, his eyes filled with tears. He tried to hide them behind his eyeglasses, but he could not do it. And finally he bowed his head upon the dead man's coffin in uncontrollable grief. It was after some delay and the greatest efforts of self-mastery that Colonel Ingersoll was able to finish reading his address, which was as follows. My friends, I am going to do that which the dead often promised he would do for me. The loved and loving brother, husband, father, friend, died where manhood's mourning almost touches noon and while the shadows still were falling toward the west. He had not passed on life's highway the stone that marks the highest point, but being weary for a moment he lay down by the wayside and using his burden for a pillow fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love with life and raptured with the world he passed to silence and pathetic dust. Yet after all it may be best, just in the happiest, sunniest hour of all, the voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail to dash against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar over a sunken ship. For whether in mid-sea or among the breakers of the farther shore a wreck must mark at last the end of each and all. And every life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment jewelled with a joy, will at its close become a tragedy, as sad and deep and dark as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death. This brave and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock, but in the sunshine he was vine and flower. He was the friend of all heroic souls. He climbed the heights and left all superstitions far below while on his forehead fell the golden dawning of a grander day. He loved the beautiful, and was with color, form, and music touched to tears. He sided with the weak, and with a willing hand gave arms, with loyal heart, and with the purest hand he faithful discharged all public trusts. He was a worshipper of liberty and a friend of the oppressed. A thousand times I have heard him quote the words, for justice all place at temple and all season summer. He believed that happiness was the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worshipper, humanity the only religion, and love the priest. He added to the sum of human joy, and were every one for whom he did some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave he would sleep tonight beneath the wilderness of flowers. Life is a narrow veil between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word, but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered, with his latest breath, I am better now. Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas and tears and fears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead, and now to you who have been chosen from among the many men he loved to do the last sad office for the dead, we give his sacred dust. Speech cannot contain our love. There is no gentler, stronger manlier man end of Ingersoll at his brother's grave. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Two orations at the graveside. From the book, lectures of Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, read for you by Ted DeLorm in Fort Mill, South Carolina during June 2007.