The Great Infidels
The Infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next.

by Robert G. Ingersoll
(1881)

From The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (Dresden Edition, 1900–1902), Volume 3.
Source: https://thegreatagnostic.com/works/the-great-infidels/
Public domain. CC0 / Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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I HAVE sometimes thought that it will not make great and splendid
character to rock children in the cradle of hypocrisy. I do not believe
that the tendency is to make men and women brave and glorious when you
tell them that there are certain ideas upon certain subjects that they
must never express; that they must go through life with a pretence as a
shield; that their neighbors will think much more of them if they
will only keep still; and that above all is a God who despises one who
honestly expresses what he believes. For my part, I believe men will be
nearer honest in business, in politics, grander in art—in everything
that is good and grand and beautiful, if they are taught from the cradle
to the coffin to tell their honest opinion.

Neither do I believe thought to be dangerous.

It is incredible that only idiots are absolutely sure of salvation.
It is incredible that the more brain you have the less your chance is.
There can be no danger in honest thought, and if the world ever advances
beyond what it is to-day, it must be led by men who express their real
opinions.

We have passed midnight in the great struggle between Fact and Faith,
between Science and Superstition. The brand of intellectual inferiority
is now upon the orthodox brain. There is nothing grander than to rescue
from the leprosy of slander the reputation of a good and generous man.
Nothing can be nearer just than to benefit our benefactors.

The Infidels of one age have been the aureoled saints of the next. The
destroyers of the old are 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 ever by the grave of buried age stand
youth and joy.

The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of
Infidels. Political rights have been preserved by traitors—the liberty
of the mind by heretics. To attack the king was treason—to dispute the
priest was blasphemy. The sword and cross were allies. They defended
each other. The throne and altar were twins—vultures from the same egg.

It was James I. who said: "No bishop, no king." He might have said: "No
cross, no crown."

The king owned the bodies, and the priest the souls, of men. One lived
on taxes, the other on alms. One was a robber, the other a beggar, and
each was both.

These robbers and beggars controlled two worlds. The king made laws, the
priest made creeds. With bowed backs the people received the burdens of
the one, and with wonder's open mouth the dogmas of the other. If any
aspired to be free they were crushed by the king, and every priest was
a Herod who slaughtered the children of the brain. The king ruled by
force, the priest by fear, and both by both.

The king said to the people: "God made you peasants, and he made me
king. He made rags and hovels for you, robes and palaces for me. Such
is the justice of God." And the priest said: "God made you ignorant and
vile. He made me holy and wise. If you do not obey me, God will punish
you here and torment you hereafter. Such is the mercy of God."

Infidels are intellectual discoverers. They sail the unknown seas and
find new isles and continents in the infinite realms of thought.

An Infidel is one who has found a new fact, who has an idea of his own,
and who in the mental sky has seen another star.

He is an intellectual capitalist, and for that reason excites the envy
and hatred of the theological pauper.

The Origin of god and Heaven, Of the Devil and Hell.

IN the estimation of good orthodox Christians I am a criminal, because
I am trying to take from loving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
husbands, wives, and lovers the consolations naturally arising from
a belief in an eternity of grief and pain. I want to tear, break, and
scatter to the winds the God that priests erected in the fields of
innocent pleasure—a God made of sticks called creeds, and of old
clothes called myths. I shall endeavor to take from the coffin its
horror, from the cradle its curse, and put out the fires of revenge
kindled by an infinite fiend.

Is it necessary that Heaven should borrow its light from the glare of
Hell?

Infinite punishment is infinite cruelty, endless injustice, immortal
meanness. To worship an eternal goaler hardens, debases, and pollutes
even the vilest soul. While there is one sad and breaking heart in the
universe, no good being can be perfectly happy.

Against the heartlessness of the Christian religion every grand and
tender soul should enter solemn protest. The God of Hell should be held
in loathing, contempt and scorn. A God who threatens eternal pain should
be hated, not loved—cursed, not worshiped. A heaven presided over by
such a God must be below the lowest hell. I want no part in any heaven
in which the saved, the ransomed and redeemed will drown with shouts of
joy the cries and sobs of hell—in which happiness will forget misery,
where the tears of the lost only increase laughter and double bliss.

The idea of hell was born of ignorance, brutality, fear, cowardice, and
revenge. This idea testifies that our remote ancestors were the lowest
beasts. Only from dens, lairs, and caves, only from mouths filled
with cruel fangs, only from hearts of fear and hatred, only from the
conscience of hunger and lust, only from the lowest and most debased
could come this most cruel, heartless and bestial of all dogmas.

Our barbarian ancestors knew but little of nature. They were too
astonished to investigate. They could not divest themselves of the idea
that everything happened with reference to them; that they caused storms
and earthquakes; that they brought the tempest and the whirlwind; that
on account of something they had done, or omitted to do, the lightning
of vengeance leaped from the darkened sky. They made up their minds that
at least two vast and powerful beings presided over this world; that
one was good and the other bad; that both of these beings wished to get
control of the souls of men; that they were relentless enemies, eternal
foes; that both welcomed recruits and hated deserters; that both
demanded praise and worship; that one offered rewards in this world, and
the other in the next. The Devil has paid cash—God buys on credit.

Man saw cruelty and mercy in nature, because he imagined that phenomena
were produced to punish or to reward him. When his poor hut was torn and
broken by the wind, he thought it a punishment. When some town or city
was swept away by flood or sea, he imagined that the crimes of the
inhabitants had been avenged. When the land was filled with plenty, when
the seasons were kind, he thought that he had pleased the tyrant of the
skies.

It must be remembered that both gods and devils were supposed to be
presided over by the greatest God and the greatest Devil. The God could
give infinite rewards and could inflict infinite torments. The Devil
could assist man here; could give him wealth and place in this world, in
consideration of owning his soul hereafter. Each human soul was a prize
contended for by these deities. Of course this God and this Devil had
innumerable spirits at their command, to execute their decrees. The God
lived in heaven and the Devil in hell. Both were mon-archs and were
infinitely jealous of each other. The priests pretended to be the agents
and recruiting sergeants of this God, and they were duly authorized to
promise and threaten in his name; they had power to forgive and curse.
These priests sought to govern the world by force and fear. Believing
that men could be frightened into obedience, they magnified the tortures
and terrors of perdition. Believing also that man could in part be
influenced by the hope of reward, they magnified the joys of heaven. In
other words, they promised eternal joy and threatened everlasting pain.
Most of these priests, born of the ignorance of the time, believed what
they taught. They proved that God was good by sunlight and harvest, by
health and happiness; that he was angry, by disease and death. Man,
according to this doctrine, was led astray by the Devil, who delighted
only in evil. It was supposed that God demanded worship; that he loved
to be flattered; that he delighted in sacrifice; that nothing made him
happier than to see ignorant faith upon its knees; that above all things
he hated and despised doubters and heretics, and that he regarded all
investigation as rebellion.

Now and then believers in these ideas, those who had gained great
reputation for learning and sanctity, or had enjoyed great power, wrote
books, and these books after a time were considered sacred. Most of them
were written to frighten mankind, and were filled with threatenings and
curses for unbelievers and promises for the faithful. The more frightful
the curses, the more extravagant the promises, the more sacred the books
were considered. All of the gods were cruel and vindictive, unforgiving
and relentless, and the devils were substantially the same.

It was also believed that certain things must be accepted as true, no
matter whether they were reasonable or not; that it was pleasing to God
to believe a certain creed, especially if it happened to be the creed of
the majority. Each community felt it a duty to see that the enemies of
God were converted or killed. To allow a heretic to live in peace was
to invite the wrath of God. Every public evil—every misfortune—was
accounted for by something the community had permitted or done. When
epidemics appeared, brought by ignorance and welcomed by filth, the
heretic was brought out and sacrificed to appease the vengeance of God.
From the knowledge they had—from their premises—they reasoned well.
They said, if God will inflict such frightful torments upon us here,
simply for allowing a few heretics to live, what will he do with the
heretics? Of course the heretics would be punished forever. They knew
how cruel was the barbarian king when he had the traitor in his power.
They had seen every horror that man could inflict on man. Of course a
God could do more than a king. He could punish forever. The fires he
would kindle never could be quenched. The torments he would inflict
would be eternal. They thought the amount of punishment would be
measured only by the power of God.

These ideas were not only prevalent in what are called barbarous times,
but they are received by the religious world of to-day.

No death could be conceived more horrible than that produced by flames.
To these flames they added eternity, and hell was produced. They
exhausted the idea of personal torture.

By putting intention behind what man called good, God was produced. By
putting intention behind what man called bad, the Devil was created.
Leave this "intention" out, and gods and devils fade away.

If not a human being existed the sun would continue to shine, and
tempests now and then would devastate the world; the rain would fall in
pleasant showers, and the bow of promise would adorn the cloud; violets
would spread their velvet bosoms to the sun, and the earthquake would
devour; birds would sing, and daisies bloom, and roses blush, and the
volcanoes would fill the heavens with their lurid glare; the procession
of the seasons would not be broken, and the stars would shine just as
serenely as though the world was filled with loving hearts and happy
homes. But in the olden time man thought otherwise. He imagined that
he was of great importance. Barbarians are always egotistic. They think
that the stars are watching them; that the sun shines on their account;
that the rain falls for them, and that gods and devils are really
troubling themselves about their poor and ignorant souls.

In those days men fought for their God as they did for their king. They
killed the enemies of both. For this their king would reward them
here, and their God hereafter. With them it was loyalty to destroy
the disloyal. They did not regard God as a vague "spirit," nor as an
"essence" without body or parts, but as a being, a person, an infinite
man, a king, the monarch of the universe, who had garments of glory for
believers and robes of flame for the heretic and infidel.

Do not imagine that this doctrine of hell belongs to Christianity alone.
Nearly all religions have had this dogma for a corner-stone. Upon this
burning foundation nearly all have built. Over the abyss of pain rose
the glittering dome of pleasure. This world was regarded as one of
trial. Here a God of infinite wisdom experimented with man. Between the
outstretched paws of the Infinite the mouse, man, was allowed to play.
Here man had the opportunity of hearing priests and kneeling in temples.
Here he could read and hear read the sacred books. Here he could have
the example of the pious and the counsels of the holy. Here he could
build churches and cathedrals. Here he could burn incense, fast, wear
haircloth, deny himself all the pleasures of life, confess to priests,
count beads, be miserable one day in seven, make creeds, construct
instruments of torture, bow before pictures and images, eat little
square pieces of bread, sprinkle water on the heads of babes, shut his
eyes and say words to the clouds, and slander and defame all who have
the courage to despise superstition, and the goodness to tell their
honest thoughts. After death, nothing could be done to make him better.
When he should come into the presence of God, nothing was left except
to damn him. Priests might convert him here, but God could do nothing
there,—all of which shows how much more a priest can do for a soul
than its creator; how much more potent is the example of your average
Christian than that of all the angels, and how much superior earth is to
heaven for the moral development of the soul. In heaven the Devil is
not allowed to enter. There all are pure and perfect, yet they cannot
influence a soul for good.

Only here, on the earth, where the Devil is constantly active, only
where his agents attack every soul, is there the slightest hope of moral
improvement.

Strange! that a world cursed by God, filled with temptations and thick
with fiends, should be the only place where hope exists, the only place
where man can repent, the only place where reform is possible! Strange!
that heaven, filled with angels and presided over by God, is the
only place where reformation is utterly impossible! Yet these are the
teachings of all the believers in the eternity of punishment.

Masters frightened slaves with the threat of hell, and slaves got a kind
of shadowy revenge by whispering back the threat. The poor have damned
the rich and the rich the poor. The imprisoned imagined a hell for their
gaolers; the weak built this place for the strong; the arrogant for
their rivals; the vanquished for their victors; the priest for the
thinker, religion for reason, superstition for science.

All the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty,
all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable,
grew, blossomed and bore fruit in this one word—Hell.

For the nourishment of this dogma cruelty was soil, ignorance was rain,
and fear was light.

Christians have placed upon the throne of the universe a God of eternal
hate. I cannot worship a being whose vengeance is boundless, whose
cruelty is shoreless, and whose malice is increased by the agonies he
inflicts.

The Appeal to the Cemetery

WHOEVER attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of
the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He
is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than
all the great and honored of the past Every defender of a creed has
graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or
words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine. The church is
always anxious to have some king or president certify to the moral
character of Christ, the authority of the Scriptures, and the justice
of the Jewish God. Of late years, confessions of gentlemen about to be
hanged have been considered of great value, and the scaffold is regarded
as a means of grace.

All the churches of our day seek the rich. They are no longer the
friends and defenders of the poor. Poverty no longer feels at home
in the house of God. In the Temple of the Most High, garments out of
fashion are considered out of place. People now, before confessing to
God what worthless souls they have, enrich their bodies. Now words of
penitence mingle with the rustle of silk, and light thrown from diamonds
adorns the repentant tear. We are told that the rich, the fortunate, the
holders of place and office, the fashionable, the respectable, are all
within the churches. And yet all these people grow eloquent over the
poverty of Christ—boast that he was born in a manger—that the Holy
Ghost passed by all the ladies of titled wealth and fashion and selected
the wife of a poor and unknown mechanic for the Mother of God.

They admit that all the men of Jerusalem who held high positions—all
the people of wealth, influence and power—were the enemies of the
Savior and held his pretensions in contempt. They admit that he had
influence only with the poor, and that he was so utterly unknown—so
indigent in acquaintance, that it was necessary to bribe one of his
disciples to point him out to the police. They assert that he had done a
great number of miracles—had cured the sick, and raised the dead—that
he had preached to vast multitudes—had made a kind of triumphal entry
into Jerusalem—had scourged from the temple the changers of money—had
disputed with the doctors—and yet, notwithstanding all these things,
he remained in the very depths of obscurity. Surely he and his disciples
could have been met with the argument that the "great" dead were opposed
to the new religion.

The apostles, it is claimed, preached the doctrines of Christ in Rome
and Athens, and the people of those cities could have used the arguments
against Christianity that Christians now use in its support. They could
have asked the apostles if they were wiser than all the philosophers,
poets, orators, and statesmen dead—if they knew more, coming as they
did from a weak and barbarous nation, than the greatest men produced by
the highest civilization of the known world. With what scorn would the
Greeks listen to a barbarian's criticisms upon Socrates and Plato. How
a Roman would laugh to hear a vagrant Hebrew attack a mythology that had
been believed by Cato and Virgil.

Every new religion has to overcome this argument of the cemetery—this
logic of the grave. Old ideas take shelter behind a barricade of corpses
and tombstones. They have epitaphs for battle-cries, and malign the
living in the name of the dead. The moment, however, that a new religion
succeeds, it becomes the old religion and uses the same argument against
a new idea that it once so gallantly refuted. The arguments used to-day
against what they are pleased to call infidelity would have shut the
mouth of every religious reformer, from Christ to the founder of the
last sect. The general objection to the new is, that it differs somewhat
from the old, and the fact that it does differ is urged as an argument
against its truth.

Every man is forced to admit that he does not agree with all the great
men, living or dead. The average Catholic, if not a priest, as a rule
will admit that Sir Isaac Newton was in some things his superior, that
Demosthenes had the advantage of him in expressing his ideas in public,
and that as a sculptor he is far below the unknown man of whose hand and
brain was born the Venus de Milo, but he will not, on account of
these admissions, change his views upon the important question of
transubstantiation.

Most Protestants will cheerfully admit that they are inferior in brain
and genius to some men who have lived and died in the Catholic Church;
that in the matter of preaching funeral sermons they do not pretend to
equal Bossuet; that their letters are not so interesting and polished
as those of Pascal; that Torquemada excelled them in the genius of
organization, and that for planning a massacre they would not for a
moment dispute the palm with Catherine de Medici.

And yet, after all these admissions, they would insist that the Pope
is an unblushing impostor, and that the Catholic Church is a vampire
fattened by the best blood of a thousand years.

The truth is, that in favor of almost every sect, the names of some
great men can be pronounced. In almost every church there have been
men whose only weakness was their religion, and who in other directions
achieved distinction. If you call men great because they were emperors,
kings, noblemen, statesmen, millionaires—because they commanded vast
armies and wielded great influence in their day, then more names can be
found to support and prop the Church of Rome than any other Christian
sect.

Is Protestantism willing to rest its claims upon the "great man"
argument? Give me the ideas, the religions, not that have been advanced
and believed by the so-called great of the past, but that will be
defended and believed by the great souls of the future.

It gives me pleasure to say that Lord Bacon was a great man; but I do
not for that reason abandon the Copernican system of astronomy, and
insist that the earth is stationary. Samuel Johnson was an excellent
writer of latinized English, but I am confident that he never saw a
real ghost. Matthew Hale was a reasonably good judge of law, but he
was mistaken about witches causing children to vomit crooked pins. John
Wesley was quite a man, in a kind of religious way, but in this country
few people sympathize with his hatred of republican government, or with
his contempt for the Revolutionary Fathers. Sir Isaac Newton, in the
domain of science, was the colossus of his time, but his commentary on
the book of Revelation would hardly excite envy, even in the breast of
a Spurgeon or a Talmage. Upon many questions, the opinions of Napoleon
were of great value, and yet about his bed, when dying, he wanted to
see burning the holy candles of Rome. John Calvin has been called
a logician, and reasoned well from his premises, but the burning of
Servetus did not make murder a virtue. Luther weakened somewhat the
power of the Catholic Church, and to that extent was a reformer, and
yet Lord Brougham affirmed that his "Table Talk" was so obscene that no
respectable English publisher would soil paper with a translation. He
was a kind of religious Rabelais; and yet a man can defend Luther in his
attack upon the church without justifying his obscenity. If every man
in the Catholic Church was a good man, that would not convince me that
Ignatius Loyola ever met and conversed with the Virgin Mary. The
fact is, very few men are right in everything. Great virtues may
draw attention from defects, but they cannot sanctify them. A pebble
surrounded by diamonds remains a common stone, and a diamond surrounded
by pebbles is still a gem. No one should attempt to refute an argument
by pronouncing the name of some man, unless he is willing to adopt all
the ideas and beliefs of that man. It is better to give reasons and
facts than names. An argument should not depend for its force upon the
name of its author. Facts need no pedigree; logic has no heraldry, and
the living should not be awed by the mistakes of the dead.

The greatest men the world has produced have known but little. They had
a few facts, mingled with mistakes without number. In some departments
they towered above their fellows, while in others they fell below the
common level of mankind.

Daniel Webster had great respect for the Scriptures, but very little for
the claims of his creditors. Most men are strangely inconsistent. Two
propositions were introduced into the Confederate Congress by the same
man. One was to hoist the black flag, and the other was to prevent
carrying the mails on Sunday. George Whitefield defended the slave
trade, because it brought the negroes within the sound of the gospel,
and gave them the advantage of associating with the gentlemen who stole
them. And yet this same Whitefield believed and taught the dogma
of predestination. Volumes might be written upon the follies and
imbecilities of great men. A full rounded man—a man of sterling
sense and natural logic—is just as rare as a great painter, poet, or
sculptor. If you tell your friend that he is not a painter, that he has
no genius for poetry, he will probably admit the truth of what you say,
without feeling that he has been insulted in the least. But if you tell
him that he is not a logician, that he has but little idea of the value
of a fact, that he has no real conception of what evidence is, and
that he never had an original thought in his life, he will cut your
acquaintance. Thousands of men are most wonderful in mechanics, in
trade, in certain professions, keen in business, knowing well the
men among whom they live, and yet satisfied with religions infinitely
stupid, with politics perfectly senseless, and they will believe that
wonderful things were common long ago, such things as no amount of
evidence could convince them had happened in their day. A man may be a
successful merchant, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, statesman, or theologian
without one particle of originality, and almost without the ability to
think logically upon any subject whatever. Other men display in some
directions the most marvelous intellectual power, astonish mankind with
their grasp and vigor, and at the same time, upon religious subjects
drool and drivel like David at the gates of Gath.

Sacred Books

WE have found, at last, that other nations have sacred books much
older than our own, and that these books and records were and are
substantiated by traditions and monuments, by miracles and martyrs,
christs and apostles, as well as by prophecies fulfilled. In all of
these nations differences of opinion as to the authenticity and meaning
of these books arose from time to time, precisely as they have done and
still do with us, and upon these differences were founded sects that
manufactured creeds. These sects denounced each other, and preached with
the sword and endeavored to convince with the fagot. Our theologians
were greatly astonished to find in other bibles the same stories,
precepts, laws, customs and commands that adorn and stain our own. At
first they accounted for this, by saying that these books were in part
copies of the Jewish Scriptures, mingled with barbaric myths. To such an
extent did they impose upon and insult probability, that they declared
that all the morality of the world, all laws commanding right and
prohibiting wrong, all ideas respecting the unity of a Supreme Being,
were borrowed from the Jews, who obtained them directly from God. The
Christian world asserts with warmth, not always born of candor, that
the Bible is the source, origin, and fountain of law, liberty, love,
charity, and justice; that it is the intellectual and moral sun of the
world; that it alone gives happiness here, and alone points out the
way to joy hereafter; that it contains the only revelation from the
Infinite; that all others are the work of dishonest and mistaken men.
They say these things in spite of the fact that the Jewish nation was
one of the weakest and most barbaric of the past; in spite of the fact
that the civilization of Egypt and India had commenced to wane before
that of Palestine existed. To account for all the morality contained in
the sacred books of the Hindus, by saying that it was borrowed from
the wanderers in the Desert of Sinai, from the escaped slaves of the
Egyptians, taxes to the utmost the credulity of ignorance, bigotry, and
zeal.

The men who make these assertions are not superior to other men. They
have only the facts common to all, and they must admit that these facts
do not force the same conclusions upon all. They must admit that men
equally honest, equally well informed as themselves, deny their premises
and conclusions. They must admit that had they been born and educated in
some other country, they would have had a different religion, and would
have regarded with reverence and awe the books they now hold as false
and foolish. Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the
judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a
grave countenance as the titlepage and preface to a most learned volume.
So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn
ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors,
and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter
how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his
soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments
would be urged. There is the same evidence in favor of the inspiration
of the Koran and Bible. Both are substantiated in exactly the same way.
It is just as wicked and unreasonable to be a heretic in Constantinople
as in New York. To deny the claims of Christ and Mohammed is alike
blasphemous. It all depends upon where you are when you make the denial.
No religion has ever fallen that carried with it down to dumb death a
solitary fact. Mistakes moulder with the temples in which they were
taught, and countless superstitions sleep with their dead priests.

Yet Christians insist that the religions of all nations that have fallen
from wealth and power were false, with of course the solitary exception
of the Jewish, simply because the nations teaching them dropped from
their dying hands the swords of power. This argument drawn from the
fate of nations proves no more than would one based upon the history
of persons. With nations as with individuals, the struggle for life is
perpetual, and the law of the survival of the fittest applies equally to
both.

It may be that the fabric of our civilization will crumbling fall to
unmeaning chaos and to formless dust, where oblivion broods and even
memory forgets. Perhaps the blind Samson of some imprisoned force,
released by thoughtless chance, may so wreck and strand the world that
man, in stress and strain of want and fear, will shudderingly crawl back
to savage and barbaric night. The time may come in which this thrilled
and throbbing earth, shorn of all life, will in its soundless orbit
wheel a barren star, on which the light will fall as fruitlessly as
falls the gaze of love upon the cold, pathetic face of death.

Fear

'T'HERE is a view quite prevalent, that in some way you can prove
whether the theories defended or advanced by a man are right or not, by
showing what kind of man he was, what kind of life he lived, and what
manner of death he died.

A man entertains certain opinions; he is persecuted. He refuses to
change his mind; he is burned, and in the midst of flames cries out
that he dies without change. Hundreds then say that he has sealed his
testimony with his blood, and his doctrines must be true.

All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient
to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule,
establishes the sincerity of the martyr,—never the correctness of
his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be
affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected
by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a
truth.

No Christian will admit that any amount of heroism displayed by a Mormon
is sufficient to prove that Joseph Smith was divinely inspired. 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, to say the least, than that
of the living. In the early days of Christianity a serene and intrepid
death was regarded as a testimony in favor of the church. At that time
Pagans were being converted to Christianity—were throwing Jupiter away
and taking the Hebrew God instead. In the moment of death many of these
converts, without doubt, retraced their steps and died in the faith of
their ancestors. But whenever one died clinging to the cross of the
new religion, this was seized upon as an evidence of the truth of the
gospel. After a time the Christians taught that an unbeliever, one
who spoke or wrote against their doctrines, could not meet death with
composure—that the infidel in his last moments would necessarily be a
prey to the serpent of remorse. For more than a thousand years they
have made the "facts" to fit this theory. Crimes against men have been
considered as nothing when compared with a denial of the truth of the
Bible, the divinity of Christ, or the existence of God.

According to the theologians, God has always acted in this way. As long
as men did nothing except to render their fellows wretched; as long as
they only butchered and burnt the innocent and helpless, God maintained
the strictest and most heartless neutrality; but when some honest man,
some great and tender soul expressed a doubt as to the truth of the
Scriptures, or prayed to the wrong God, or to the right one by the wrong
name, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon his victim, and
from his quivering flesh tore his wretched soul.

There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has been
paralyzed—no truthful account in all the literature of the world of the
innocent being shielded by God. Thousands of crimes are committed every
day—men are this moment lying in wait for their human prey—wives
are whipped and crushed, driven to insanity and death—little children
begging for mercy, lifting imploring, tear-filled eyes to the brutal
faces of fathers and mothers—sweet girls are deceived, lured, and
outraged, but God has no time to prevent these things—no time to defend
the good and to protect the pure. He is too busy numbering hairs and
watching sparrows.

He listens for blasphemy; looks for persons who laugh at priests;
examines baptismal registers; watches professors in colleges who begin
to doubt the geology of Moses and the astronomy of Joshua. He does not
particularly object to stealing if you won't swear. A great many persons
have fallen dead in the act of taking God's name in vain, but millions
of men, women, and children have been stolen from their homes and used
as beasts of burden, but no one engaged in this infamy has ever been
touched by the wrathful hand of God.

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
any discredit on his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold, with
a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in
heaven. The man who has succeeded in making his home a hell, meets death
without a quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the
divinity of Christ, or the eternal "procession" of the Holy Ghost. The
king who has waged cruel and useless war, who has filled countries with
widows and fatherless children, with the maimed and diseased, and who
has succeeded in offering to the Moloch of ambition the best and bravest
of his subjects, dies like a saint.

The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered
his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he
convened the Council of Nice to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or
the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial
with the Father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a
wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the
Savior. Theodosius called a council at Constantinople in 381, and
this council decided that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father.
Theodosius, the younger, assembled another council at Ephesus to
ascertain who the Virgin Mary really was, and it was solemnly decided in
the year 431 that she was the Mother of God. In 451 it was decided by a
council held at Chalcedon, called together by the Emperor Marcian, that
Christ had two natures—the human and divine. In 680, in another general
council, held at Constantinople, convened by order of Pognatius, it
was also decided that Christ had two wills, and in the year 1274 it was
decided at the Council of Lyons, that the Holy Ghost proceeded not only
from the Father, but from the Son as well. Had it not been for these
councils, we might have been without a Trinity even unto this day. When
we take into consideration the fact that a belief in the Trinity is
absolutely essential to salvation, how unfortunate it was for the world
that this doctrine was not established until the year 1274. Think of
the millions that dropped into hell while these questions were being
discussed.

This, however, is a digression. Let us go back to Constantine. This
Emperor, stained with every crime, is supposed to have died like a
Christian. We hear nothing of fiends leering at him in the shadows of
death. He does not see the forms of his murdered wife and son covered
with the blood he shed. From his white and shrivelled lips issued no
shrieks of terror. He does not cover his glazed eyes with thin and
trembling hands to shut out the visions of hell. His chamber is filled
with the rustle of wings—of wings waiting to bear his soul to the
thrilling realms of joy.

Against the Emperor Constantine the church has hurled no anathema. She
has accepted the story of his vision in the clouds, and his holy memory
has been guarded by priest and pope. All the persecutors sleep in peace,
and the ashes of those who burned their brothers in the name of Christ
rest in consecrated ground. Whole libraries could not contain even the
names of the wretches who have filled the world with violence and death
in defence of book and creed, and yet they all died the death of the
righteous, and no priest or minister describes the agony and fear, the
remorse and horror, with which their guilty souls were filled in the
last moments of their lives. These men had never doubted—they accepted
the creed—they were not infidels—they had not denied the divinity
of Christ—they had been baptized—they had partaken of the Last
Supper—they had respected priests—they admitted that the Holy Ghost
had "proceeded," and these things put pillows beneath their dying heads,
and covered them with the drapery of peace.

Now and then, in the history of this world, a man of genius, of sense,
of intellectual honesty has appeared. These men have denounced the
superstitions of their day. They pitied the multitude. To see priests
devour the substance of the people filled them with indignation. These
men were honest enough to tell their thoughts. Then they were denounced,
tried, condemned, executed. Some of them escaped the fury of the people
who loved their enemies, and died naturally in their beds.

It would not do for the church to admit that they died peacefully. That
would show that religion was not actually necessary in the last moment.
Religion got much of its power from the terror of death.

The Death Test

YOU had better live well and die wicked.

You had better live well and die cursing than live badly and die
praying.

It would not do to have the common people understand that a man could
deny the Bible, refuse to look at the cross, contend that Christ was
only a man, and yet die as calmly as Calvin did after he had murdered
Servetus, or as did King David after advising one son to kill another.

The church has taken great pains to show that the last moments of all
infidels (that Christians did not succeed in burning) were infinitely
wretched and despairing. It was alleged that words could not paint the
horrors that were endured by a dying infidel. Every good Christian was
expected to, and generally did, believe these accounts. They have been
told and retold in every pulpit of the world. Protestant ministers have
repeated the inventions of Catholic priests, and Catholics, by a kind
of theological comity, have sworn to the falsehoods told by Protestants.
Upon this point they have always stood together, and will as long as the
same calumny can be used by both.

Upon the death-bed subject the clergy grow eloquent. When describing the
shudderings and shrieks of the dying unbeliever, their eyes glitter with
delight.

It is a festival.

They are no longer men. They become hyenas. They dig open graves. They
devour the reputations of the dead.

It is a banquet.

Unsatisfied still, they paint the terrors of hell. They gaze at the
souls of the infidels writhing in the coils of the worm that never dies.
They see them in flames—in oceans of fire—in gulfs of pain—in abysses
of despair. They shout with joy. They applaud.

It is an auto da fe, presided over by God and his angels.

The men they thus describe were not atheists; they were all believers
in God, in special providence, and in the immortality of the soul. They
believed in the accountability of man—in the practice of virtue, in
justice, and liberty, but they did not believe in that collection of
follies and fables called the Bible.

In order to show that an infidel must die overwhelmed with remorse and
fear, they have generally selected from all the "unbelievers" since the
day of Christ five men—the Emperor Julian, Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot,
David Hume, and Thomas Paine.

Hardly a minister in the United States has attempted to "answer" me
without referring to the death of one or more of these men.

In vain have these calumniators of the dead been called upon to prove
their statements. In vain have rewards been offered to any priestly
maligner to bring forward the evidence.

Let us once for all dispose of these slanders—of these pious calumnies.

Julian

THEY say that the Emperor Julian was an apostate that he was once
a Christian; that he fell from grace, and that in his last moments,
throwing some of his own blood into the air, he cried out to Jesus
Christ, "Galilean, thou hast conquered!"

It must be remembered that the Christians had persecuted and imprisoned
this very Julian; that they had exiled him; that they had threatened him
with death. Many of his relatives were murdered by the Christians.
He became emperor, and Christians conspired to take his life. The
conspirators were discovered and they were pardoned. He did what he
could to prevent the Christians from destroying each other. He held pomp
and pride and luxury in contempt, and led his army on foot, sharing the
privations of the meanest soldier.

Upon ascending the throne he published an edict proclaiming universal
religious toleration. He was then a Pagan. It is claimed by some that he
never did entirely forget his Christian education. In this I am
inclined to think there is some truth, because he revoked his edict of
toleration, and for a time was nearly as unjust as though he had been
a saint. He was emperor one year and seven months. In a battle with the
Persians he was mortally wounded. "Brought back to his tent, and
feeling that he had but a short time to live, he spent his last hours in
discoursing with his friends on the immortality of the soul. He reviewed
his reign and declared that he was satisfied with his conduct, and had
neither penitence nor remorse to express for anything that he had done."
His last words were: "I submit willingly to the eternal decrees of
heaven, convinced that he who is captivated with life, when his last
hour has arrived is more weak and pusillanimous than he who would rush
to voluntary death when it is his duty still to live."

When we remember that a Christian emperor murdered Julian's father and
most of his kindred, and that he narrowly escaped the same fate, we can
hardly blame him for having a little prejudice against a church
whose members were fierce, ignorant, and bloody—whose priests were
hypocrites, and whose bishops were assassins. If Julian had said he was
a Christian—no matter what he actually was, he would have satisfied the
church.

The story that the dying emperor acknowledged that he was conquered
by the Galilean was originated by some of the so-called Fathers of the
Church, probably by Gregory or Theodoret. They are the same wretches
who said that Julian sacrificed a woman to the moon, tearing out her
entrails with his own hands. We are also informed by these hypocrites
that he endeavored to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, and that
fire came out of the earth and consumed the laborers employed in the
sacrilegious undertaking.

I did not suppose that an intelligent man could be found in the world
who believed this childish fable, and yet in the January number for
1880, of the Princeton Review, the Rev. Stuart Robinson (whoever
he may be) distinctly certifies to the truth of this story. He says:
"Throughout the entire era of the planting of the Christian Church, the
gospel preached was assailed not only by the malignant fanaticism of the
Jew and the violence of Roman statecraft, but also by the intellectual
weapons of philosophers, wits, and poets. Now Celsus denounced the new
religion as base imposture. Now Tacitus described it as but another
phase of the _odium generis humani. Now Julian proposed to bring into
contempt the prophetic claims of its founder by the practical test
of rebuilding the Temple_." Here then in the year of grace 1880 is a
Presbyterian preacher, who really believes that Julian tried to rebuild
the Temple, and that God caused fire to issue from the earth and consume
the innocent workmen.

All these stories rest upon the same foundation—the mendacity of
priests.

Julian changed the religion of the Empire, and diverted the revenues
of the church. Whoever steps between a priest and his salary, will find
that he has committed every crime. No matter how often the slanders may
be refuted, they will be repeated until the last priest has lost his
body and found his wings. These falsehoods about Julian were invented
some fifteen hundred years ago, and they are repeated to-day by just as
honest and just as respectable people as those who told them at first.
Whenever the church cannot answer the arguments of an opponent, she
attacks his character. She resorts to falsehood, and in the domain of
calumny she has stood for fifteen hundred years without a rival.

The great Empire was crumbling to its fall. The literature of the world
was being destroyed by priests. The gods and goddesses were driven from
the earth and sky. The paintings were torn and defaced. The statues were
broken. The walls were left desolate, and the niches empty. Art, like
Rachel, wept for her children, and would not be comforted. The streams
and forests were deserted by the children of the imagination, and the
whole earth was barren, poor and mean.

Christian ignorance, bigotry and hatred, in blind unreasoning zeal, had
destroyed the treasures of our race. Art was abhorred, Knowledge
was despised, Reason was an outcast. The sun was blotted from the
intellectual heaven, every star extinguished, and there fell upon the
world that shadow—that midnight,—known as "The Dark Ages."

This night lasted for a thousand years.

The First Great Star—Herald of the Dawn—was Bruno.

Bruno

THE night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star
that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He
was the herald of the dawn.

He was born in 1550, was educated for a priest, became a Dominican
friar. At last his reason revolted against the doctrine of
transubstantiation. He could not believe that the entire Trinity was in
a wafer, or in a swallow of wine. He could not believe that a man could
devour the Creator of the universe by eating a piece of bread. This led
him to investigate other dogmas of the Catholic Church, and in
every direction he found the same contradictions and impossibilities
supported, not by reason, but by faith.

Those who loved their enemies threatened his life. He was obliged to
flee from his native land, and he became a vagabond in nearly every
nation of Europe. He declared that he fought, not what priests believed,
but what they pretended to believe. He was driven from his native
country because of his astronomical opinions. He had lost confidence
in the Bible as a scientific work. He was in danger because he had
discovered a truth.

He fled to England. He gave some lectures at Oxford. He found that
institution controlled by priests. He found that they were teaching
nothing of importance—only the impossible and the hurtful. He called
Oxford "the widow of true learning." There were in England, at that
time, two men who knew more than the rest of the world. Shakespeare was
then alive.

Bruno was driven from England. He was regarded as a dangerous man,—he
had opinions, he inquired after reasons, he expressed confidence in
facts. He fled to France. He was not allowed to remain in that country.
He discussed things—that was enough. The church said, "move on." He
went to Germany. He was not a believer—he was an investigator. The
Germans wanted believers; they regarded the whole Christian system as
settled; they wanted witnesses; they wanted men who would assert. So he
was driven from Germany.

He returned at last to his native land. He found himself without
friends, because he had been true, not only to himself, but to the human
race. But the world was false to him because he refused to crucify the
Christ of his own soul between the two thieves of hypocrisy and bigotry.
He was arrested for teaching that there are other worlds than this;
that many of the stars are suns, around which other worlds revolve; that
Nature did not exhaust all her energies on this grain of sand called the
earth. He believed in a plurality of worlds, in the rotation of this, in
the heliocentric theory. For these crimes, and for these alone, he was
imprisoned for six years. He was kept in solitary confinement. He was
allowed no books, no friends, no visitors. He was denied pen and paper.
In the darkness, in the loneliness, he had time to examine the great
questions of origin, of existence, of destiny. He put to the test what
is called the goodness of God. He found that he could neither depend
upon man nor upon any deity. At last, the Inquisition demanded him.
He was tried, condemned, excommunicated and sentenced to be burned.
According to Professor Draper, he believed that this world is animated
by an intelligent soul—the cause of forms, but not of matter; that it
lives in all things, even in such as seem not to live; that everything
is ready to become organized; that matter is the mother of forms,
and then their grave; that matter and the soul of things, together,
constitute God. He was a pantheist—that is to say, an atheist. He was
a lover of Nature,—a reaction from the asceticism of the church. He was
tired of the gloom of the monastery. He loved the fields, the woods, the
streams. He said to his brother-priests: Come out of your cells, out of
your dungeons: come into the air and light.

Throw away your beads and your crosses. Gather flowers; mingle with your
fellow-men; have wives and children; scatter the seeds of joy; throw
away the thorns and nettles of your creeds; enjoy the perpetual miracle
of life.

On the sixteenth day of February, in the year of grace 1600, by "the
triumphant beast," the Church of Rome, this philosopher, this great and
splendid man, was burned. He was offered his liberty if he would recant.
There was no God to be offended by his recantation, and yet, as an
apostle of what he believed to be the truth, he refused this offer. To
those who passed the sentence upon him he said: "It is with greater fear
that ye pass this sentence upon me than I receive it." This man, greater
than any naturalist of his day; grander than the martyr of any religion,
died willingly in defence of what he believed to be the sacred truth. He
was great enough to know that real religion will not destroy the joy
of life on earth; great enough to know that investigation is not a
crime—that the really useful is not hidden in the mysteries of faith.
He knew that the Jewish records were below the level of the Greek and
Roman myths; that there is no such thing as special providence; that
prayer is useless; that liberty and necessity are the same, and that
good and evil are but relative.

He was the first real martyr,—neither frightened by perdition, nor
bribed by heaven. He was the first of all the world who died for truth
without expectation of reward. He did not anticipate a crown of glory.
His imagination had not peopled the heavens with angels waiting for his
soul. He had not been promised an eternity of joy if he stood firm,
nor had he been threatened with the fires of hell if he wavered and
recanted. He expected as his reward an eternal nothing! Death was to him
an everlasting end—nothing beyond but a sleep without a dream, a night
without a star, without a dawn—nothing but extinction, blank, utter,
and eternal. No crown, no palm, no "well done, good and faithful
servant," no shout of welcome, no song of praise, no smile of God, no
kiss of Christ, no mansion in the fair skies—not even a grave within
the earth—nothing but ashes, wind-blown and priest-scattered, mixed
with earth and trampled beneath the feet of men and beasts.

The murder of this man will never be completely and perfectly avenged
until from Rome shall be swept every vestige of priest and pope, until
over the shapeless ruin of St. Peter's, the crumbled Vatican and the
fallen cross, shall rise a monument to Bruno,—the thinker, philosopher,
philanthropist, atheist, martyr.

The Church in the Time of Voltaire

WHEN Voltaire was born, the natural was about the only thing in which
the church did not believe. The monks sold little amulets of consecrated
paper. They would cure diseases. If laid in a cradle they would prevent
a child being bewitched. So, they could be put into houses and barns to
keep devils away, or buried in a field to prevent bad weather, to delay
frost, and to insure good crops. There was a regular formulary by which
they were made, ending with a prayer, after which the amulets were
sprinkled with holy water. The church contended that its servants were
the only legitimate physicians. The priests cured in the name of the
church, and in the name of God, by exorcism, relics, water, salt,
and oil. St. Valentine cured epilepsy, St. Gervasius was good for
rheumatism, St. Michael de Sanatis for cancer, St. Judas for coughs, St.
Ovidius for deafness, St. Sebastian for poisonous bites, St. Apollonia
for toothache, St. Clara for rheum in the eye, St. Hubert for
hydrophobia. Devils were driven out with wax tapers, with incense, with
holy water, by pronouncing prayers. The church, as late as the middle of
the twelfth century, prohibited good Catholics from having anything to
do with physicians.

It was believed that the devils produced storms of wind, of rain and of
fire from heaven; that the atmosphere was a battlefield between angels
and devils; that Lucifer had power to destroy fields and vineyards and
dwellings, and the principal business of the church was to protect the
people from the Devil. This was the origin of church bells. These bells
were sprinkled with holy water, and their clangor cleared the air of
imps and fiends. The bells also prevented storms and lightning. The
church used to anathematize insects. In the sixteenth century, regular
suits were commenced against rats, and judgment was rendered. Every
monastery had its master magician, who sold magic incense, salt, and
tapers, consecrated palms and relics.

Every science was regarded as an outcast, an enemy. Every fact held the
creed of the church in scorn. Investigators were enemies in disguise.
Thinkers were traitors, and the church exerted its vast power for
centuries to prevent the intellectual progress of man. There was no
liberty, no education, no philosophy, no science; nothing but credulity,
ignorance, and superstition. The world was really under the control
of Satan and his agents. The church, for the purpose of increasing her
power, exhausted every means to convince the people of the existence
of witches, devils, and fiends. In this way the church had every enemy
within her power. She simply had to charge him with being a wizard, of
holding communication with devils, and the ignorant mob were ready to
tear him to pieces.

To such an extent was this frightful course pursued, and such was the
prevalence of the belief in the supernatural, that the worship of the
devil was absolutely established. The poor people, brutalized by the
church, filled with fear of Satanic influence, finding that the church
did not protect, as a last resort began to worship the Devil. The power
of the Devil was proven by the Bible. The history of Job, the temptation
of Christ in the desert, the carrying of Christ to the top of
the temple, and hundreds of other instances, were relied upon as
establishing his power; and when people laughed about witches riding
upon anointed sticks in the air, invisible, they were reminded of a like
voyage when the Devil carried Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple.

This frightful doctrine filled every friend with suspicion of his
friend. It the husband denounce the wife, the children the parents,
and the parents the children It destroyed all the sweet relations of
humanity. It did away with justice in the courts. It destroyed the
charity of religion. It broke the bond of friendship. It filled with
poison the golden cup of life. It turned earth into a very hell, peopled
with ignorant, tyrannical, and malicious demons.

Such was the result of a few centuries of Christianity. Such was the
result of a belief in the supernatural. Such was the result of giving
up the evidence of our own senses, and relying upon dreams, visions, and
fears. Such was the result of destroying human reason, of depending upon
the supernatural, of living here for another world instead of for this,
of depending upon priests instead of upon ourselves. The Protestants
vied with the Catholics. Luther stood side by side with the priests
he had deserted, in promoting this belief in devils and fiends. To the
Catholic, every Protestant was possessed by a devil. To the Protestant,
every Catholic was the homestead of a fiend. All order, all regular
succession of causes and effects, were known no more. The natural ceased
to exist. The learned and the ignorant were on a level. The priest had
been caught in the net spread for the peasant, and Christendom was a
vast madhouse, with insane priests for keepers.

Voltaire

WHEN Voltaire was born, the church ruled and owned France. It was
a period of almost universal corruption. The priests were mostly
libertines. The judges were nearly as cruel as venal. The royal palace
was simply a house of assignation. The nobles were heartless, proud,
arrogant, and cruel to the last degree. The common people were treated
as beasts. It took the church a thousand years to bring about this happy
condition of things.

The seeds of the revolution unconsciously were being scattered by
every noble and by every priest. They germinated in the hearts of the
helpless. They were watered by the tears of agony. Blows began to bear
interest. There was a faint longing for blood. Workmen, blackened by the
sun, bent by labor, looked at the white throats of scornful ladies and
thought about cutting them.

In those days witnesses were cross-examined with instruments of torture.
The church was the arsenal of superstition. Miracles, relics, angels
and devils were as common as rags. Voltaire laughed at the evidences,
attacked the pretended facts, held the Bible up to ridicule, and
filled Europe with indignant protests against the cruelty, bigotry, and
injustice of the time.

He was a believer in God, and in some ingenious way excused this God for
allowing the Catholic Church to exist. He had an idea that, originally,
mankind were believers in one God, and practiced all the virtues. Of
course this was a mistake. He imagined that the church had corrupted the
human race. In this he was right.

It may be that, at one time, the church relatively stood for progress,
but when it gained power, it became an obstruction. The system of
Voltaire was contradictory. He described a being of infinite goodness,
who not only destroyed his children with pestilence and famine, but
allowed them to destroy each other. While rejecting the God of the
Bible, he accepted another God, who, to say the least, allowed the
innocent to be burned for love of him.

Voltaire hated tyranny, and loved liberty. His arguments to prove the
existence of a God were just as groundless as those of the reverend
fathers of his day to prove the divinity of Christ, or that Mary was the
mother of God. The theologians of his time maligned and feared him. He
regarded them as a spider does flies. He spread nets for them. They
were caught, and he devoured them for the amusement and benefit of the
public. He was educated by the Jesuits, and sometimes acted like one.

It is fashionable to say that he was not profound, This is because he
was not stupid. In the presence of absurdity he laughed, and was called
irreverent. He thought God would not damn even a priest forever: this
was regarded as blasphemy. He endeavored to prevent Christians from
murdering each other and did what he could to civilize the disciples
of Christ. Had he founded a sect, obtained control of some country, and
burned a few heretics at slow fires, he would have won the admiration,
respect and love of the Christian world. Had he only pretended to
believe all the fables of antiquity, had he mumbled Latin prayers,
counted beads, crossed himself, devoured the flesh of God, and carried
fagots to the feet of philosophy in the name of Christ, he might have
been in heaven this moment, enjoying a sight of the damned.

Instead of doing these things, he willfully closed his eyes to the light
of the gospel, examined the Bible for himself, advocated intellectual
liberty, struck from the brain the fetters of an arrogant faith,
assisted the weak, cried out against the torture of man, appealed to
reason, endeavored to establish universal toleration, succored the
indigent, and defended the oppressed.

These were his crimes. Such a man God would not suffer to die in peace.
If allowed to meet death with a smile, others might follow his example,
until none would be left to light the holy fires of the auto da fe. It
would not do for so great, so successful an enemy of the church, to
die without leaving some shriek of fear, some shudder of remorse, some
ghastly prayer of chattered horror, uttered by lips covered with blood
and foam.

He was an old man of eighty-four. He had been surrounded with the
comforts of life; he was a man of wealth, of genius. Among the literary
men of the world he stood first. God had allowed him to have the
appearance of success. His last years were filled with the intoxication
of flattery. He stood at the summit of his age.

The priests became anxious. They began to fear that God would forget, in
a multiplicity of business, to make a terrible example of Voltaire.

Toward the last of May, 1778, it was whispered in Paris that Voltaire
was dying. Upon the fences of expectation gathered the unclean birds of
superstition, impatiently waiting for their prey.

"Two days before his death, his nephew went to seek the curé of Saint
Sulpice and the Abbé Gautier and brought them into his uncle's sick
chamber, who was informed that they were there. 'Ah, well!' said
Voltaire, 'give them my compliments and my thanks.' The Abbé spoke some
words to him, exhorting him to patience. The curé of Saint Sulpice then
came forward, having announced himself, and asked of Voltaire, elevating
his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. The
sick man pushed one of his hands against the curé's coif, shoving him
back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, 'Let me die in
peace.' The curé seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif
dishonored, by the touch of the philosopher. He made the nurse give him
a little brushing, and went out with the Abbé Gautier."

He expired, says Wagniere, on the 30th of May, 1778, at about a quarter
past eleven at night, with the most perfect tranquillity. Ten minutes
before his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his _valet de
chambre_, who was watching by him, pressed it and said: "Adieu, my dear
Morand, I am gone." These were his last words.

From this death, so simple and serene, so natural and peaceful; from
these words so utterly destitute of cant or dramatic touch, all the
frightful pictures, all the despairing utterances, have been drawn and
made. From these materials, and from these alone, have been constructed
all the shameless lies about The death of this great and wonderful man,
compared with whom all of his calumniators, dead and living, were and
are but dust and vermin.

Voltaire was the intellectual autocrat of his time. 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. He was the assassin of
superstition. He left the quiver of ridicule without an arrow. Through
the shadows of faith and fable, through the darkness of myth and
miracle, through the midnight of Christianity, through the blackness of
bigotry, past cathedral and dungeon, past rack and stake, past altar and
throne, he carried, with chivalric hands, the sacred torch of reason.

Diderot

DOUBT IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARD TRUTH.

DIDEROT was born in 1713. His parents were in what may be called the
humbler walks of life. Like Voltaire he was educated by the Jesuits. He
had in him something of the vagabond, and was for several years almost a
beggar in Paris. He was endeavoring to live by his pen. In that day and
generation, a man without a patron, endeavoring to live by literature,
was necessarily almost a beggar. He nearly starved—frequently going for
days without food. Afterward, when he had something himself, he was as
generous as the air. No man ever was more willing to give, and no man
less willing to receive, than Diderot.

He wrote upon all conceivable subjects, that he might have bread. He
even wrote sermons, and regretted it all his life. He and D'Alembert
were the life and soul of the Encyclopaedia. With infinite enthusiasm he
helped to gather the knowledge of the world for the use of each and all.
He harvested the fields of thought, separated the grain from the
straw and chaff, and endeavored to throw away the seeds and fruit of
superstition. His motto was, "_Incredulity is the first step towards
philosophy_."

He had the vices of most Christians—was nearly as immoral as the
majority of priests. His vices he shared in common, his virtues were his
own. All who knew him united in saying that he had the pity of a woman,
the generosity of a prince, the self-denial of an anchorite, the courage
of Cæsar, and the enthusiasm of a poet. He attacked with every power
of his mind the superstition of his day. He said what he thought. The
priests hated him. He was in favor of universal education—the church
despised it. He wished to put the knowledge of the whole world within
reach of the poorest.

He wished to drive from the gate of the Garden of Eden the cherubim of
superstition, so that the child of Adam might return to eat once more
the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Every Catholic was his enemy. His
poor little desk was ransacked by the police searching for manuscripts
in which something might be found that would justify the imprisonment of
such a dangerous man. Whoever, in 1750, wished to increase the knowledge
of mankind was regarded as the enemy of social order.

The intellectual superstructure of France rests upon the Encyclopaedia.
The knowledge given to the people was the impulse, the commencement,
of the revolution that left the church without an altar and the king
without a throne. Diderot thought for himself, and bravely gave his
thoughts to others. For this reason he was regarded as a criminal. He
did not expect his reward in another world. He did not do what he did to
please some imaginary God. He labored for mankind. He wished to lighten
the burdens of those who should live after him. Hear these noble words:

"The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into
the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and
ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity
of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what
consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would
pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon
their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and
the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who
findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down
the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon
me!" Posterity is for the philosopher what the other world is for the
devotee.

Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was
guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have
used it.

Of course it would not do for the church to allow a man to die in
peace who had added to the intellectual wealth of the world. The moment
Diderot was dead, Catholic priests began painting and recounting the
horrors of his expiring moments. They described him as overcome with
remorse, as insane with fear; and these falsehoods have been repeated
by the Protestant world, and will probably be repeated by thousands of
ministers after we are dead. The truth is, he had passed his three-score
years and ten. He had lived for seventy-one years. He had eaten his
supper. He had been conversing with his wife. He was reclining in
his easy chair. His mind was at perfect rest. He had entered, without
knowing it, the twilight of his last day. Above the horizon was the
evening star, telling of sleep. The room grew still and the stillness
was lulled by the murmur of the street. There were a few moments of
perfect peace. The wife said, "He is asleep." She enjoyed his repose,
and breathed softly that he might not be disturbed. The moments wore on,
and still he slept. Lovingly, softly, at last she touched him. Yes, he
was asleep. He had become a part of the eternal silence.

David Hume

THE worst religion of the world was the Presbyterianism of Scotland as
it existed in the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Kirk had all
the faults of the Church of Rome without a redeeming feature. The Kirk
hated music, painting, statuary, and architecture. Anything touched with
humanity—with the dimples of joy—was detested and accursed. God was to
be feared—not loved.

Life was a long battle with the Devil. Every desire was of Satan.
Happiness was a snare, and human love was wicked, weak and vain. The
Presbyterian priest of Scotland was as cruel, bigoted and heartless as
the familiar of the Inquisition.

One case will tell it all:

In the beginning of this, the nineteenth century, a boy seventeen
years of age, Thomas Aikenhead, was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for
blasphemy. He had denied the inspiration of the Bible. He had on several
occasions, when cold, jocularly wished himself in hell that he might get
warm. The poor, frightened boy recanted—begged for mercy; but he was
found guilty, hanged, thrown in a hole at the foot of the scaffold,
and his weeping mother vainly begged that his bruised and bleeding body
might be given to her.

This one case, multiplied again and again, gives you the condition of
Scotland when, on the 26th of April, 1711, David Hume was born.

David Hume was one of the few Scotchmen of his day who were not owned
by the church. He had the manliness to examine historical and religious
questions for himself, and the courage to give his conclusions to
the world. He was singularly capable of governing himself. He was a
philosopher, and lived a calm and cheerful life, unstained by an
unjust act, free from all excess, and devoted in a reasonable degree to
benefiting his fellow-men. After examining the Bible he became convinced
that it was not true. For failing to suppress his real opinion, for
failing to tell a deliberate falsehood, he brought upon himself the
hatred of the church.

Intellectual honesty is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and whether God
will forgive this sin or not his church has not, and never will.

Hume took the ground that a miracle could not be used as evidence until
the fact that it had happened was established. But how can a miracle be
established? Take any miracle recorded in the Bible, and how could it be
established now? You may say: Upon the testimony of those who wrote
the account. Who were they? No one knows. How could you prove
the resurrection of Lazarus? Or of the widow's son? How could you
substantiate, today, the ascension of Jesus Christ? In what way could
you prove that the river Jordan was divided upon being struck by the
coat of a prophet? How is it possible now to establish the fact that the
fires of a furnace refused to burn three men? Where are the witnesses?
Who, upon the whole earth, has the slightest knowledge upon this
subject?

He insisted that at the bottom of all good was the useful; that human
happiness was an end worth working and living for; that origin
and destiny were alike unknown; that the best religion was to live
temperately and to deal justly with our fellow-men; that the dogma of
inspiration was absurd, and that an honest man had nothing to fear. Of
course the Kirk hated him. He laughed at the creed.

To the lot of Hume fell ease, respect, success, and honor. While many
disciples of God were the sport and prey of misfortune, he kept steadily
advancing.

Envious Christians bided their time. They waited as patiently as
possible for the horrors of death to fall upon the heart and brain of
David Hume. They knew that all the furies would be there, and that God
would get his revenge.

Adam Smith, author of the "Wealth of Nations," speaking of Hume in his
last sickness, says that in the presence of death "his cheerfulness was
so great, and his conversation and amusements ran so much in the usual
strain, that, notwithstanding all his bad symptoms, many people could
not believe he was dying. A few days before his death Hume said: 'I am
dying as fast as my enemies—if I have any—could wish, and as easily
and tranquilly as my best friends could desire.'"

Col. Edmondstoune shortly afterward wrote Hume a letter, of which the
following is an extract:

"My heart is full. I could not see you this morning. I thought it was
better for us both. You cannot die—you must live in the memory of your
friends and acquaintances; and your works will render you immortal. I
cannot conceive that it was possible for any one to dislike you, or hate
you. He must be more than savage who could be an enemy to a man with the
best head and heart and the most amiable manners."

Adam Smith happened to go into his room while he was reading the above
letter, which he immediately showed him. Smith said to Hume that he was
sensible of how much he was weakening, and that appearances were in many
respects bad; yet, that his cheerfulness was so great and the spirit of
life still seemed to be so strong in him, that he could not keep from
entertaining some hopes.

Hume answered, "When I lie down in the evening I feel myself weaker than
when I arose in the morning; and when I rise in the morning, weaker than
when I lay down in the evening. I am sensible, besides, that some of my
vital parts are affected so that I must soon die."

"Well," said Mr. Smith, "if it must be so, you have at least the
satisfaction of leaving all your friends, and the members of your
brother's family in particular, in great prosperity."

He replied that he was so sensible of his situation that when he was
reading Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, among all the excuses which are
alleged to Charon for not entering readily into his boat, he could not
find one that fitted him. He had no house to finish; he had no daughter
to provide for; he had no enemies upon whom he wished to revenge
himself; "and I could not well," said he, "imagine what excuse I could
make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done everything
of consequence which I ever meant to do, and I could, at no time expect
to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in
which I am now likely to leave them; and I have, therefore, every reason
to die contented."

"Upon further consideration," said he, "I thought I might say to him,
'Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition.
Allow me a little time that I may see how the public receives the
alterations.' 'But,' Charon would answer, 'when you have seen the effect
of this, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no
end to such excuses; so, my honest friend, please step into the boat.'
'But,' I might still urge, 'have a little patience, good Charon; I have
been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public; if I live a few years
longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of
the prevailing systems of superstition.' And Charon would then lose all
temper and decency, and would cry out, 'You loitering rogue, that will
not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a
lease for so long a time? Get into the boat this instant.'"

To the Comtesse de Boufflers, the dying man, with the perfect serenity
that springs from an honest and loving life, writes:

"I see death approach gradually without any anxiety or regret.... I
salute you with great affection and regard, for the last time."

On the 25th of August, 1776, the philosopher, the historian, the
infidel, the honest man, and a benefactor of his race, in the composure
born of a noble life, passed quietly and panglessly away.

Dr. Black wrote the following account of his death:

"Monday, 26 August, 1776.

"Dear Sir: Yesterday, about four o'clock in the afternoon, Mr. Hume
expired. The near approach of his death became evident on the evening
between Thursday and Friday, when his disease became exhaustive, and
soon weakened him so much that he could no longer rise from his bed.
He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain
or feeling of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of
impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him,
always did it with affection and tenderness.... When he became very
weak, it cost him an effort to speak, and he died in such happy
composure of mind that nothing could exceed it."

Dr. Cullen writes Dr. Hunter on the 17th of September, 1776, from which
the following extracts are made:

"You desire an account of Mr. Hume's last days, and I give it to you
with great pleasure.... It was truly an example _des grands hommes qui
sont morts en plaisantant_; and to me, who have been so often shocked
with the horrors of superstition, the reflection on such a death is
truly agreeable. For many weeks before his death he was very sensible
of his gradual decay; and his answer to inquiries after his health was,
several times, that he was going as fast as his enemies could wish, and
as easily as his friends could desire. He passed most of the time in his
drawing-room, admitting the visits of his friends, and with his usual
spirit conversed with them upon literature and politics and whatever
else was started. In conversation he seemed to be perfectly at ease;
and to the last abounded with that pleasantry and those curious and
entertaining anecdotes which ever distinguished him.... His senses and
judgment did not fail him to the last hour of his life. He constantly
discovered a strong sensibility of the attention and care of his
friends; and midst great uneasiness and languor never betrayed any
peevishness or impatience." (Here follows the conversation with Charon.)
"These are a few particulars which may, perhaps, appear trivial; but to
me, no particulars seem trivial which relate to so great a man. It is
perhaps from trifles that we can best distinguish the tranquilness and
cheerfulness of the philosopher at a time when the most part of mankind
are under disquiet, and sometimes even horror. I consider the sacrifice
of the cock as a more certain evidence of the tranquillity of Socrates
than his discourse on immortality."

The Christians took it for granted that this serene and placid man died
filled with remorse for having given his real opinions, and proceeded to
describe, with every incident and detail of horror, the terrors of his
last moments. Brainless clergymen, incapable of understanding what Hume
had written, knowing only in a general way that he had held their creeds
in contempt, answered his arguments by maligning his character.

Christians took it for granted that he died in horror and recounted the
terrible scenes.

When the facts of his death became generally known to intelligent men,
the ministers redoubled their efforts to maintain the old calumnies,
and most of them are in this employment even unto this day. Finding it
impossible to tell enough falsehoods to hide the truth, a few of the
more intelligent among the priests admitted that Hume not only died
without showing any particular fear, but was guilty of unbecoming
levity. The first charge was that he died like a coward; the next that
he did not care enough, and went through the shadowy doors of the
dread unknown with a smile upon his lips. The dying smile of David Hume
scandalized the believers in a God of love. They felt shocked to see
a man dying without fear who denied the miracles of the Bible; who had
spent a life investigating the opinions of men; in endeavoring to prove
to the world that the right way is the best way; that happiness is
a real and substantial good, and that virtue is not a termagant with
sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.

Christians hated to admit that a philosopher had died serenely without
the aid of superstition—one who had taught that man could not make God
happy by making himself miserable, and that a useful life, after all,
was the best possible religion. They imagined that death would fill such
a man with remorse and terror. He had never persecuted his fellow-men
for the honor of God, and must needs die in despair. They were mistaken.

He died as he had lived. Like a peaceful river with green and shaded
banks he passed, without a murmur, into that waveless sea where life at
last is rest.

Benedict Spinoza

ONE of the greatest thinkers was Benedict Spinoza, a Jew, born at
Amsterdam, in 1632. He studied medicine and afterward theology. He
endeavored to understand what he studied. In theology he necessarily
failed. Theology is not intended to be understood,—it is only to be
believed. It is an act, not of reason, but of faith. Spinoza put to the
rabbis so many questions, and so persistently asked for reasons, that
he became the most troublesome of students. When the rabbis found
it impossible to answer the questions, they concluded to silence the
questioner. He was tried, found guilty, and excommunicated from the
synagogue.

By the terrible curse of the Jewish religion, he was made an outcast
from every Jewish home. His father could not give him shelter. His
mother could not give him bread—could not speak to him, without
becoming an outcast herself. All the cruelty of Jehovah, all the
infamy of the Old Testament, was in this curse. In the darkness of the
synagogue the rabbis lighted their torches, and while pronouncing the
curse, extinguished them in blood, imploring God that in like manner the
soul of Benedict Spinoza might be extinguished.

Spinoza was but twenty-four years old when he found himself without
kindred, without friends, surrounded only by enemies. He uttered no
complaint.

He earned his bread with willing hands, and cheerfully divided his crust
with those still poorer than himself.

He tried to solve the problem of existence. To him, the universe was
One. The Infinite embraced the All. The All was God. According to his
belief, the universe did not commence to be. It is; from eternity it
was; to eternity it will be.

He was right. The universe is all there is, or was, or will be. It is
both subject and object, contemplator and contemplated, creator and
created, destroyer and destroyed, preserver and preserved, and hath
within itself all causes, modes, motions and effects.

In this there is hope. This is a foundation and a star. The Infinite
is the All. Without the All, the Infinite cannot be. I am something.
Without me, the Infinite cannot exist.

Spinoza was a naturalist—that is to say, a pantheist. He took the
ground that the supernatural is, and forever will be, an infinite
impossibility. His propositions are luminous as stars, and each of his
demonstrations is a Gibraltar, behind which logic sits and smiles at all
the sophistries of superstition.

Spinoza has been hated because he has not been answered. He was a
real republican. He regarded the people as the true and only source of
political power. He put the state above the church, the people above
the priest. He believed in the absolute liberty of worship, thought and
speech. In every relation of life he was just, true, gentle, patient,
modest and loving. He respected the rights of others, and endeavored to
enjoy his own, and yet he brought upon himself the hatred of the Jewish
and the Christian world. In his day, logic was blasphemy, and to think
was the unpardonable sin. The priest hated the philosopher, revelation
reviled reason, and faith was the sworn foe of every fact.

Spinoza was a philosopher, a philanthropist. He lived in a world of his
own. He avoided men. His life was an intellectual solitude. He was a
mental hermit. Only in his own brain he found the liberty he loved. And
yet the rabbis and the priests, the ignorant zealot and the cruel bigot,
feeling that this quiet, thoughtful, modest man was in some way forging
weapons to be used against the church, hated him with all their hearts.

He did not retaliate. He found excuses for their acts. Their ignorance,
their malice, their misguided and revengeful zeal excited only pity in
his breast. He injured no man. He did not live on alms. He was poor—and
yet, with the wealth of his brain, he enriched the world. On Sunday,
February 21, 1677, Spinoza, one of the greatest and subtlest of
metaphysicians—one of the noblest and purest of human beings,—at the
age of forty-four, passed tranquilly away; and notwithstanding the curse
of the synagogue under which he had lived and most lovingly labored,
death left upon his lips the smile of perfect peace.

Our Infidels

IN our country there were three infidels—Paine, Franklin and Jefferson.
The colonies were filled with superstition, the Puritans with the spirit
of persecution. Laws savage, ignorant and malignant had been passed in
every colony, for the purpose of destroying intellectual liberty.
Mental freedom was absolutely unknown. The Toleration Acts of
Maryland tolerated only Christians—not infidels, not thinkers, not
investigators. The charity of Roger Williams was not extended to those
who denied the Bible, or suspected the divinity of Christ. It was not
based upon the rights of man, but upon the rights of believers, who
differed in non-essential points.

The moment the colonies began to deny the rights of the king they
suspected the power of the priest. In digging down to find an excuse for
fighting George the Third, they unwittingly undermined the church. They
went through the Revolution together. They found that all denominations
fought equally well. They also found that persons without religion had
patriotism and courage, and were willing to die that a new nation might
be born. As a matter of fact the pulpit was not in hearty sympathy with
our fathers. Many priests were imprisoned because they would not pray
for the Continental Congress. After victory had enriched our standard,
and it became necessary to make a constitution—to establish a
government—the infidels—the men like Paine, like Jefferson, and
like Franklin, saw that the church must be left out; that a government
deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed could make no
contract with a church pretending to derive its powers from an infinite
God.

By the efforts of these infidels, the name of God was left out of the
Constitution of the United States. They knew that if an infinite being
was put in, no room would be left for the people. They knew that if
any church was made the mistress of the state, that mistress, like all
others, would corrupt, weaken, and destroy. Washington wished a church
established by law in Virginia. He was prevented by Thomas Jefferson. It
was only a little while ago that people were compelled to attend church
by law in the Eastern States, and taxes were raised for the support of
churches the same as for the construction of highways and bridges. The
great principle enunciated in the Constitution has silently repealed
most of these laws. In the presence of this great instrument, the
constitutions of the States grew small and mean, and in a few years
every law that puts a chain upon the mind, except in Delaware, will be
repealed, and for these our children may thank the Infidels of 1776.

The church never has pretended that Jefferson or Franklin died in fear.
Franklin wrote no books against the fables of the ancient Jews. He
thought it useless to cast the pearls of thought before the swine of
ignorance and fear. Jefferson was a statesman. He was the father of a
great party. He gave his views in letters and to trusted friends. He
was a Virginian, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of a
university, father of a political party, President of the United
States, a statesman and philosopher. He was too powerful for the divided
churches of his day. Paine was a foreigner, a citizen of the world. He
had attacked Washington and the Bible. He had done these things openly,
and what he had said could not be answered. His arguments were so good
that his character was bad.

Thomas Paine

THOMAS PAINE was born in Thetford, England. He came from the common
people. At the age of thirty-seven he left England for America. He
was the first to perceive the destiny of the New World. He wrote the
pamphlet "Common Sense," and in a few months the Continental Congress
declared the colonies free and independent States—a new nation was
born. Paine having aroused the spirit of independence, gave every energy
of his soul to keep the spirit alive. He was with the army. He shared
its defeats and its glory. When the situation became desperate, he gave
them "The Crisis." It was a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night,
leading the way to freedom, honor, and to victory.

The writings of Paine are gemmed with compact statements that carry
conviction to the dullest. Day and night he labored for America, until
there was a government of the people and for the people. At the close
of the Revolution, no one stood higher than Thomas Paine. Had he been
willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least
could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there
would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled
with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a
hypocritical monument covered with lies.

Having done so much for man in America, he went to France. The seeds
sown by the great infidels were bearing fruit in Europe. The eighteenth
century was crowning its gray hairs with the wreath of progress.
Upon his arrival in France he was elected a member of the French
Convention—in fact, he was selected about the same time by the people
of no less than four Departments. He was one of the committee to draft
a constitution for France. In the Assembly, where nearly all were
demanding the execution of the king, he had the courage to vote against
death. To vote against the death of the king was to vote against his own
life. This was the sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he
was arrested, imprisoned, and doomed to death. While under sentence of
death, while in the gloomy cell of his prison, Thomas Paine wrote to
Washington, asking him to say one word to Robespierre in favor of the
author of "Common Sense." Washington did not reply. He wrote again.
Washington, the President, paid no attention to Thomas Paine, the
prisoner. The letter was thrown into the wastebasket of forgetfulness,
and Thomas Paine remained condemned to death. Afterward he gave his
opinion of Washington at length, and I must say, that I have never found
it in my heart to greatly blame him.

Thomas Paine, having done so much for political liberty, turned his
attention to the superstitions of his age. He published "The Age of
Reason;" and from that day to this, his character has been maligned by
almost every priest in Christendom. He has been held up as the terrible
example. Every man who has expressed an honest thought, has been
warningly referred to Thomas Paine. All his services were forgotten. No
kind word fell from any pulpit. His devotion to principle, his zeal for
human rights, were no longer remembered. Paine simply took the ground
that it is a contradiction to call a thing a revelation that comes to us
second-hand. There can be no revelation beyond the first communication.
All after that is hearsay. He also showed that the prophecies of the Old
Testament had no relation whatever to Jesus Christ, and contended that
Jesus Christ was simply a man. In other words, Paine was an enlightened
Unitarian. Paine thought the Old Testament too barbarous to have been
the work of an infinitely benevolent God. He attacked the doctrine that
salvation depends upon belief. He insisted that every man has the right
to think.

After the publication of these views every falsehood that malignity
could coin and malice pass was given to the world. On his return to
America, after the election to the presidency of another infidel, Thomas
Jefferson, it was not safe for him to appear in the public streets. He
was in danger of being mobbed. Under the very flag he had helped to put
in heaven his rights were not respected. Under the Constitution that he
had suggested, his life was insecure. He had helped to give liberty to
more than three millions of his fellow-citizens, and they were willing
to deny it unto him. He was deserted, ostracized, shunned, maligned, and
cursed. He enjoyed the seclusion of a leper; but he maintained through
it all his integrity. He stood by the convictions of his mind. Never for
one moment did he hesitate or waver.

He died almost alone. The moment he died Christians commenced
manufacturing horrors for his death-bed. They had his chamber filled
with devils rattling chains, and these ancient lies are annually
certified to by the respectable Christians of the present day. The truth
is, he died as he had lived. Some ministers were impolite enough to
visit him against his will. Several of them he ordered from his room.
A couple of Catholic priests, in all the meekness of hypocrisy, called
that they might enjoy the agonies of a dying friend of man. Thomas
Paine, rising in his bed, the few embers of expiring life blown into
flame by the breath of indignation, had the goodness to curse them both.
His physician, who seems to have been a meddling fool, just as the cold
hand of death was touching the patriot's heart, whispered in the dull
ear of the dying man: "Do you believe, or do you wish to believe, that
Jesus Christ is the son of God?" And the reply was: "I have no wish to
believe on that subject."

These were the last remembered words of Thomas Paine. He died as
serenely as ever Christian passed away. He died in the full possession
of his mind, and on the very brink and edge of death proclaimed the
doctrines of his life.

Every Christian, every philanthropist, every believer in human liberty,
should feel under obligation to Thomas Paine for the splendid service
rendered by him in the darkest days of the American Revolution. In the
midnight of Valley Forge, "The Crisis" was the first star that glittered
in the wide horizon of despair. Every good man should remember
with gratitude the brave words spoken by Thomas Paine in the French
Convention against the death of Louis. He said: "We will kill the king,
but not the man. We will destroy monarchy, not the monarch."

Thomas Paine was a champion, in both hemispheres, of human liberty; one
of the founders and fathers of this Republic; one of the foremost men of
his age. He never wrote a word in favor of injustice. He was a despiser
of slavery. He abhorred tyranny in every form. He was, in the widest and
best sense, a friend of all his race. His head was as clear as his heart
was good, and he had the courage to speak his honest thought.

He was the first man to write these words: "The United States of
America." He proposed the present Federal Constitution. He furnished
every thought that now glitters in the Declaration of Independence.

He believed in one God and no more. He was a believer even in special
providence, and he hoped for immortality.

How can the world abhor the man who said:

"I believe in the equality of man, and that religious duties consist
in doing justice, in loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy."—

"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to
himself."—

"The word of God is the creation which we behold."—

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."—

"My opinion is, that those whose lives have been spent in doing good
and endeavoring to make their fellow-mortals happy, will be happy
hereafter."—

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."—

"I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this
life."—

"Man has no property in man"—and "The key of heaven is not in the
keeping of any sect!"

Had it not been for Thomas Paine I could not deliver this lecture here
to-night..

It is still fashionable to calumniate this man—and yet Channing,
Theodore Parker, Longfellow, Emerson, and in fact all the liberal
Unitarians and Universalists of the world have adopted the opinions of
Thomas Paine.

Let us compare these Infidels with the Christians of their time:

Compare Julian with Constantine,—the murderer of his wife,—the
murderer of his son,—and who established Christianity with the same
sword he had wet with their blood. Compare him with all the Christian
emperors—with all the robbers and murderers and thieves—the parricides
and fratricides and matricides that ever wore the imperial purple on the
banks of the Tiber or the shores of the Bosphorus.

Let us compare Bruno with the Christians who burned him; and we will
compare Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Jefferson, Paine—with the men
who it is claimed have been the visible representatives of God.

Let it be remembered that the popes have committed every crime of which
human nature is capable, and that not one of them was the friend of
intellectual liberty—that not one of them ever shed one ray of light.

Let us compare these Infidels with the founders of sectarian churches;
you will see how narrow, how bigoted, how cruel were their founders, and
how broad, how generous, how noble, were these infidels.

Let us be honest. The great effort of the human mind is to ascertain the
order of facts by which we are surrounded—the history of things.

Who has accomplished the most in this direction—the church, or
the unbelievers? Upon one side write all that the church has
discovered—every phenomenon that has been explained by a creed, every
new fact in Nature that has been discovered by a church, and on the
other side write the discoveries of Humboldt, and the observations and
demonstrations of Darwin!

Who has made Germany famous—her priests, or her scientists?

Goethe.

Kant: That immortal man who said: "Whoever thinks that he can please
God in any way except by discharging his obligations to his fellows, is
superstitious."

And that greatest and bravest of thinkers, Ernst

Haeckel.

Humboldt.

Italy:—Mazzini. Garibaldi.

In France who are and were the friends of freedom—the Catholic priests,
or Renan? the bishops, or Gambetta?—Dupanloup, or Victor Hugo?

Michelet—Taine—Auguste Comte.

England:—Let us compare her priests with John Stuart Mill,—Harriet
Martineau, that "free rover on the breezy common of the
universe."—George Eliot—with Huxley and Tyndall, with Holyoake and
Harrison—and above and over all—with Charles Darwin.

Conclusion

LET us be honest. 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 the 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 Paine?—as much for
science as Charles Darwin?

What would the world be if infidels had never been?

The infidels have been the brave and thoughtful men; the flower of all
the world; the pioneers and heralds of the blessed day of liberty and
love; the generous spirits of the unworthy past; the seers and
prophets of our race; the great chivalric souls, proud victors on the
battlefields of thought, the creditors of all the years to be.

Why should it be taken for granted that the men who devoted their lives
to the liberation of their fellow-men should have been hissed at in
the hour of death by the snakes of conscience, while men who defended
slavery, practiced polygamy, justified the stealing of babes from
the breasts of mothers, and lashed the naked back of unpaid labor are
supposed to have passed smilingly from earth to the embraces of the
angels? Why should we think that the brave thinkers, the investigators,
the honest men, must have left the crumbling shore of time in dread
and fear, while the instigators of the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the
inventors and users of thumbscrews, of iron boots and racks; the burners
and tearers of human flesh; the stealers, the whippers and the enslavers
of men; the buyers and beaters of maidens, mothers, and babes; the
founders of the Inquisition; the makers of chains; the builders of
dungeons; the calumniators of the living; the slanderers of the
dead, and even the murderers of Jesus Christ, all died in the odor of
sanctity, with white, forgiven hands folded upon the breasts of peace,
while the destroyers of prejudice, the apostles of humanity, the
soldiers of liberty, the breakers of fetters, the creators of light,
died surrounded by the fierce fiends of God?
