The church has today $600,000,000 or $700,000,000 of property in this
country. It must cost $2,000,000 a week, that is to say $500 a minute,
to run these churches. You give me this money and if I don't do more
good with it than four times as many churches I'll resign. Let them
make the churches attractive and they'll get more hearers. They will
have less empty pews if they have less empty heads in the pulpit. The
time will come when the preacher will become a teacher.
Admitting that the bible is the book of God, is that His only good job?
Will not a man be damned as quick for denying the equator as denying
the bible? Will he not be damned as quick for denying geology as for
denying the scheme of salvation? When the bible was first written it
was not believed. Had they known as much about science as we know now
that bible would not have been written.
Col. Ingersoll next gave his views of the Puritans, declared they left
Holland to escape persecution and came came here to persecute others.
He referred to the persecutions heaped upon those of other religious
belief by the Puritans, paid the Catholics the compliment to say that
Maryland, which they ruled, was the first colony to enact a law
tolerating religious views not held by themselves, and went on to
explain that God was never mentioned in the constitution of the United
States because each colony had a different religious belief, and each
sect preferred to have God not mentioned at all than to having another
religious belief than their own recognized.
"In 1876," said the speaker, "our forefathers retired God from
politics. They said all power comes from the people. They kept God out
of the constitution and allowed each state to settle the question for
itself."
The present laws of different states were neatly reviewed, so far as
they relate to the prevention of infidels giving testimony and to
religious intolerance in any way, and these features were all branded
and discussed as a gigantic evil.
The lecture was attentively listened to by the immense audience from
beginning to the end, and the speaker's most blasphemous fights were
the most loudly applauded.