Ladies and Gentlemen: In the first place, allow me to tender my sincere
thanks to the clergy of this city. I feel that I am greatly indebted
to them for this magnificent audience. It has been said, and I believe
it myself, that there is a vast amount of intolerance in the church of
today, but when twenty-four clergymen, three of whom, I believe, are
bishops, act as my advance agents, without expecting any remuneration,
or reward in this world, I must admit that perhaps I was mistaken on
the question of intolerance. And I will say, further, that against
those men I have not the slightest feeling in the world; every man is
the product of his own surroundings; he is the product of every
circumstance that has ever touched him; he is the product to a certain
degree of the religion and creed of his day, and when men show the
slightest intolerance I blame the creed, I blame the religion, I blame
the superstition that forced them to do so. I do not blame those men.
Allow me to say, further, that this world is not, in my judgment, yet
perfect. I am doing, in a very feeble way, to be sure, but I am still
endeavoring, according to my Idea, to make this world just a little
better; to give a little more liberty to men, a little more liberty to
women. I believe in the government of kindness; I believe in truth, in
investigation, in free thought. I do not believe that the hand of want
will be eternally extended in the world; I do not believe that the
prison will forever scar the ground; I do not believe that the shadow
of the gallows will forever curse the earth; I do not believe that it
will always be true that the men who do the most work will have the
least to wear and the least to eat. I do believe that the time will
come when liberty and morality and justice, like the rings of Saturn,
will surround the world; that the world will be better, and every true
man and every free man will do what he can to hasten the coming of the
religion of human advancement.
I understand that for the thousands and thousands of years that have
gone by, all questions have been settled by religion. I understand
that during all this time the people have gotten their information from
the sacerdotal class--from priests. I know that when India was supreme
they worshipped Brahma and Vishnu, and that when Rome held in its hand
the red sword of war they worshipped Jove, and I know now that our
religion has swept to the top. Any man living in India a few hundred
or thousand years ago would have said, this is the only true religion.
Why? Because here is the only true civilization. A man afterward
living in Egypt would have said, this is the only true religion,
because we have the best civilization; a Greek in Athens would have
said this is the only true religion, and a Roman would have said we
have the true religion, and now those religions all having died,
although they were all true religions, we say ours is the only
religion, because we are the greatest commercial nation in the world.
There will come other nations; there will come other religions. Man has
made every religion in this world, in my judgment, and the religion,
has been good or bad according as the men who made it were good or bad.
If they were savages and barbarians, they made a God like the Jehovah
of the Jews; if they were civilized, if they were kind and tender, they
filled the heavens with kindness and love. Every man makes his own
God. Show me the God a man worships, and I will tell you what kind of a
man he is. Every one makes his own God, every one worships his own
God; and if you are a civilized man you will have a civilized God, and
we have been civilizing ours for hundreds and hundreds of years. He is
getting better every day.
I am going to tell you tonight just exactly what I think. The other
lecture I delivered here was my conservative lecture; this is my
radical one! We even hear it suggested that our religion, our Bible,
has given us all we have of prosperity and greatness and grandeur. I
deny it! We have become civilized in spite of it, and I will show you
tonight that the obstruction that every science has had is what we have
been pleased to call our religion--or superstition. I had a
conversation with a gentleman once--and these gentlemen are always
mistaking something that goes along with a thing for the cause of the
thing--and he stated to me that his particular religion was the cause
of all advancement. I said to him: "No, Sir; the causes of all
advancement, in my judgment, are plug hats and suspenders." And I said
to him: "You go to Turkey, where they are semi-barbarians, and you
won't find a pair of suspenders or a plug hat in all that country; you
go to Russia, and you will find now and then a pair of suspenders at
Moscow or St. Petersburg; you go on down till you strike Austria, and
black hats begin; then you go on to Paris, Berlin and New York, and you
will find everybody wears suspenders and everybody wears black hats.
Wherever you find education and music there you will find black hats
and suspenders." He said that any man who said to him that plug hats
and suspenders had done more for mankind than the Bible and religion he
would not talk to.
As a matter of fact, we are controlled today by men who do not exist.
We are controlled today by phenomena that never did exist. We are
controlled by ghosts and dead men, and in the grasp of death is a
scepter that controls the living present. I propose that we shall
govern ourselves! I propose that we shall let the past go, and let the
dead past bury the dead past. I believe the American people have
brains enough, and nerve enough, and courage enough, to control and
govern themselves, without any assistance from dust or ghosts. That is
my doctrine, and I am going to do what I can while I live to increase
that feeling of independence and manhood in the American people.--We
can control ourselves. I believe in the gospel of this world; I
believe in happiness right here; I do not believe in drinking skim milk
all my life with the expectation of butter beyond the clouds. I
believe in the gospel, I say, in this world. This is a mighty good
world. There are plenty of good people in this world. There is lots
of happiness in this world and, I say, let us, in every way we can,
increase it. I envy every man who is content with his lot, whether he
is poor or whether he is rich. I tell you, the man that tries to make
somebody else happy, and who owns his own soul, nobody having a
mortgage or deed of trust upon his manhood or liberty--this world is a
pretty good world for such a man. I do not care: I am going to say my
say, whether I make money or grow poor; no matter whether I get high
office or walk along the dusty highway of the common. I am going to
say my say, and I had rather be a farmer and live on forty acres of
land--live in a log cabin that I built myself, and have a little grassy
path going down to the spring, so that I can go there and hear the
waters gurgling, and know that it is coming out from the lips of the
earth, like a poem, whispering to the white pebbles--I would rather
live there, and have some hollyhocks at the corner of the house, and
the larks singing and swinging in the trees, and some lattice over the
window, so that the sunlight can fall checkered on the babe in the
cradle. I had rather live there, and have the freedom of my own brain;
I had rather do that than live in a palace of gold, and crawl, a slimy
hypocrite, through this world. Superstition has done enough harm
already; every religion, nearly, suspects everything that is pleasant,
everything that is joyous, and they always have a notion that God feels
best when we feel worst. They have chained the Andromeda of joy to the
cold rock of ignorance and fear, there to be devoured by the dragon of
superstition. Church and State are two vultures that have fed upon the
heart of chained Prometheus. I say, let the human race have a chance
let every man think for himself and express that thought. There is no
wrath in the serene heavens; there is no scowl in the blue of the sky.
Upon the throne of the universe tyranny does not sit as a king.
The speaker here took from his pocket a pair of spectacles, and
adjusted them, saying: I am sorry to admit it; I have got to come to
it. I hate to put on a pair of spectacles, but the other day, as I was
putting them on, a thought struck me. I see progress in this. To
progress is to overcome the obstacles of nature, and in order to
overcome this obstacle of the loss of sight man invented spectacles.
Spectacles led men to the telescope, with which he read all the starry
heavens; and had it not been for the failure of sight we wouldn't have
seen a millionth part that we have. In the first place, we owe nothing
but truth to the dead. I am going to tell the truth about them. There
are three theories by which men account for all phenomena--for
everything that happens: First, the supernatural. In the olden time,
everything that happened some deity produced, some spirit, some devil,
some hobgoblin, some dryad, some fairy, some spook, something except
nature. First, then, the supernatural; and a barbarian, looking at the
wide, mysterious sea, wandering through the depths of the forest,
encountering the wild beasts, troubled by strange dreams, accounted for
everything by the action of spirits, good and bad. Second, the
supernatural and natural. There is where the religious world is
today--a mingling of the supernatural and natural, the idea being that
God created the world and imposed upon men certain laws, and then let
them run, and if they ever got into any trouble then he would do a
miracle, and accomplish any good that he desired to do. Third--and
that is the grand theory--the natural. Between these theories there
has been from the dawn of civilization a conflict. In this great war
nearly all the soldiers have been in the ranks of the supernatural.
The believers in the supernatural insist that matter is controlled and
directed entirely by powers from without. The naturalists maintain
that nature acts from within; that nature is not acted upon; that the
universe is all there is; that nature, with infinite arms, embraces
everything that exists, and that the supposed powers beyond the limits
of the materially real are simply ghosts.
You say, ah! this is materialism! this is the doctrine of matter! What
is matter? I take a handful of earth in my hands, and into that dust I
put seeds, and arrows from the eternal quiver of the sun smite it, and
the seeds grow and bud and blossom, and fill the air with perfume in my
sight. Do you understand that? Do you understand how this dust and
these seeds and that light and this moisture produced that bud and that
flower and that perfume? Do you understand that any better than you do
the production of thought? Do you understand that any better than you
do a dream? Do you understand that any better than you do the thoughts
of love that you see in the eyes of the one you adore? Can you explain
it? Can you tell what matter is? Have you the slightest conception?
Yet you talk about matter as though you were acquainted with its
origin; as though you had compelled, with clenched hands, the very
rocks to give up the secret of existence? Do you know what force is?
Can you account for molecular action? Are you familiar with chemistry?
Can you account for the loves and the hatreds of the atoms? Is there
not something in matter that forever excludes you? Can you tell what
matter really is? Before you cry materialism, you had better find what
matter is. Can you tell of anything without a material basis? Is it
possible to imagine the annihilation of a single atom? Is it possible
for you to conceive of the creation of a single atom? Can you have a
thought that is not suggested to you by what you call matter? Did any
man or woman or child ever have a solitary thought, dream or
conception, that was not suggested to them by something they had seen
in nature? Can you conceive of anything the different parts of which
have been suggested to you by nature? You can conceive of an animal
with the hoofs of a bison, with the pouch of a kangaroo, with the head
of a buffalo, with the tail of a lion, with the scales of a fish, with
the wings of a bird, and yet every part of this impossible monster has
been suggested to you by nature. You say time, therefore you can think
eternity. You say pain, therefore you can think hell. You say
strength, therefore you can think omnipotence. You say wisdom,
therefore you can think infinite wisdom. Everything you see, everything
you can dream of or think of, has been suggested to you by your
surroundings, by nature. Man cannot rise above nature; below nature
man cannot fall. Imagine, if you please, the creation of a single
atom. Can any one here imagine the creation out of nothing of one
atom? Can any one here imagine the destruction of one atom? Can you
imagine an atom being changed to nothing? Can you imagine nothing
being changed to an atom? There is not a solitary person here with an
imagination strong enough to think either of the creation of an atom or
of the annihilation of an atom.
Matter and the universe are the same yesterday, today and forever.
There is just as much matter in the universe today as there ever was,
and as there ever will be; there is just as much force and just as much
energy as there ever was or ever will be; but it is continually taking
different shapes and forms; one day it is a man, another day it is
animal, another day it is earth, another day it is metal, another day
it is gas, it gains nothing and it loses nothing. Our fathers
denounced materialism and accounted for all phenomena how? By the
caprice of gods and devils. For thousands of years it was believed
that ghosts, good ghosts, bad ghosts, benevolent and malevolent, in
some mysterious way produced all phenomena; that disease and health,
happiness and misery, fortune and misfortune, peace and war, life and
death, success and failure, were but arrows shot by those ghosts or
shadowy phantoms, to reward or punish mankind; that they were
displeased or pleased by our actions, that they blessed the earth with
harvest or cursed it with famine; that they fed or starved the children
of men; that they crowned or uncrowned kings; that they controlled war;
that they gave prosperous voyages, allowing the brave mariner to meet
his wife and children inside the harbor bar, or strewed the sad shore
with wrecks of ships and the bodies of men. Formerly these ghosts were
believed to be almost innumerable. Earth, air and water were filled
with these phantoms, but in modern times they have greatly decreased in
number, because the second proposition that I stated, the supernatural
and the natural, has generally been adopted, but the remaining ghosts
are supposed to perform the same functions as of yore.
Let me say right here that the object of every religion ever made by
man has been to get on the good side of supposed powers; has been to
petition the gods to stop the earthquakes, to stop famine, to stop
pestilence. It has always been something that man should do to prevent
being punished by the powers of the air or to get from them some
favors. It has always been believed that these ghosts could in some way
be appeased; that they could be bettered by sacrifices, by prayer, by
fasting, by the building of temples and cathedrals, by shedding the
blood of men and beasts, by forms, by ceremonies, by kneelings, by
prostrations and flagellations, by living alone in the wild desert, by
the practice of celibacy, by inventing instruments of torture, by
destroying men, women and children, by covering the earth with
dungeons, by burning unbelievers and by putting chains upon the
thoughts and manacles upon the lips of men, by believing things without
evidence, by believing things against evidence, by disbelieving and
denying demonstrations, by despising facts, by hating reason, by
discouraging investigation, by making an idiot of yourself--all these
have been done to appease the winged monsters of the air.
In the history of our poor world no horror has been omitted, no infamy
has been left undone by believers in ghosts, and all the shadows were
born of cowardice and malignity; they were painted by the pencil of
fear upon the canvas of ignorance by that artist called Superstition.
From these ghosts our fathers received their information. These ghosts
were the schoolmasters of our ancestors. They were the scientists, the
philosophers, the geologists, the legislators, the astronomers, the
physicians, the metaphysicians and historians of the past.
Let me give you my definition of metaphysics, that is to say, the
science of the unknown, the science of guessing. Metaphysics is where
two fools get together, and each one admits that neither can prove, and
both say, "Hence we infer." That is the science of metaphysics. For
this these ghosts were supposed to have the only experience and real
knowledge; they inspired men to write books, and the books were sacred.
If facts were found to be inconsistent with these books, so much the
worse for the facts, and especially for the discoverers of these facts.
It was then and still is believed that these sacred books are the basis
of the idea of immortality, to give up the idea that these books were
inspired is and to renounce the idea of immortal life. I deny it! Men
existed before books; and all the books that were ever written were
written, in my judgment, by men, and the idea of immortality was not
born of a book, but was born of the man who wrote the book. The idea
of immortality, like the great sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human
heart, beating its countless waves of hope and joy against the shores
of time, and was not born of any book, nor of any religion, nor of any
creed; it was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and
flow beneath the clouds and mists of doubt and darkness as long as love
kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow of hope shining upon the
tears of grief. We love, therefore we wish to live, and the foundation
of the idea of immortality is human affection and human love, and I
have a thousand times more confidence in the affections of the human
heart, in the deep and splendid feelings of the human soul than I have
in any book that ever was or ever can be written by mortal man.
From the books written by those ghosts we have at least ascertained
that they knew nothing whatever of the world in which we live. Did they
know anything about any other? Upon every point where contradiction is
possible, the ghosts have been contradicted. By these ghosts, by these
citizens of the air, by this aristocracy of the clouds the affairs of
government were administered all authority to govern came from them.
The emperors, kings and potentates, every one of them, had the divine
petroleum poured upon his head, the kerosene of authority.
The emperors, king and potentates had communications from the phantoms.
Man was not considered as the source of power; to rebel against the
king was to rebel against the ghosts, and nothing less than the blood
of the offenders could appease the invisible phantoms and by the
authority of the ghosts man was crushed and slayed and plundered. Many
toiled wearily in the sun and storm that a few favorites of the ghosts
might live in idleness, and many lived in huts and caves and dens that
the few might dwell in palaces, and many clothed themselves with rags
that a few might robe themselves in purple and gold, and many crept and
cringed and crawled that a few might tread upon their necks with feet
of iron. From the ghosts men received not only authority but
information. They told us the form of the earth; they informed us that
eclipses were caused by the sins of man, especially the failure to pay
tithes that the universe was made in six days; that gazing at the sky
with a telescope was dangerous; that trying to be wise beyond what they
had written was born of a rebellious and irreverent spirit; they told
us there was no virtue like belief; no crime like doubt, that
investigation was simply impudence, and the punishment therefore
violent torment; they not only told us all about this world but about
two others, and if their statements about the other two are as true as
they were about this, no one can estimate the value of their
information.
For countless ages the world was governed by ghosts, and they spared no
pains to change the eagle of the human intellect into a bat of
darkness. To accomplish this infamous purpose, to drive the love of
truth from the human heart; to prevent the advancement of mankind to
shut out from the world every ray of intellectual light to pollute
every mind with superstition, the power of kings, the cunning and
cruelty of priests, and the wealth of nations were used.
In order to show you the information we got from the ghosts, and the
condition of the world when the ghosts were the kings, let me call your
attention to this: During these years of persecution, ignorance,
superstition and slavery, nearly all the people, the kings, lawyers and
doctors, learned and unlearned, believed in that frightful production
of ignorance, of fear and faith, called witchcraft. Witchcraft today
is religion carried out. They believed that man was the sport and prey
of devils; that the very air was thick with these enemies of man, and,
with few exceptions, this hideous belief was universal. Under these
conditions progress was almost impossible. Fear paralyzed the brain.
Progress is born of courage. Fear believes, courage doubts. Fear
falls upon the earth and prays; courage stands erect and thinks. Fear
retreats; courage advances. Fear is barbarism, courage is
civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft; courage in science and in
eternal law. The facts upon which this terrible belief rested were
proved over and over again in nearly every court in Europe. Thousands
confessed themselves guilty, admitted they had sold themselves to the
devil. They gave the particulars of the sale; told what they said and
what the devil replied. They confessed themselves guilty when they
knew that confession was death; knew that their property would be
confiscated and their children left to beg their bread. This is one of
the miracles of history, one of the strangest contradictions of the
human mind. Without doubt they really believed themselves guilty.
In the first place, they believed in witchcraft as a fact, and when
charged with it, they became insane. They had read the account of the
witch of Endor calling up the dead body of Samuel. He is an old man; he
has his mantle on. They had read the account of Saul stooping to the
earth and conversing with the spirit that had been called from the
region of space by a witch. They had read a command from the Almighty,
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and they believed the world
was full of witches, or else the Almighty Would not have made a law
against them. They believed in witchcraft, and when they were charged
with it, they probably became insane, and in their insanity they
confessed their guilt. They found themselves abhorred and deserted,
charged with a crime they could not disprove. Like a man in quicksand,
every effort only sunk them deeper. Caught in this frightful web, at
the mercy of the devotees of superstition, hope fled and nothing
remained but the insanity of confession.
The whole world appeared insane. In the time of James I, a man was
burned for causing a storm at sea, with the intention of drowning one
of the royal family, but I do not think it would have been much of a
crime if he had been really guilty. How could he disprove it? How
could he show that he did not cause a storm at sea? All storms were at
that time supposed to be inspired by the devil; the people believed
that all storms were caused by him, or by persons whom he assisted. I
implore you to remember that the men who believed these things wrote
our creeds and our confessions of faith, and it is by their dust that I
am asked to kneel and pay implicit homage, instead of investigating;
and I implore you to recollect that they wrote our creeds.
A woman was tried and convicted before Sir Matthew Hale, one of the
greatest judges and lawyers of England, for having caused children to
vomit crooked pins. Think of that! The learned judge charged the
intelligent jury that there was no doubt as to the existence of
witches, that it was established by all history and expressly taught by
the Bible. The woman was hung and her body was burned. Sir Thomas
Moore declared that to give up witchcraft was to throw away the sacred
scriptures. John Wesley, too, was a firm believer in ghosts, and
insisted upon their existence after all laws upon the subject had been
repealed in England, and I beg of you to remember that John Wesley was
the founder of the Methodist Church. In New England a woman was
charged with being a witch and with having changed herself into a fox;
while in that condition she was attacked and bitten by some dogs, and a
committee of three men was ordered by the Court to examine this woman.
They removed her clothing, and searched for what they were pleased to
call witch-spots--that is to say, spots into which a needle could be
thrust without giving pain; they reported to the Court that such spots
were found. She denied that she had ever changed herself into a fox.
On the report of the committee she was found guilty, and she was
actually executed by our Puritan fathers, the gentlemen who braved the
danger of the deep for the sake of worshiping God and persecuting their
fellow men. I belong to their blood, and the best thing I can say
about them, and that which rises like a white shaft to their eternal
honor, is that they were in favor of education.
A man was attacked by a wolf; he defended himself and succeeded in
cutting off one of the animal's paws, and the wolf ran away; he put it
in his pocket and carried it home; there he found his wife with one of
her hands gone, and he took that paw from his pocket and put it upon
her arm, and it assumed the appearance of a human hand, and he charged
his wife with being a witch. She was tried, she confessed her guilt,
and she was hung and her body was burned! My! is it possible? Did not
somebody say something against such an infamous proceeding? Yes, they
did! There was a Young Men's Association who invited a man to come and
give his ideas upon the subject.
He denounced it. He said it was outrageous, that it was nonsensical,
that it was infamous and the moment he went away the young men met and
passed a resolution that he had deceived them; and the clergy at that
time protested and said, of course, let the man think, if you call that
kind of stuff thinking.
But there was one man belonging to this Association who had the courage
to stand by the truth.
Whether he believed in what the speaker said or not, he had that
manliness; and I take this opportunity to thank from the bottom of my
heart a man. I have no idea he agrees with me except in this: Whatever
you do, do it like a man and be honest about it.
People were burned for causing frost in summer; for destroying crops
with hail; for causing storms--for making cows go dry; for souring
beer; for putting the devil in emptyings so that they would not rise.
The life of no one was secure. To be charged was to be convicted.
Every man was at the mercy of every other. This infamous belief was so
firmly seated in the minds of the people, that, to express a doubt as
to its existence was to be suspected yourself. They believed that
animals were often taken possession of by devils, and they believed
that the killing of the animal would destroy the devil. They
absolutely tried, convicted and executed dumb beasts.
At Vail, in 1470, a rooster was tried upon the charge of having laid an
egg, and the clergy said they had no doubt of it. Rooster eggs were
used only in making witch-ointment. This everybody knew. The rooster
was convicted, and with all due solemnity, he was burned in the public
square.
So a hog and six pig died for having killed and partially eaten a
child. The hog was convicted, but the pigs, on account of their extreme
youth, were acquitted.
As late as 1740, a cow, charged with being possessed of a devil, was
tried and was convicted. They used to exorcise rats, snakes and
vermin; they used to go through the alleys and streets and fields and
warn them to leave within a certain number of days, and if they did not
leave, they threatened them with certain pains and penalties which they
proceeded to recount.
But let us be careful how we laugh about those things; let us not pride
ourselves too much on the progress of our age. We must not forget that
some of our people are yet in the same intelligent business. Only a
little while ago the Governor of Minnesota appointed a day of fasting
and prayer to see if the Lord could not be induced to kill the
grasshoppers--or send them into some other State.
About the close of the fifteenth century was the excitement in regard
to witchcraft, and Pope Innocent the Eighth issued a bull directing the
inquisitors to be vigilant in searching out and punishing all guilty of
this crime. Forms for the crime were regularly issued. For two
hundred and fifty years the church was busy in punishing the impossible
crime of witchcraft by burning, hanging and torturing men, women and
little children.
Protestants were as active as Catholics; and in Geneva five hundred
witches were burned at the stake in three months, and one thousand were
executed in one year in the diocese of Couro; at least one hundred
thousand victims suffered in Germany, the last execution being in
Galesburgh, and taking place in 1794, and the last in Switzerland,
1780. In England statutes were passed from Henry VI to James I,
defining the crime and punishment, and the last act passed in the
British Parliament was when Lord Bacon was a member of the house.
In 1716 Mrs. Hicks and daughter, nine years of age, were hung for
selling their souls to the devil; and raising a storm at sea by pulling
off their stockings and making a lather of soap. In England it has
been estimated that at least 30,000 were hung or burned. The last
victim executed in Scotland was 1722. She was an innocent old woman
who had so little idea of her condition, that she rejoiced at the sight
of the fire destined to consume her to ashes. She had a daughter, lame
in her hands, a circumstance accounted for from the fact that the witch
had been used to transfer her daughter into a pony and get her shod by
the devil! Intelligent ancestors!
In 1692 nineteen persons were executed in Salem, Massachusetts, for the
crime of witchcraft. It was thought in those days that men and women
made contracts with the devil, and those contracts were confirmed at a
meeting of witches and ghosts, over which the devil presided; these
contracts in some cases were for a few years, others for life. General
assemblages of witches were held once a year. To these they rode from
great distances on brooms and dogs, and there they did homage to the
prince of hell and offered him sacrifices.
In 1836 the populace of Holland plunged into the sea a woman reputed to
be a sorceress, and as the miserable woman persisted in rising to the
surface, she was pronounced guilty, and was beaten to death. It was
believed that the devil could transform people into any shape he
pleased, and whoever denounced this idea was denounced as an Infidel;
that the believers in witchcraft appealed to the devil; that with the
devil were associated innumerable spirits, who ranged over the world
endeavoring to torment mankind; that these spirits possessed a power
and wisdom transcending the limits of human faculties. They believed
the devil could carry persons hundreds of miles in a few seconds; they
believed this because they knew that Christ had been carried by the
devil, in the same manner, into a high mountain, and placed upon a
pinnacle. According to their account, the prince of the air had
absolutely taken the God of this infinite Universe, the Creator of all
its shining, wheeling stars--he had been absolutely taken by the devil
to a pinnacle of the temple, and there had been tempted by the devil to
cast himself to the earth.
Take from the church itself the threat and fear of hell and it becomes
an extinct volcano. With the doctrine of hell taken from the Church,
that is the end of the fall of man, that is the end of the scheme of
atonement. Take from them the idea of an eternal place of torment, and
the Church is thrown back simply upon facts.
And Dean Stanley, the leading ecclesiastic of Great Britain, only the
other day in Winchester Abbey, said science will be the only theology
of the future. Morality is the only religion of the years to come.
Not withstanding all the infamous things laid to the charge of the
Church, we are told that the civilization of today is the child of what
we are pleased to call superstition. Let me call your attention to what
they received from their fears of these ghosts. Let me give you an
outline of the sciences as taught by those philosophers. There is one
thing that a man is interested in, if he is in anything, and that is in
the science of medicine. A doctor is, so to speak, in partnership with
Nature. He is a preserver if he is worthy of the name. And now I want
to show what they have gotten from these ghosts upon the science of
medicine.
According to them, all of the diseases were produced as a punishment by
the good ghosts, or out of pure malignity by the bad ones. There were,
properly speaking, no diseases; the sick were simply possessed by
ghosts. The science of medicine consisted in knowing how to persuade
these ghosts to vacate the premises and for thousands of years all
diseases were treated with incantations, hideous noises, with the
beating of drums and gongs; everything was done to make the position of
a ghost as unpleasant as possible; and they generally succeeded in
making things so disagreeable that if the ghost did not leave, the
patient died. These ghosts were supposed to be different in rank,
power and dignity. Now, then, a man pretended to have won the favor of
some powerful ghost who gave him power over the little ones. Such a
man became a very great physician. It was found that a certain kind of
smoke was exceedingly offensive to the nostrils of your ordinary ghost.
With this smoke the sick room would be filled until the ghost vanished
or the patient died. It was also believed that certain words, when
properly pronounced, were the most effective weapons, for it was for a
long time supposed that Latin words were the best, I suppose because
Latin was a dead language. For thousands of years medicine consisted
in driving the devils out of men. In some instances bargains and
promises were made with the ghosts. One case is given where a
multitude of devils traded a man off for a herd of swine. In this
transaction the devils were the losers, the swine having immediately
drowned themselves in the sea. This idea of disease appears to have
been almost universal and is not yet extinct. The contortions of the
epileptic, the strange twitching of those afflicted with cholera, were
all seized as proof that the bodies of men were filled with vile and
malignant spirits. Whoever endeavored to account for these things by
natural causes; whoever endeavored to cure disease by natural means was
denounced as an Infidel. To explain anything was a crime. It was to
the interest of the sacerdotal class that all things should be
accounted for by the will and power of God and the devil. The moment
it is admitted that all phenomena are within the domain of the natural,
and that all the prayers in the world cannot change one solitary fact,
the necessity for the priest disappears. Religion breathes the idea of
miracles. Take from the minds of men the idea of the supernatural, and
superstition ceases to exist; for this reason the Church has always
despised the man who explains the wonderful. The moment that it began
to be apparent that prayer could do nothing for the body, the priest
shifted his ground and began praying for the soul.
After the devil was substantially abandoned in the practice of
medicine, and when it was admitted that God had nothing to do with
ordinary coughs and colds, it was still believed that all the diseases
were sent by Him as punishment for the people; it was thought to be a
kind of blasphemy to even stay the ravages of pestilence. Formerly,
when a pestilence fell upon a people, the arguments of the priest were
boundless. He told the people that they had refused to pay their
tithes, and they had doubted some of the doctrines of the church, that
in their hearts they had contempt for some of the priests of the Lord,
and God was now taking his revenge, and the people, for the most part,
believed this issue of falsehood, and hastened to fall upon their knees
and to pour out their wealth upon the altars of hypocrisy.
The Church never wanted disease to be absolutely under the control of
man. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preached a sermon
against vaccination. His idea was that if God had decreed that through
all eternity certain men should die of small pox, it was a frightful
sin to endeavor to prevent it; that plagues and pestilence were
instruments in the hands of God with which to gain the love and worship
of mankind; to find the cure for the disease was to take the punishment
from the Church. No one tries to cure the ague with prayer because
quinine has been found to be altogether more reliable. Just as soon as
a specific is found for a disease, that disease is left out of the list
of prayer. The number of diseases with which God from time to time
afflicts mankind is continually decreasing, because the number of
diseases that man can cure is continually increasing. In a few years
all diseases will be under the control of man. The science of medicine
has but one enemy--superstition. Man was afraid to save his body for
fear he would lose his soul. Is it any wonder that the people in those
days believed in and taught the infamous doctrine of eternal
punishment, that makes God a heartless monster and man a slimy
hypocrite and slave?
The ghosts were also historians, and wrote the grossest absurdities.
They wrote as though they had been eye witnesses of every occurrence.
They told all the past, they predicted all the future, with an
impudence that amounted to sublimity. They said that the Tartars
originally came from hell, and that they were called Tartars because
that was one of the names of hell. These gentlemen accounted for the
red on the breasts of robins from the fact that those birds used to
carry water to the unhappy infants in hell. Other eminent historians
say that Nero was in the habit of vomiting frogs. When I read that, I
said some of the croakers of the present day would be better for such a
vomit. Others say that the walls of a city fell down in answer to
prayer. They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals;
that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that
he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had
slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were
rewarded for having written the only reliable history of their country.
These are the men from whom we get our creeds and our confessions of
faith.
In all the histories of those days there is hardly a truth. Facts were
not considered of any importance. They wrote, and the people believed
that the tracks of Pharaoh's chariot were still visible upon the sands
of the Red Sea, and that they had been miraculously preserved as
perpetual witnesses of the miracles that had been performed, and they
said to any man who denied it, "Go there and you will find the tracks
still upon the sand." They accounted for everything as the work of
good and evil spirits; with cause and effect they had nothing to do.
Facts were in no way related to each other. God, governed by infinite
caprice, filled the world with miracles and disconnected events, and
from his quiver came the arrows of pestilence and death. The moment
the idea is abandoned that everything in this universe is natural--that
all phenomena are the necessary links in the endless chain of
being--the conception of history becomes impossible that the ghost of
the present is not the child of the past; the present is not the mother
of the future. In the domain of superstition all is accident and
caprice; and do not, I pray you, forget that the writers of our creeds
and confessions of faith believed this to be a world of chance.
Nothing happens by accident; nothing happens by chance. In the wide
universe everything is necessarily produced, every effect has behind it
a cause, every effect is in its turn a cause, and there is in the wide
domain of the infinite not room enough for a miracle.
When I say this, I mean this is my idea. I may be wrong, but that is
my idea. It was believed by our intelligent ancestors that all law
derived its greatness and force from the fact that it had been
communicated to man by ghosts. Of course, it is not pretended that the
ghosts told everybody the law, but they told it to a few, and the few
told it to the people, and the people, as a rule, paid them exceedingly
well for the trouble. It was a long time before the people commenced
making laws for themselves, and, strange as it may appear, most of
their laws are vastly superior to the ghost article. Through the web
and woof of human legislation gradually began to run and shine and
glitter the golden thread of justice.
During these years of darkness it was believed that, rather than see an
act of injustice done, rather than see the guilty triumph, some ghost
would interfere and I do wish, from the bottom of my heart, that that
was the truth. There never was forced upon my heart a more frightful
conviction than this--the right does not always prevail; there never
was forced upon my mind a more cruel conclusion than this--innocence is
not always a sufficient shield. I wish it was. I wish, too, that man
suffered nothing but that which he brings upon himself and yet I find
that in nine districts in India, between the 1st day of last January
and the 1st day of June, 2,800,000 people starved to death, and that
little children, with their lips upon the breasts of famine, died,
wasted away. And why, simply because a little while before the wind did
not veer the one hundredth part of a degree, and send clouds over the
country, freighted with rain, freighted with love and joy. But if that
wind had just turned that way there would have been happy men, women
and children, all clad in the garments of health. I wish that I could
know in my heart that there was some power that would see to it that
men and women got exact justice somewhere. I do wish that I knew--the
right would prevail--that innocence was an infinite shield.
During these years it was believed that rather than see an act of
injustice done some ghost would interfere. This belief, as a rule,
gave great satisfaction to the victorious party, and, as the other man
was dead, no complaint was ever made by him. This doctrine was a
sanctification of brute force and chance. Prisoners were made to grasp
hot irons, and if it burned them their guilt was established. Others
were tied hands and feet and cast into the sea, and if they sank, the
verdict of guilt was unanimous; if they did not sink then they said
water is such a pure element that it refuses to take a guilty person,
and consequently he is a witch or wizard. Why, in England, persons
accused of crime could appeal to the cross, and to a piece of
sacramental bread. If he could swallow this without choking he was
acquitted. And this practice was continued until the time of King
Edward, who was choked to death; after which it was discontinued.
Ghosts and their followers always took delight in torturing with
unusual pain any infraction of their laws, and generally death was the
penalty. Sometimes, when a man committed only murder, he was permitted
to flee to a place of refuge--murder being only a crime against
man--but for saying certain words, or denying certain doctrines, or for
worshiping wrong ghosts, or for failing to pray to the right one, or
for laughing at a priest, or for saying that wine was not blood, or
bread was not flesh, or for failing to regard rams' horns as artillery,
or for saying that a raven as a rule, was a poor landlord, death,
produced by all the ways that ingenuity or hatred could devise, was the
penalty suffered by these men. I tell you tonight law is a growth; law
is a science. Right and wrong exist in the nature of things. Things
are not right because they are commanded; they are not wrong because
they are prohibited. They are prohibited because we believe them
wrong; they are commended because we believe them right. There are
real crimes enough without creating artificial ones. All progress in
legislation for a thousand years has consisted in repealing the laws of
the ghosts. The idea of right and wrong is born of man's capacity to
enjoy and suffer. If man could not suffer, if he could not inflict
injury upon his brother, if he could neither feel nor inflict
punishment, the idea of law, the idea of right, the idea of wrong,
never could have entered into his brain. If man could not suffer, if
he could not inflict suffering, the word conscience never would have
passed the lips of man. There is one good--happiness. There is one
sin--selfishness. All laws should be for the preservation of the one
and the destruction of the other. Under the regime of the ghosts the
laws were not understood to exist in the nature of things; they were
supposed to be irresponsible commands, and these commands were not
supposed to rest upon reason; they were simply the product of arbitrary
will. These penalties for the violations of those laws were as cruel
as the penalties were absurd. There were over two hundred offenses for
which man was punished with death. Think of it! And these laws are
said to have come from a most merciful God. And yet we have become
civilized to that degree in this country that in the State of New York
there is only one crime punishable with death. Think of it! Did I not
tell you that we were now civilizing our gods? The tendency of those
horrible laws, the tendency of those frightful penalties, was to blot
the idea of justice from the human soul. Now, I want to show you how
perfectly every department of human knowledge, or rather of ignorance,
was saturated with superstition. I will for a moment refer to the
science of language.
It was thought by our fathers that Hebrew was the original language;
that it was taught to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by the
Almighty himself. Every fact inconsistent with that idea was thrown
away. According to the ghosts, the trouble at the Tower of Babel
accounted for the fact that all the people did not speak the Hebrew
language. The Babel question settled all questions in the science of
language. After a time so many facts were found to be so inconsistent
with the Hebrew idea that it began to fall into disrepute, and other
languages began to be used. Andrew Kent published a work on the
science of language, in which he stated that God spoke to Adam, and
Adam answered, in Hebrew, and that the serpent probably spoke to Eve in
French. In 1580 another celebrated work was published at Antwerp, in
which the whole matter was put at rest, showing beyond a doubt that the
language spoken in Paradise was neither more nor less than plain
Holland Dutch. Another celebrated writer, a contemporary of Sir Isaac
Newton, discouraged the idea that all languages could be traced to one;
he maintained that language was of natural growth; that we speak as
naturally as we grow; we talk as naturally as sings a bird, or as
blooms and blossoms a flower. Experience teaches us that this be so;
words are continually dying and continually may being born--words are
the garments of thought. Through the lapse of time some were as rude
as the skins of wild beasts, and others pleasing and cultured like silk
and gold. Words have been born of hatred and revenge, of love and self
sacrifice and fear, of agony and joy the stars have fashioned them, and
in them mingled the darkness and the dawn.
Every word that we get from the past is, so to speak, a mummy robed in
the linen of the grave. They are the crystallizations of human
history, of all that man enjoyed, of all that man has suffered, his
victories and defeats, all that he has lost and won. Words are the
shadows of all that has been; they are the mirrors of all that is. The
ghosts also enlightened our fathers in astronomy and geology. According
to them the world was made out of nothing, and a little more nothing
having been taken than was used in the construction of the world, the
stars were made out of the scraps that were left over. Cosmos, in the
sixth century, taught that the stars were impelled by angels, who
carried them upon their shoulders, rolled them in front of them, or
drew them after. He also taught that each angel who pushed a star took
great pains to observe what the other angels were doing, so that the
relative distances between the stars might always remain the same.
He stated that this world was a vast body of water, with a strip of
land on the outside; that Adam and Eve lived on the outer strip; that
their descendants were drowned on the outer strip, all except Noah and
his family; he accounted for night and day by saying that on the outer
strip of land was a mountain, around which the sun revolved, producing
darkness when it was hidden from sight, and daylight when it emerged;
he also declared the earth to be flat. This he proved by many passages
from the Bible; among other reasons for believing the earth to be flat
he referred to a passage in the New Testament, which says that Christ
shall come again in glory and power, and every eye shall see him, and
said, now, if the world is round how are the people on the other side
going to see Christ when he comes? That settled the question, and the
church not only indorsed this book but declared that whoever believed
either less or more was a heretic and would be dealt with as such.
In those blessed days ignorance was a king and science was an outcast.
The church knew that the moment the earth ceased to be the center of
the universe, and became a mere speck in the starry sphere of
existence, every religion would become a thing of the past. In the name
and by the authority of the ghosts, men enslaved their fellowmen; they
trampled upon the rights of women and children. In the name and by the
authority of ghosts, they bought and sold each other. They filled
heaven with tyrants and the earth with slaves. They filled the present
with intolerance and the future with horror. In the name and by the
authority of the ghosts, they declared superstition to be the real
religion. In the name and by the authority of the ghosts, they
imprisoned the human mind; they polluted the conscience, they subverted
justice, and they sainted hypocrisy. I have endeavored in some degree
to show you what has been and always will be when men are governed by
superstition.
When they destroy the sublime standard of reason; when they take the
words of others and do not investigate them themselves, even the great
men of those days appear nearly as weak as the most ignorant. One of
the greatest men of the world, an astronomer second to none, discoverer
of the three great laws that explain the solar system, was an
astrologer and believed that he could predict the career of a man by
finding what star was in the ascendant at his birth. He believed in
what is called the music of the spheres, and he ascribed the qualities
of the music--alto, bass, tenor and treble--to certain of the planets.
Another man kept an idiot, whose words he put down and then put them
together in such a manner as to make promises, and waited patiently to
see that they were fulfilled. Luther believed he had actually seen the
devil and discussed points of theology with him. The human mind was
enchained. Every idea, almost, was a mystery. Facts were looked upon
as worthless; only the wonderful was worth preserving. Devils were
thought to be the most industrious beings in the universe, and with
these imps every occurrence of an unusual character was connected.
There was no order, certainty; everything depended upon ghosts and
phantoms, and man, for the most part, considered himself at the mercy
of malevolent spirits. He protected himself as best he could with holy
water, and with tapers, and wafers, and cathedrals. He made noises to
frighten the ghosts and music to charm them; he fasted when he was
hungry and he feasted when he was not; he believed everything
unreasonable; he humbled himself; he crawled in the dust; he shut the
doors and windows; and excluded every ray of light from his soul; and
he delayed not a day to repair the walls of his own prison; and from
the garden of the human heart they plucked and trampled into the bloody
dust the flowers and blossoms; they denounced man as totally depraved;
they made reason blasphemy; they made pity a crime; nothing so
delighted them as painting the torments and tortures of the damned.
Over the worm that never dies they grew poetic. According to them, the
cries ascending from hell were the perfume of heaven.
They divided the world into saints and sinners, and all the saints were
going to heaven, and all the sinners yonder. Now, then, you stand in
the presence of a great disaster. A house is on fire, and there is
seen at a window the frightened face of a woman with a babe in her
arms, appealing for help; humanity cries out: "Will someone go to the
rescue?" They do not ask for a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Catholic;
they ask for a man; all at once there starts from the crowd one that
nobody ever suspected of being a saint; one may be, with a bad
reputation; but he goes up the ladder and is lost in the smoke and
flame; and a moment after he emerges, and the great circles of flame
hiss around him; in a moment more he has reached the window; in another
moment, with the woman and child in his arms, he reaches the ground and
gives his fainting burden to the bystanders and the people all stand
hushed for a moment, as they always do at such times, and then the air
is rent with acclamations. Tell me that that man is going to be sent
to hell, to eternal flames, who is willing to risk his life rather than
a woman and child should suffer from the fire one moment! I despise
that doctrine of hell! Any man that believes in eternal hell is
afflicted with at least two diseases--petrifaction of the heart and
petrifaction of the brain.
I have seen upon the field of battle a boy sixteen years of age struck
by a fragment of a shell; I have seen him fall; I have seen him die
with a curse upon his lips and the face of his mother in his heart.
Tell me that his soul will be hurled from the field of battle where he
lost his life that his country might live--where he lost his life for
the liberties of man--tell me that he will be hurled from that field to
eternal torment! I pronounce it an infamous lie. And yet, according
to these gentlemen, that is to be the fate of nearly all the splendid
fellows in this world.
I had in my possession a little while ago a piece of fresco that used
to adorn a church at Stratford-on-Avon, the place where Shakespeare
lived, and there was a picture representing the morning of the
resurrection and people were getting out of their graves and devils
were grabbing them by their heels. And there was an immense monster,
with jaws open so wide that a man could walk down its throat, and the
flames were issuing therefrom, and there were devils driving people in
droves down the throat of this monster; and there was an immense kettle
in which they had put these men, and the fire was being stirred under
it, and hot pitch was being poured on top, and little devils were
setting it on fire and then on the walls there were hundreds hung up by
their tongues to hooks and nails; and then the saved--there were some
five or six saved--upon the horizon, and they had a most self-satisfied
grin of "I told you so."
At the risk of being tiresome, I have said that I have to show the
direction of the human mind in slavery, the effects of widespread
ignorance, and the result of fear. I want to convince you that every
form of slavery, physical or mental, is a viper that will finally fill
with poison the breast of any man alive. I want to show you that there
should be republicanism in the domain of thought as well as in civil
government. The first step toward progress is for man to cease to be
the slave of the creatures of his creation. Men found at last that the
event is more valuable than the prophecy, especially if it never comes
to pass. They found that diseases were not produced by spirits; that
they could not be cured by frightening them away. They found that
death was as natural as life. They began to study the anatomy and
chemistry of the human body, and they found that all was natural, and
the conjurer and the sorcerer were dismissed, and the physician and
surgeon were employed. They learned that being born under a star or
planet had nothing to do with their luck; the astrologer was discharged
and the astronomer took his place. They found that the world had swept
through the constellation for millions of ages. They found that
diseases were produced as easily as grass, and were not sent as
punishment on men for failing to believe a creed. They found that man,
through intelligence, could take advantage of the affairs of nature;
that he could make the waves, the winds, the flames, and the lightnings
slaves at his bidding to administer to his wants; they found the ghosts
knew nothing of benefit to man; that they were entirely ignorant of
history; that they were bad doctors and worse surgeons; that they knew
nothing of the law and less of justice that they were poor politicians;
that they were tyrants, and that they were without brains and utterly
destitute of hearts.
The condition of this world during the dark ages shows exactly the
result of enslaving the souls of men. In those days there was no
liberty. Liberty was despised, and the laborer was considered but
little above the beast. Ignorance, like a vast cowl, covered the brain
of the world; superstition ran riot, and credulity sat upon the throne
of the soul. Murder and hypocrisy were the companions of man, and
industry was a slave. Every country maintained that it was no robbery
to take the property of Mohammedans by force, and no murder to kill the
owner. Lord Bacon was the first man who maintained that a Christian
country was bound to keep its plighted faith with a Mohammedan nation.
Every man who could read or write was suspected of being a heretic in
those days. Only one person in 40,000 could read or write. All
thought was discouraged. The whole earth was ruled by the mitre and
sceptre, by the altar and throne, by fear and force, by ignorance and
faith, by ghouls and ghosts. In the 15th century the following law was
in force in England: "Whosoever reads the Scripture in the mother
tongue shall forfeit land, cattle, life and goods, for themselves and
their heirs forever, and should be condemned for heretics to God,
enemies to the crown, and traitors to the land."
During the period this law was in force, thirty-nine were hanged and
their bodies burned. In the 16th century men were burned because they
failed to kneel to a procession of monks. Even the Reformers, so
called, had no idea of liberty only when in the minority; the moment
they were clothed with power, they began to exterminate with fire and
sword. Castillo--and I want you to recollect it--was the first
minister in the world that declared in favor of universal toleration.
Castillo was pursued by John Calvin like a wild beast. Calvin said
that such a monstrous doctrine he crucified Christ afresh, and they
pursued that man until he died; recollect it! They can't do that
now-a-days! You don't know how splendid I feel about the liberty I
have. The horizon is filled with glory and the air is filled with
wings. If there are any in this world who think they had better not
tell what they really think because it will take bread from their
little children, because it will take clothing from their
families--don't do it! don't make martyrs of yourselves! I don't
believe in martyrdom! Go right along with them; go to church and say
amen as near the right place as you can. I will do your talking for
you. They can't take the bread away from me. I will talk. Bodemus, a
lawyer of France, wrote a few words in favor of freedom of conscience.
Montaigne was the first to raise his voice against torture in France;
but what was the voice of one man against the terrible cry of ignorant,
infatuated, malevolent millions! I intend to do what little I can, and
I am going to do it kindly. I am going to appeal to reason and to
charity, to justice, to science, and to the future. For my part, I
glory in the fact that in the New World, in the United States, liberty
of conscience was first granted to man, and that the Constitution of
the United States was the first great decree entered in the high court
of human equity forever divorcing Church and State. It is the grandest
step ever taken by the human race and the Declaration of Independence
was the first document that retired ghosts from politics. It is the
first document that said authority does not come from the phantoms of
the air; authority is not from that direction; it comes from the people
themselves. The Declaration of Independence enthroned man and
dethroned the phantoms. You will ask what has caused this change in
three hundred years. I answer, the inventions and discoveries of the
few; the brave thoughts and heroic utterances of the few; the
acquisition of a few facts; getting acquainted with our mother, Nature.
Besides this, you must remember that every wrong in some way, tends to
abolish itself. It is hard to make a lie last always. A lie will not
fit the truth; it will only fit another lie told on purpose to fit it.
Nothing but truth lives.
The nobles and the kings quarreled; the priests began to dispute, and
the millions began to get their rights. In 1441 printing was
discovered. At that time the past was a vast cemetery, without an
epitaph. The ideas of men had mostly perished in the brains that had
produced them. Printing gives an opening for thought; it preserves
ideas; it made it possible for a man to bequeath to the world the
wealth of his thoughts. About the same time, or a little before, the
Moors had gone into Europe, and it can be truthfully said that science
was thrust into the brain of Europe upon the point of a Moorish lance.
They gave us paper, and what is printing without paper?
A bird without wings. I tell you paper has been a splendid thing.
The discovery of America, whose shores were trod by the restless feet
of adventure and the people of every nation--out of this strange
mingling of facts and fancies came the great Republic. Every fact has
pushed a superstition from the brain and a ghost from the cloud. Every
mechanical art is an educator; every loom, every reaper, every mower,
every steamboat, every locomotive, every engine, every press, every
telegraph is a missionary of science and an apostle of progress; every
mill, every furnace with its wheels and levers, in which something is
made for the convenience, for the use and the comfort and the
well-being of man, is my kind of church, and every schoolhouse is a
temple. Education is the most radical thing in this world. To teach
the alphabet is to inaugurate a revolution; to build a schoolhouse is
to construct a fort; every library is an arsenal filled with the
weapons and ammunition of progress; every fact is a monitor with sides
of iron and a turret of steel. I thank the inventors and discoverers.
I thank Columbus and Magellan. I thank Locke and Hume, Bacon and
Shakespeare. I thank Fulton and Watt, Franklin and Morse, who made
lightning the messenger of man. I thank Luther for protesting against
the abuses of the Church, but denounce him because he was an enemy of
liberty. I thank Calvin for writing a book in favor of religious
freedom, but I abhor him because he burned Servetus. I thank the
Puritans for saying that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, and
yet I am compelled to admit that they were tyrants themselves. I thank
Thomas Paine because he was a believer in liberty. I thank Voltaire,
that great man who for half a century was the intellectual monarch of
Europe, and who, from his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the
finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom. I thank the
inventors, I thank the discoverers, the thinkers and the scientists,
and I thank the honest millions who have toiled. I thank the brave men
with brave thoughts. They are the Atlases upon whose broad and mighty
shoulders rests the grand fabric of civilization; they are the men who
have broken, and are still breaking, the chains of superstition.
We are beginning to learn that to swap off a superstition for a fact,
to ascertain the real, is to progress. All that gives us better bodies
and minds and clothes and food and pictures, grander music, better
heads, better hearts, and that makes us better husbands and wives and
better citizens, all these things combined produce what we call the
progress of the human race. Man advances only as he overcomes the
obstacles of nature. It is done by labor and thought. Labor is the
foundation. Without great labor it is impossible to progress. Without
labor on the part of those who conduct all great industries of life, of
those who battle with the obstacles of the sea, on the part of the
inventors, the discoverers, and the brave, heroic thinkers, no surplus
is produced; and from the surplus produced by labor, spring the schools
and universities, the painters, the sculptors, the poets, the hopes,
the loves and the aspirations of the world.
The surplus has given us the books. It has given us all there is of
beauty and eloquence. I am aware there is a vast difference of opinion
as to what progress is, and that many denounce my ideas. I know there
are many worshipers of the past. They see no beauty in anything from
which they do not blow the dust of ages with the breath of praise.
They see nothing like the ancients; no orators, poets or statesmen like
those who have been dust for thousands of years.
In a sermon on a certain evening, some time ago, the Rev. Dr. Magee of
Albany, N. Y., stated that Colonel Ingersoll, referring to Jesus
Christ, called him a "dirty little Jew." I denounce that as a dirty
little lie.
I have as much reverence for any man who ever did what he believed was
right, and died in order to benefit mankind, as any man in this world.
Do they treat an opponent with fairness? Are they investigating? Do
they pull forward or do they hold back? Is science indebted to the
Church for a single fact? Let us know what it is. What church has
been the asylum for a persecuted truth? What reform has been
inaugurated by the Church? Did the Church abolish slavery? No. Who
commenced it? Such men as Garrison and Pillsbury and Wendel Phillips.
They were the titans that attacked the monster, and not a solitary one
of them ever belonged to a church. Has the Church raised its voice
against war? No. Are men restrained by superstition? Are men
restrained by what you call religion? I used to think they were not;
now I admit they are. No man has ever been restrained from the
commission of a real crime, but from an artificial one he has. There
was a man who committed murder. They got the evidence, but he
confessed that he did it. "What did you do it for?" "Money." "Did
you get any money?" "Yes." "How much?" "Fifteen cents." "What kind
of a man was he?" "A laboring man I killed." "What did you do with
the money?" "I bought liquor with it." "Did he have anything else?"
"I think he had some meat and bread." "What did you do with that?" "I
ate the bread and threw away the meat; it was Friday." So you see it
will restrain in some things.
Just to the extent that man has freed himself from the dominion of
ghosts he has advanced; to that extent he has freed himself from the
tyrant's poison. Man has found that he must give liberty to others in
order to have it himself. He has found that a master is a slave; that
a tyrant is also a slave. He has found that governments should be
administered by men for men; that the rights of all are to be
protected; that woman is at least the equal for man; that men existed
before books; that all creeds were made by men; that the few have a
right to contradict what the pulpit asserts; that man is responsible to
himself and to others. True religion must be free; without liberty the
brain is a dungeon and the mind the convict. The slave may bow and
cringe and crawl, but he cannot worship, he cannot adore. True
religion is the perfume of the free and grateful air. True religion is
the subordination of the passions to the intellect. It is not a creed;
it is a life. The theory that is afraid of investigation is not
deserving of a place in the human mind.
I do not pretend to tell what all the truth is. I do not pretend to
have fathomed the abyss, nor to have floated on outstretched wings
level with the heights of thought. I simply plead for freedom. I
denounce the cruelties and horrors of slavery. I ask for light and air
for the souls of men. I say, take off those chains--break those
manacles--free those limbs--release that brain. I plead for the right
to think--to reason--to investigate. I ask that the future may be
enriched with the honest thoughts of men. I implore every human being
to be a soldier in the army of progress. I will not invade the rights
of others. You have no right to erect your toll-gates upon the
highways of thought. You have no right to leap from the hedges of
superstition and strike down the pioneers of the human race. You have
no right to sacrifice the liberties of man upon the altars of ghosts.
Believe what you may; preach what you desire; have all the forms and
ceremonies you please; exercise your liberties in your own way, and
extend to all others the same right.
I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the
world. I attack slavery. I ask for room--room for the human mind.
Why should we sacrifice a real world that we have for one we know not
of? Why should we enslave ourselves? Why should we forge fetters for
our own hands? Why should we be the slaves of phantoms--phantoms that
we create ourselves? The darkness of barbarism was the womb of these
shadows. In the light of science they cannot cloud the sky forever.
They have reddened the hands of man with innocent blood. They made the
cradle a curse, and the grave a place of torment.
They blinded the eyes and stopped the ears of the human race. They
subverted all the ideas of justice by promising infinite rewards for
finite virtues, and threatening infinite punishment for finite offenses.
I plead for light, for air, for opportunity. I plead for individual
independence. I plead for the rights of labor and of thought. I plead
for a chainless future. Let the ghosts go--justice remains. Let them
disappear--men, women and children are left. Let the monster fade
away--the world remains, with its hills and seas and plains, with its
seasons of smiles and frowns, its Springs of leaf and bud, its Summer
of shade and flower, its Autumn with the laden boughs, when
The withered banners of the corn are still,
And gathered fields are growing strangely wan,
While Death, poetic Death, with hands that color
Whate'er they touch, weaves in the Autumn wood
Her tapestries of gold and brown.
The world remains, with its Winters and homes and firesides, where grow
and bloom the virtues of our race. All these are left; and music, with
its sad and thrilling voice, and all there is of art and song and hope,
and love and aspiration high. All these remain. Let the ghosts go--we
will worship them no more.
Man is greater than these phantoms. Humanity is grander than all the
creeds, than all the books. Humanity is the great sea, and these
creeds and books and religions are but the waves of a day. Humanity is
the sky, and these religions and dogmas and theories are but the mists
and clouds, changing continually, destined finally to melt away.
Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more. Let them cover their
eyeless sockets with their fleshless hands, and fade forever from the
imaginations of men.