Ladies and Gentlemen: There is nothing grander in this world than to
rescue from the leprosy of slander a great and splendid name. There is
nothing nobler than to benefit our benefactors. The infidels of one
age have been the aureole saints of the next. The destroyers of the
old have always been the creators of the new. The old passes away and
the new becomes old. There is in the intellectual world, as in the
material, decay and growth; and even by the sunken grave of age stand
youth and joy. The history of progress is written in the lives of
infidels. Political rights have been preserved by traitors;
intellectual rights by infidels.
To attack the kings was treason; to dispute the priests blasphemy. The
sword and cross have always been allies; they defended each other. The
throne and altar are twins--vultures born of the same egg. It was
James I. who said: "No king, no bishop; no church, no crown; no tyrant
in heaven, no tyrant on earth." Every monarchy that has disgraced the
world, every despotism that has covered the cheeks of men with fear has
been copied after the supposed despotism of hell. The king owned the
bodies and the priest owned the souls; one lived on taxes and the
other on alms; one was a robber and the other a beggar.
The history of the world will not show you one charitable beggar. He
who lives on charity never has anything to give away. The robbers and
beggars controlled not only this world, but the next. The king made
laws, the priest made creeds; with bowed backs the people received and
bore the burdens of the one, and with the open mouth of wonder the
creed of the other. If any aspired to be free they were crushed by the
king, and every priest was a hero who slaughtered the children of the
brave. The king ruled by force, the priest by fear and by the bible.
The king said to the people: "God made you peasants and me a king; He
clothed you in rags and housed you in hovels; upon me He put robes and
gave me a palace." Such is the justice of God. The priest said to the
people: "God made you ignorant and vile, me holy and wise; obey me, or
God will punish you here and hereafter." Such is the mercy of God.
Infidels are the intellectual discoverers. Infidels have sailed the
unknown sea and have discovered the isles and continents in the vast
realms of thought. What would the world have been had infidels never
existed? What the infidel is in religion the inventor is in mechanics.
What the infidel is in religion the man willing to fight the hosts of
tyranny is in the political world. An infidel is a gentleman who has
discovered a fact and is not afraid to tell about it. There has been
for many thousands of years an idea prevalent that in some way you can
prove whether the theories defended or advanced by a man are right or
wrong by showing what kind of a man he was, what kind of a life he
lived, and what manner of death he died. There is nothing to this. It
makes no difference what the character of the man was who made the
first multiplication table. It is absolutely true, and whenever you
find an absolute fact, it makes no difference who discovered it. The
golden rule would have been just as good if it had first been whispered
by the devil.
It is good for what it contains, not because a certain man said it.
Gold is just as good in the hands of crime as in the hands of virtue.
Whatever it may be, it is gold. A statement made by a great man is not
necessarily true. A man entertains certain opinions, and then he is
proscribed because he refuses to change his mind. He is burned to
ashes, and in the midst of the flames he cries out that he is of the
same opinion still. Hundreds then say that he has sealed his testimony
with his blood, and that his doctrines must be true. All the martyrs
in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the
correctness of any one opinion. Martyrdom as a rule establishes the
sincerity of the martyr, not the correctness of his thought. Things
are true or false independently of the man who entertains them. Truth
cannot be affected by opinion; an error cannot be believed sincerely
enough to make it the truth. No Christian will admit that any amount
of heroism displayed by a Mormon is sufficient to show that Joseph
Smith was an inspired prophet. All the courage and culture, all the
poetry and art of ancient Greece do not even tend to establish the
truth of any myth.
The testimony of the dying concerning some other world, or in regard to
the supernatural, cannot be any better than that of the living. In the
early days of Christian experience an intrepid faith was regarded as a
testimony in favor of the church. No doubt, in the arms of death, many
a one went back and died in the lay of the old faith. After awhile
Christians got to dying and clinging to their faith; and then it was
that Christians began to say: "No man can die serenely without clinging
to the cross." According to the theologians, God has always punished
the dying who did not happen to believe in Him. As long as men did
nothing except to render their fellowmen wretched, God maintained the
strictest neutrality, but when some honest man expressed a doubt as to
the Jewish scriptures, or prayed to the wrong god, or to the right God
by the wrong man, then the real God leaped like a wounded tiger upon
this dying man, and from his body tore his wretched soul.
There is no recorded instance where the uplifted hand of murder has
been paralyzed, or the innocent have been shielded by God. Thousands
of crimes are committed every day, and God has no time to prevent them.
He is too busy numbering hairs and matching sparrows; He is listening
for blasphemy; He is looking for persons who laugh at priests; He is
examining baptismal registers; He is watching professors in colleges
who begin to doubt the geology of Moses or the astronomy of Joshua.
All kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable
serenity. As a rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast
discredit upon his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold
smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The Emperor
Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife and
oldest son.
Now and then, in the history of the world, there has been a man of
genius, a man of intellectual honesty. These men have denounced the
superstition of their day. They were honest enough to tell their
thoughts. Some of them died naturally in their beds, but it would not
do for the church to admit that they died peaceably; that would show
that religion was not necessary in the last moments. The first grave,
the first cathedral; the first corpse was the first priest. If there
was no death in the world there would be no superstition. The church
has taken great pains to show that the last moments of all infidels
have been infinitely wretched. Upon this point, Catholics and
Protestants have always stood together. They are no longer men; they
become hyenas, they dig open graves. They devour the dead. It is an
auto da fe presided over by God and his angels. These men believed in
the accountability of men in the practice of virtue and justice. They
believed in liberty, but they did not believe in the inspiration of the
bible. That was their crime. In order to show that infidels died
overwhelmed with remorse and fear they have generally selected from all
the infidels since the days of Christ until now five men--the Emperor
Julian, Bruno, Diderot, David Hume and Thomas Paine.
They forget that Christ himself was not a Christian, that He did what
He could to tear down the religion of His day; that He held the temple
in contempt. I like Him because He held the old Jewish religion in
contempt; because He had sense enough to say that doctrine was not
true. In vain have their calumniators been called upon to prove their
statements. They simply charge it, they simply relate it, but that is
no evidence. The Emperor Julian did what he could to prevent
Christians destroying each other. He held pomp and pride in contempt.
In battle with the Persians he was mortally wounded. Feeling that he
had but a short time to live, he spent his last hours in discussing
with his friends the immortality of the soul. He declared that he was
satisfied with his conduct, and that he had no remorse to express for
any act he had ever done.
The first great infidel was Giordano Bruno. He was born in the year of
grace 1550. He was a Dominican friar--Catholic--and afterwards he
changed his mind.
The reason he changed was because he had a mind. He was a lover of
nature, and said to the poor hermits in their caves, to the poor monks
in their monasteries, to the poor nuns in their cells: "Come out in the
glad fields; come and breathe the fresh, free air; come and enjoy all
the beauty there is in the world. There is no God who can be made
happier by you being miserable; there is no God who delights to see
upon the human face the tears of pain, of grief, of agony. Come out
and enjoy all there is of human life; enjoy progress, enjoy thought,
enjoy being somebody and belonging to yourself."
He revolted at the idea of transubstantiation; he revolted at the idea
that the eternal God could be in a wafer. He revolted at the idea that
you could make the Trinity out of dough--bake God in an oven as you
would a biscuit. I should think he would have revolted. The idea of a
man devouring the creator of the universe by swallowing a piece of
bread. And yet that is just as sensible as any of it. Those who, when
smitten on one cheek turn the other, threatened to kill this man. He
fled from his native land and was a vagabond in nearly every nation of
Europe. He declared that he fought not what men really believed, but
what they pretended to believe. And, do you know, that is the business
I am in? I am simply saying what other people think; I am furnishing
clothes for their children, I am putting on exhibition their offspring,
and they like to hear it, they like to see it. We have passed midnight
in the history of the world. Bruno was driven from his native country
because he taught the rotation of the earth; you can see what a
dangerous man he must have been in a well regulated monarchy. You see
he had found a fact, and a fact has the same effect upon religion that
dynamite has upon a Russian czar. A fellow with a new fact was
suspected and arrested, and they always thought they could destroy it
by burning him, but they never did. All the fires of martyrdom never
destroyed one truth; all the churches of the world have never made one
lie true. Germany and France would not tolerate Bruno. According to
the Christian system, this world was the center of everything. The
stars were made out of what little God happened to have left when He
got the world done. God lived up in the sky, and they said this earth
must rest upon something, and finally science passed its hand clear
under, and there was nothing. It was self-existent in infinite space.
Then the church began to say they didn't say it was flat--not so awful
flat--it was kind of rounding. According to the ancient Christians God
lived from all eternity, and never worked but six days in His whole
life, and then had the impudence to tell us to be industrious. I heard
of a man going to California over the plains, and, there was a
clergyman on board, and he had a great deal to say, and finally he fell
in conversation with the '49-er, and the latter said to the clergyman:
"Do you believe that God made this world in six days?" "Yes, I do."
They were then going along the Humboldt. Says he: "Don't you think He
could put in another day to advantage right around here?"
Bruno went to England and delivered lectures at Oxford. He found that
there was nothing taught there but superstition, and so called Oxford
the "wisdom of learning." Then they told him they didn't want him any
more. He went back to Italy, where there was a kind of fascination
that threw him back to the very doors of the Inquisition. He was
arrested for teaching that there were other worlds, and that stars are
suns around which revolve other planets. He was in prison for six
years. (During those six years Galileo was teaching mathematics.) Six
years in a dungeon; and then he was tried, denounced by the
Inquisition, excommunicated, condemned by brute force, pushed upon his
knees while he received the benediction of the church, and on the 16th
of February, in the year of our Lord 1600, he was burned at the stake.
He believed that the world is animated by an intelligent soul, the
cause of force but not of matter; that matter and force have existed
from eternity; that this force lives in all things, even in such as
appear not to live--in the rock as much as in the man; that matter is
the mother of forms and the grace of forms; that the matter and force
together constitute God. He was a pantheist--that is to say, he was an
atheist. He had the courage to die for what he believed to be right.
The murder of Bruno will never, in my judgment, be completely and
perfectly revenged until from the city of Rome shall be swept every
vestige of priests and pope--until from the shapeless ruins of St.
Peter's, the crumbled Vatican and the fallen cross of Rome, rises a
monument sacred to the philosopher, the benefactor and the
martyr--Bruno.
Voltaire was born in 1694. When he was born, the natural was about the
only thing that the church did not believe in. Monks sold amulets, and
the priests cured in the name of the church. The worship of the devil
was actually established, which today is the religion of China. They
say: "God is good; He won't bother you; Joss is the one." They offer
him gifts, and try and soften his heart;--so, in the middle ages, the
poor people tried to see if they could not get a short cut, and trade
directly with the devil, instead of going round-about through the
church. In these days witnesses were cross-examined with instruments
of torture. Voltaire did more for human liberty than any other man who
ever lived or died. He appealed to the common sense of mankind--he
held up the great contradictions of the sacred scriptures in a way that
no man, once having read him, could forget. For one, I thank Voltaire
for the liberty I am enjoying this moment. How small a man a priest
looked when he pointed his finger at him; how contemptible a king.
Toward the last of May, 1778, it was whispered in Paris that Voltaire
was dying. He expired with the most perfect tranquility. There have
been constructed most shameless lies about the death of this great and
wonderful man, compared with whom all his calumniators, living or dead,
were but dust and vermin. From his throne at the foot of the Alps he
pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. He was the
pioneer of his century.
In 1771, in Scotland, David Hume was born. Scotch Presbyterianism is
the worst form of religion that has ever been produced. The Scotch
Kirk had all the faults of the Church of Rome, without a redeeming
feature. The church hated music, despised painting, abhorred statuary,
and held architecture in contempt. Anything touched with humanity,
with the weakness of love, with the dimple of joy, was detested by the
Scotch Kirk. God was to be feared; God was infinitely practical; no
nonsense about God. They used to preach four times a day. They
preached on Friday before the Sunday upon which they partook of the
sacrament, and then on Saturday; four sermons on Sunday, and two or
three on Monday to sober up on. They were bigoted and heartless. One
case will illustrate. In the beginning of this nineteenth century a
boy seventeen years of age was indicted at Edinburgh for blasphemy. He
had given it as his opinion that Moses had learned magic in Egypt, and
had fooled the Jews. They proved that on two or three occasions, when
he was real cold, he jocularly remarked that he wished he was in hell,
so that he could warm up. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be
hanged. He recanted; he even wrote that he believed the whole
business; and that he just said it for pure devilment. It made no
difference. They hung him, and his bruised and bleeding corpse was
denied to his own mother, who came and besought them to let her take
her boy home. That was Scotch Presbyterianism. If the devil had been
let loose in Scotland he would have improved that country at that time.
David Hume was one of the few Scotchmen who was not owned by the
church. He had the courage to examine things for himself, and to give
his conclusion to the world. His life was unstained by an unjust act.
He did not, like Abraham, turn a woman from his door with his child in
her arms. He did not, like King David, murder a man that he might
steal his wife. He didn't believe in Scotch Presbyterianism. I don't
see how any good man ever did. Just think of going to the day of
judgment, if there is one, and standing up before God and admitting,
without a blush, that you have lived and died a Scotch Presbyterian. I
would expect the next sentence would be, "Depart ye cursed in
everlasting fire." Hume took the ground that a miracle could not be
used as evidence until you had proved the miracle. Of course that
excited the church. Why? Because they could not prove one of them.
How are you going to prove a miracle? Who saw it, and who would know a
devil if he did see him? Hume insisted that at the bottom of all good
is something useful; that after all, human happiness was the great
object, end, and aim of life; that virtue was not a termagant, with
sunken cheeks and frightful eyes, but was the most beautiful thing in
the world, and would strew your path with flowers from the cradle to
the grave. When he died they gave an account of how he had suffered.
They knew that the horrors of death would fall upon him, and that God
would get his revenge. But his attending physician said that his death
was the most serene and most perfectly tranquil of any he had ever
seen. Adam Smith said he was as near perfect as the frailty incident
to humanity would allow human being to be.
The next is Benedict Spinoza, a Jew, born at Amsterdam in 1768. He
studied theology, and asked the rabbis too many questions, and talked
too much about what he called reason, and finally he was excommunicated
from the synagogue, and became an outcast at the age of twenty-four,
without friends. Cursed, anathematized, bearing upon his forehead the
mark of Cain, he undertook to solve the problem of the universe. To
him the universe was one. The infinite embraced the all. That all was
God. He was right; the universe is all there is, and if God does not
exist in the universe He exists nowhere. The idea of putting some
little Jewish jehovah outside the universe, as if to say that from an
eternity of idleness he woke up one morning and thought he would make
something.
The propositions of Spinoza are as luminous as the stars, and his
demonstrations, each one of them, is a Gibraltar, behind which logic
sits laughing at all the sophistries of theological thought. In every
relation of life he was just, true, gentle, patient, loving,
affectionate. He died in 1812. In his life of forty-four years he had
climbed to the very highest alpine of human thought. He was a great
and splendid man, an intellectual hero, one of the benefactors, one of
the Titans of our race.
And now I will say a few words about our infidels. We had three, to
say the least of them--Paine, Franklin and Jefferson. In their day the
colonies were filled with superstition, and the Puritans with the
spirit of persecution. Law, savage, ignorant and malignant, had been
passed in every colony for the purpose of destroying intellectual
liberty. Manly freedom was unknown. The toleration act of Maryland
tolerated only chickens, not thinkers, not investigators. It tolerated
faith, not brains. The charity of Roger Williams was not extended to
one who denied the bible. Let me show you how we have advanced.
Suppose you took every man and woman out of the Penitentiary in New
England and shipped them to a new country where man before had never
trod, and told them to make a government, and constitution, and a code
of laws for themselves. I say tonight that they would make a better
constitution and a better code of laws than any that were made in any
of the original thirteen colonies of the United States.
Not that they are better men, not that they are more honest, but that
they have got more sense. They have been touched with the dawn of the
eternal day of liberty that will finally come to this world. They
would have more respect for others' rights than they had at that time.
But the churches were jealous of each other, and we got a constitution
without religion in it from the mutual jealousies of the church, and
from the genius of men like Paine, Franklin and Jefferson. We are
indebted to them for a constitution without a God in it. They knew
that if you put God in there, an infinite God, there wouldn't be any
room for the people. Our fathers retired Jehovah from politics. Our
fathers, under the directions and leadership of those infidels, said,
"All power comes from the consent of the governed." George Washington
wanted to establish a church by law in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson
prevented it. Under the guaranty of liberty of conscience which was
given, our legislation has improved, and it will not be many years
before all laws touching liberty of conscience, excepting it may be in
the State of Delaware, will be blotted out, and when that time comes we
or our children may thank the infidels of 1776. The church never
pretended that Franklin died in fear. Franklin wrote no books against
the bible. He thought it useless to cast the pearls of thought before
the swine of his generation.
Jefferson was a statesman. He was the author of the Declaration of
Independence, founder of a university, father of a political body,
president of the United States, a statesman, and a philosopher. He was
too powerful for the churches of his day. Paine attacked the Trinity
and the bible both. He had done these things openly--His arguments
were so good that his reputation got bad. I want you to recollect
tonight that he was the first man who wrote these words: "The United
States of America." I want you to know tonight that he was the first
man who suggested the Federal Constitution. I want you to know that he
did more for the actual separation from Great Britain than any man that
ever lived. I want you to know that he did as much for liberty with
his pen as any soldier did with his sword. I want you to know that
during the Revolution his "Crisis" was the pillar of fire by night and
a cloud by day. I want you to know that his "Common Sense" was the one
star in the horizon of despotism. I want you to know that he did as
much as any living man to give our free flag to the free air. He was
not content to waste all his energies here. When the volcano covered
Europe with the shreds of robes and the broken fragments of thrones,
Paine went to France. He was elected by four constituencies. He had
the courage to vote against the death of Louis, and was imprisoned. He
wrote to Washington, the president, and asked him to interfere.
Washington threw the letter in the wastebasket of forgetfulness. When
Paine was finally released he gave his opinion of George Washington,
and, under such circumstances, I say a man can be pardoned for having
said even unjust things. The eighteenth century was crowning its gray
hairs with the wreaths of progress, and Thomas Paine said: "I will do
something to liberate mankind from superstition." He wrote the "Age of
Reason." For his good, he wrote it too soon; for ours, not a day too
quick. From that moment he was a despised and calumniated man. When
he came back to this country he could not safely walk the streets for
fear of being mobbed. Under the Constitution he had suggested, his
rights were not safe; under the flag that he had helped give to heaven,
with which he had enriched the air, his liberty was not safe. Is it
not a disgrace to us that all the lies that have been told about him,
and will be told about him, are a perpetual disgrace? I tell you that
upon the grave of Thomas Paine the churches of America have sacrificed
their reputation for veracity. Who can hate a man with a creed:
"I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for immortality; I
believe in the equality of man, and that religious duty consists in
doing justice, in doing mercy, and in endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy. It is necessary to the happiness of man that he
be faithful to himself. One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand
priests. Man has no property in man, and the key of heaven is in the
keeping of no saint."
Grand, splendid, brave man!--with some faults, with many virtues; the
world is better because he lived; and if Thomas Paine had not lived I
could not have delivered this lecture here tonight.
Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much
as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the
civilization of this world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the
ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as
David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests,
bishops, cardinals and popes from the day of Pentecost to the last
election done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine? What would
the world be now if infidels had never been? Infidels have been the
flower of all this world. Recollect, by infidels I mean every man who
has made an intellectual advance. By orthodox I mean a gentleman who is
petrified in his mind, whopping around intellectually, simply to save
the funeral expenses of his soul. Infidels are the creditors of all the
years to come. They have made this world fit to live in, and without
them the human brain would be as empty as the Chronicles soon will be.
Unless they preach something that the people want to hear, it is not a
crime to benefit our fellow-man intellectually. The churches point to
their decayed saints and their crumbled popes and say, "Do you know
more than all the ministers that ever lived?" And, without the
slightest egotism or blush, I say, "Yes; and the name of Humboldt
outweighs them all." The men who stand in the front rank, the men who
know most of the secrets of nature, the men who know most are today the
advanced infidels of this world. I have lived long enough to see the
brand of intellectual inferiority on every orthodox brain.