Ladies and Gentlemen: Nothing can be more certain than that no human
being can by any possibility control his thought. We are in this
world--we see, we hear, we feel, we taste; and everything in nature
makes an impression upon the brain, and that wonderful something,
enthroned there with these materials, weaves what we call thought, and
the brain can no more help thinking than the heart can help beating.
The blood pursues its old accustomed round without our will. The heart
beats without asking leave of us, and the brain thinks in spite of all
that we can do. This being true, no human being can justly be held
responsible for his thought any more than for the beating of his heart,
any more than for the course pursued by the blood, any more than for
breathing air. And yet for thousands of years thought has been thought
to be a crime, and thousands and millions have threatened us with
eternal fire if we give the product of that brain. Each brain, in my
judgment, is a field where nature sows the seeds of thought, and
thought is the crop that man reaps, and it certainly cannot be a crime
to gather; it certainly cannot be a crime to tell it, which simply
amounts to the right to sell your crop or to exchange your product for
the product of some other man's brain. That is all it is. Most
brains--at least some--are rather poor fields, and the orthodox worst
of all. That field produces mostly sorrel and mullin, while there are
fields which, like the tropic world, are filled with growth, and where
you find the vine and palm, royal children of the sun and brain. I
then stand simply for absolute freedom of thought--absolute; and I
don't believe, if there be a God, that it will be or can be pleasing to
Him to see one of His children afraid to express what he thinks. And,
if I were God, I never would cease making men until I succeeded in
making one grand enough to tell his honest opinion.
Now there has been a struggle, you know, a long time between the
believers in the natural and the supernatural--between gentlemen who
are going to reward us in another world and those who propose to make
life worth living here and now. In all ages the priest, the medicine
man, the magician, the astrologer, in other words, gentlemen who have
traded upon the fear and ignorance of their fellow-man in all
countries--they have sought to, make their living out of others. There
was a time when a God presided over every department of human interest,
when a man about to take a voyage bribed the priest of Neptune so that
he might have a safe journey, and when he came back, he paid more,
telling the priest that he was infinitely obliged to him; that he had
kept waves from the sea and storms in their caves. And so, when one
was sick he went to a priest; when one was about to take a journey he
visited the priest of Mercury; if he were going to war he consulted the
representative of Mars. We have gone along. When the poor
agriculturist plowed his ground and put in the seed he went to the
priest of some god and paid him to keep off the frost. And the priest
said he would do it; "but," added the priest, "you must have faith."
If the frost came early he said, "You didn't have faith." And besides
all that he says to him: "Anything that has happened badly, after all,
was for your good." Well, we found out, day by day, that a good boat
for the purpose of navigating the sea was better than prayers, better
than the influence of priests; and you had better have a good captain
attending to business than thousands of priests ashore praying.
We also found that we could cure some diseases, and just as soon as we
found that we could cure diseases we dismissed the priest. We have
left him out now of all of them, except it may be cholera and smallpox.
When visited by a plague some people get frightened enough to go back
to the old idea--go back to the priest, and the priest says: "It has
been sent as a punishment." Well, sensible people began to look about;
they saw that the good died as readily as the bad; they saw that this
disease would attack the dimpled child in the cradle and allow the
murderer to go unpunished; and so they began to think in time that it
was not sent as a punishment; that it was a natural result; and so the
priest stepped out of medicine.
In agriculture we need him no longer; he has nothing to do with the
crops. All the clergymen in this world can never get one drop of rain
out of the sky; and all the clergymen in the civilized world could not
save one human life if they tried it.
Oh, but they say, "We do not expect a direct answer to prayer; it is
the reflex action we are after." It is like a man endeavoring to lift
himself up by the straps of his boots; he will never do it, but he will
get a great deal of useful exercise.
The missionary goes to some pagan land, and there he finds a man
praying to a god of stone, and it excites the wrath of the missionary.
I ask you tonight, does not that stone god answer prayer just as well
as ours? Does he not cause rain? Does he not delay frost? Does he not
snatch the ones that we love from the grasp of death precisely the same
as ours? Yet we have ministers that are still engaged in that
business. They tell us that they have been "called;" that they do not
go at their profession as other people do, but they are "called;" that
God, looking over the world, carefully selects His priests, His
ministers, and His exhorters.
I don't know. They say their calling is sacred. I say to you tonight
that every kind of business that is honest that a man engages in for
the purpose of feeding his wife and children, for the purpose of
building up his home, for the purpose of feeding and clothing the ones
he loves--that business is sacred. They tell us that statesmen and
poets, philosophers, heroes, and scientists and inventors come by
chance; that all other departments depend entirely upon luck; but when
God wants exhorters He selects.
They also tell us that it is infinitely wicked to attack the Christian
religion, and when I speak of the Christian religion I do not refer
especially to the Christianity of the new testament; I refer to the
Christianity of the orthodox church, and when I refer to the clergy I
refer to the clergy of the orthodox church. There was a time when men
of genius were in the pulpits of the orthodox church; that time is
past. When you find a man with brains now occupying an orthodox pulpit
you will find him touched with heresy--every one of them.
How do they get most of these ministers? There will be a man in the
neighborhood not very well--not having constitution enough to be
wicked, and it instantly suggests itself to everybody who sees him that
he would make an excellent minister. There are so many other
professions, so many cities to be built, so many railways to be
constructed, so many poems to be sung, so much music to be composed, so
many papers to edit, so many books to read, so many splendid things, so
many avenues to distinction and glory, so many things beckoning from
the horizon of the future to every great and splendid man that the
pulpit has to put up with the leavings--ravelings, selvage.
These preachers say, "How can any man be wicked and infamous enough to
attack our religion and take from the world the solace of orthodox
Christianity?" What is that solace? Let us be honest. What is it? If
the Christian religion be true, the grandest, greatest, noblest of the
world are now in hell, and the narrowest and meanest are now in heaven.
Humboldt, the Shakespeare of science, the most learned man of the most
learned nation, with a mind grand enough to grasp not simply this
globe, but this constellation--a man who shed light upon the whole
earth--a man who honored human nature, and who won all his victories on
the field of thought--that man, pure and upright, noble beyond
description, if Christianity be true, is in hell this moment. That is
what they call "solace"--"tidings of great joy." LaPlace, who read the
heavens like an open book, who enlarged the horizon of human thought,
is there too. Beethoven, Master of melody and harmony, who added to the
joy of human life, and who has borne upon the wings of harmony and
melody millions of spirits to the height of joy, with his heart still
filled with melody--he is in hell today. Robert Burns, poet of love
and liberty, and from his heart, like a spring gurgling and running
down the highways, his poems have filled the world with music. They
have added luster to human love. That man who, in four lines, gave all
the philosophy of life--
To make a happy fireside clime
For weans and wife
Is the true pathos and
Sublime Of human life
--he is there with the rest.
Charles Dickens, whose genius will be a perpetual shield, saving
thousands and millions of children from blows, who did more to make us
tender with children than any other writer that ever touched a pen--he
is there with the rest, according to our Christian religion. A little
while ago there died in this country a philosopher--Ralph Waldo
Emerson--a man of the loftiest ideal, a perfect model of integrity,
whose mind was like a placid lake and reflected truths like stars. If
the Christian religion be true, he is in perdition today. And yet he
sowed the seeds of thought, and raised the whole world intellectually.
And Longfellow, whose poems, tender as the dawn, have gone into
millions of homes, not an impure, not a stained word in them all; but
he was not a Christian. He did not believe in the "tidings of great
joy." He didn't believe that God so loved the world that He intended
to damn most everybody. And now he has gone to his reward. And
Charles Darwin--a child of nature--one who knew more about his mother
than any other child she ever had. What is philosophy? It is to
account for phenomena by which we are surrounded--that is, to find the
hidden cord that unites everything. Charles Darwin threw more light
upon the problem of human existence than all the priests who ever lived
from Melchisedec to the last exhorter. He would have traversed this
globe on foot had it been possible to have found one new fact or to
have corrected one error that he had made. No nobler man has lived--no
man who has studied with more reverence (and by reverence I mean simply
one who lives and studies for the truth)--no man who studied with more
reverence than he. And yet, according to orthodox religion, Charles
Darwin is in hell. Consolation!
So, if Christianity be true, Shakespeare, the greatest man who ever
touched this planet, within whose brain were the fruits of all thought
past, the seeds of all to be--Shakespeare, who was an intellectual
ocean toward which all rivers ran, and from which now the isles and
continents of thought received their dew and rain--that man who has
added more to the intelligence of the world than any other who ever
lived--that man, whose creations will live as long as man has
imagination, and who has given more happiness upon the stage and more
instruction than has flown from all the pulpits of this earth--that man
is in hell, too. And Harriet Martineau, who did as much for English
liberty as any man, brave and free--she is there. "George Eliot," the
greatest woman the English-speaking people ever produced--she is with
the rest. And this is called "Tidings of great joy."
Who are in heaven? How could there be much of a heaven without the men
I have mentioned--the great men that have endeavored to make the world
grander--such men as Voltaire, such men as Diderot, such men as the
encyclopedists, such men as Hume, such men as Bruno, such men as Thomas
Paine? If Christianity is true, that man who spent his life in
breaking chains is now wearing the chains of God; that man who wished
to break down the prison walls of tyranny is now in the prison of the
most merciful Christ. It will not do. I can hardly express to you
today my contempt for such a doctrine; and if it be true, I make my
choice today, and I prefer hell.
Who is in heaven? John Calvin! John Knox! Jonathan Edwards!
Torquemada--the builders of dungeons, the men who have obstructed the
march of the human race. These are the men who are in heaven; and who
else? Those who never had brain enough to harbor a doubt. And they ask
me: How can you be wicked enough to attack the Christian religion?
"Oh," but they say, "God will never forgive you if you attack the
orthodox religion." Now, when I read the history of this world, and
when I think of the experience of my fellow-men, when I think of the
millions living in poverty, and when I know that in the very air we
breathe and in the sunlight that visits our homes there lurks an
assassin ready to take our lives, and even when we believe we are in
the fullness health and joy, they are undermining us with their
contagion--when I know that we are surrounded by all these evils, and
when I think of what man has suffered, I do not wonder if God can
forgive man, but I often ask myself, "Can man forgive God?"
There is another thing. Some of these ministers have talked about me,
and have made it their business to say unpleasant things. Among others
the Rev. Mr. Talmage, of Brooklyn--a man of not much imagination, but
of most excellent judgment--charges that I am a "blasphemer." A
frightful charge! Terrible, if true! What is blasphemy? It is a sin,
as I understand, against God. Is God infinite? He is, so they say; He
is infinite; absolutely conditionless? Can I injure the conditionless?
No. Can I sin against anything that I cannot injure? No. That is a
perfectly plain proposition. I can injure my fellow-man, because he is
a conditioned being, and I can help to change those conditions. He
must have air; he must have food, he must have clothing; he must have
shelter; but God is conditionless, and I cannot by any possibility
affect Him. Consequently I cannot sin against Him. But I can sin
against my fellow-man, so that I ought to be a thousand times more
careful of doing injustice than of uttering blasphemy. There is no
blasphemy but injustice, and there is no worship except the practice of
justice. It is a thousand times more important that we should love our
fellow-men than that we should love God. It is better to love wife and
children than to love Jesus Christ, He is dead; they are alive. I can
make their lives happy and fill all their hours with the fullness of
joy. That is my religion; and the holiest temple ever erected beneath
the stars is the home; the holiest altar is the fireside.
What is this blasphemy? First, it is a geographical question. There
was a time when it was blasphemy in Jerusalem to say that Christ was
God. In this country it is now blasphemy to say that He was not. It
is blasphemy in Constantinople to deny that Mahomet was the Prophet of
God; it is blasphemy here to say that he was. It is a geographical
question; you cannot tell whether it is blasphemy or not without
looking at the map. What is blasphemy? It is what the mistake says
about the fact. It is what the last year's leaf says about this year's
bud. It is the last cry of the defeated priest. Blasphemy is the
little breast-work behind which hypocrisy hides; behind which mental
impotency feels safe. There is no blasphemy but the avowal of thought,
and he who speaks what he thinks blasphemes.
That I have had the hardihood--it doesn't take much--to attack the
sacred scriptures. I have simply given my opinion; and yet they tell
me that that book is holy--that you can take rags, make pulp, put ink
on it, bind it in leather, and make something holy. The Catholics have
a man for a pope; the Protestants have a book. The Catholics have the
best of it. If they elect an idiot he will not live forever, and it is
impossible for us to get rid of the barbarisms in our book. The
Catholics said, "We will not let the common people read the bible."
That was right. If it is necessary to believe it in order to get to
heaven no man should run the risk of reading it. To allow a man to
read the bible on such conditions is to set a trap for his soul. The
right way is never to open it, and when you get to the day of judgment,
and they ask you if you believe it say "Yes, I have never read it."
The Protestant gives the book to a poor man and says: "Read it. You
are at liberty to read it." "Well, suppose I don't believe it, when I
get through?" "Then you will be damned." No man should be allowed to
read it on those conditions. And yet Protestants have done that
infinitely cruel thing. If I thought it was necessary to believe it I
would say never read another line in it but just believe it and stick
to it. And yet these people really think that there is something
miraculous about the book. They regard it as a fetish--a kind of
amulet--a something charmed, that will keep off evil spirits, or bad
luck, stop bullets, and do a thousand handy-things for the preservation
of life.
I heard a story upon that subject. You know that thousands of them are
printed in the Sunday-school books. Here is one they don't print.
There was a poor man who had belonged to the church, but he got cold,
and he rather neglected it, and he had bad luck in his business, and he
went down and down and down until he hadn't a dollar--not a thing to
eat; and his wife said to him, "John, this comes of you having
abandoned the church, this comes of your having done away with family
worship. Now, I beg of you, let's go back." Well, John said it
wouldn't do any harm to try. So he took down the bible, blew the dust
off it, read a little from a chapter, and had family worship. As he
was putting it up he opened it again, and there was a $10 bill between
the leaves. He rushed out to the butcher's and bought meat, to the
grocer's and bought tea and bread, and butter and eggs, and rushed back
home and got them cooked, and the house was filled with the perfume of
food; and he sat down at the table, tears in every eye and a smile on
every face. She said, "What did I tell you?" Just then there was a
knock on the door, and in came a constable, who arrested him for
passing a $10 counterfeit bill.
They tell me that I ought not to attack the bible--that I have
misrepresented it, and among other things that I have said that,
according to the bible, the world was made of nothing. Well, what was
it made of? They say God created everything. Consequently, there must
have been nothing when He commenced. If he didn't make it of nothing,
what did he make it of? Where there was, nothing, He made something.
Yes; out of what? I don't know. This doctor of divinity, and I should
think such a divinity would need a doctor, says that God made the
universe out of His omnipotence. Why not out of His omniscience, or
His omnipresence? Omnipotence is not a raw material. It is the
something to work raw material with. Omnipotence is simply all
powerful, and what good would strength do with nothing? The weakest
man ever born could lift as much nothing as God. And he could do as
much with it after he got it lifted. And yet a doctor of divinity tells
me that this world was made of omnipotence. And right here let me say
I find even in the mind of the clergymen the seeds of infidelity. He
is trying to explain things. That is a bad symptom. The greater the
miracle the greater the reward for believing it. God cannot afford to
reward a man for believing anything reasonable. Why, even the scribes
and Pharisees would believe a reasonable thing. Do you suppose God is
to crown you with eternal joy and give you a musical instrument for
believing something where the evidence is clear? No, sir. The larger
the miracle the more grace. And let me advise the ministers of Chicago
and of this country, never to explain a miracle; it cannot be
explained. If you succeed in explaining it, the miracle is gone. If
you fail you are gone. My advice to the clergy is, use assertion; just
say "it is so," and the larger the miracle the greater the glory reaped
by the eternal. And yet this man is trying to explain, pretending that
He had some raw material of some kind on hand. And then I objected to
the fact that He didn't make the sun until the fourth day, and that,
consequently, the grass could not have grown--could not have thrown its
mantle of green over the shoulders of the hill--and that the trees
would not blossom and cast their shade upon the sod without some
sunshine; and what does this man say? Why, that the rocks, when they
crystallized, emitted light, even enough to raise a crop by. And he
says "vegetation might have depended on the glare of volcanoes in the
moon." What do you think would be the fate of agriculture depending on
the "glare of volcanoes in the moon?" Then he says "the aurora
borealis." Why, you couldn't raise cucumbers by the aurora borealis.
And he says "liquid rivers of molten granite." I would like to have a
farm on that stream. He guesses everything of the kind except
lightning-bugs and foxfire. Now, think of that explanation in the last
half of the nineteenth century by a minister. The truth is, the
gentleman who wrote the account knew nothing of astronomy--knew as
little as the modern preacher does--just about the same; and if they
don't know more about the next world than they do about this, it is
hardly worth while talking with them on the subject. There was a time,
you know, when the minister was the educated man in the country, and
when, if you wanted to know anything, you asked him. Now you do if you
don't. So I find this man expounding the flood, and he says it was not
very wet. He begins to doubt whether God had water enough to cover the
whole earth. Why not stand by his book? He says that some of the
animals got into the ark to keep out of the wet. I believe that is the
way the Democrats got to the polls last Tuesday.
Another divine says that God would have drowned them all, but it was
purely for the sake of economy that He saved any of them. Just think
of that! According to this Christian religion all the people in the
world were totally depraved through the fall, and God found he could
not do anything with them, so he drowned them. Now, if God wanted to
get up a flood big enough to drown sin, why did He not get up a flood
big enough to drown the snake? That was His mistake. Now, these
people say that if Jonah had walked rapidly up and down the whale's
belly he would have avoided the action of its gastric-juice. Imagine
Jonah sitting in the whale's mouth, on the back of a molar-tooth; and
yet this doctor of divinity would have us believe that the infinite God
of the universe was sitting under his gourd and made the worm that was
at the root of Jonah's vine. Great business.
David is said to have been a man after God's own heart, and if you will
read the twenty-eighth chapter of Chronicles you will find that David
died full of years and honors. So I find in the great book of
prophecy, concerning Solomon: "He shall reign in peace and quietness,
he shall be my son, and I shall be his father, and I will preserve his
Kingdom." Was that true?
It won't do. But they say God couldn't do away with slavery suddenly,
nor with polygamy all at once--that He had to do it gradually--that if
He had told this man you mustn't have slaves, and one man that he must
have one wife, and one wife that she must have one husband, He would
have lost the control over them notwithstanding all the miraculous
power. Is it not wonderful that when they did all these miracles
nobody paid any attention to them? Isn't it wonderful that, in Egypt,
when they performed these wonders--when the waters were turned into
blood, when the people were smitten with disease and covered with the
horrible animals--isn't it wonderful that it had no influence on them?
Do you know why all these miracles didn't affect the Egyptians? They
were there at the time. Isn't it wonderful, too, that the Jews who had
been brought from bondage--had followed a cloud by day and a pillar of
fire by night--who had been miraculously fed, and for whose benefit
water had leaked from the rocks and followed them up and down hill
through all their journeying--isn't it wonderful, when they had seen
the earth open and their companions swallowed, when they had seen God
Himself write in robes of flames from Sinai's crags, when they had seen
Him talking face to face with Moses--isn't it a little wonderful that
He had no more influence over them? They were there at the time. And
that is the reason they didn't mind it--they were there. And yet, with
all these miracles, this God could not prevent polygamy and slavery.
Was there no room on the two tables of stone to put two more
commandments? Better have written them on the back, then. Better have
left the others all off and put these two on. Man shall not enslave
his brother, (you shall not live on unpaid labor), and the one man
shall have the one wife. If these two had been written and the other
ten left off, it would have been a thousand times better for this world.
But, they say, God works gradually. No hurry about it. He is not
gradual about keeping Sunday, because, if He met a man picking up
sticks, He killed Him; but in other things He is gradual. Suppose we
wanted now to break certain cannibals of eating missionaries--wanted to
stop them from eating them raw? Of course we would not tell them, in
the first place, it was wrong. That would not do. We would induce them
to cook them. That would be the first step toward civilization. We
would have them stew them. We would not say it is wrong to eat
missionary, but it is wrong to eat missionary raw. Then, after they
began stewing them, we would put in a little mutton--not enough to
excite suspicion but just a little, and so, day by day, we would put in
a little more mutton and a little less missionary until, in about what
the bible calls "the fullness of time," we would have clear mutton and
no missionary. That is God's way. The next great charge against me is
that I have disgraced my parents by expressing my honest thoughts. No
man can disgrace his parents that way. I want my children to express
their real opinions, whether they agree with mine or not. I want my
children to find out more than I have found, and I would be gratified
to have them discover the errors I have made. And if my father and
mother were still alive I feel and know that I am pursuing a course of
which they would approve. I am true to my manhood. But think of it!
Suppose the father of Dr. Talmage had been a Methodist and his mother
an infidel. Then what. Would he have to disgrace them both to be a
Presbyterian. The disciples of Christ, according to this doctrine,
disgraced their parents. The founder of every new religion, according
to this doctrine, was a disgrace to his father and mother. Now there
must have been a time when a Talmage was not a Presbyterian, and the
one that left something else to join that church disgraced his father
and mother. Why, if this doctrine be true why do you send missionaries
to other lands and ask those people to disgrace their parents? If this
doctrine be true nobody has religious liberty except foundlings, and it
should be written over every Foundling Hospital: "Home for Religious
Liberty." It won't do.
What is the next thing I have said? I have taken the ground, and I
take it again today, that the bible has only words of humiliation for
woman. The bible treats woman as the slave, the serf of man, and
wherever that book is believed in thoroughly woman is a slave. It is
the infidelity in the church that gives her what liberty she has today.
Oh! but, says the gentleman, think of the heroines in the bible. How
could a book be opposed to woman which has pictured such heroines?
Well, that is a good argument. Let's answer it. Who are the heroines?
He tells us. The first is Esther. Who was she? Esther is a very
peculiar book, and the story is about this: Ahasaerus was a king. His
wife's name was Vashti. She didn't please him. He divorced her, and
advertised for another. A gentleman by the name of Mordecai had a good
looking niece, and he took her to market. Her name was Esther. I
don't feel like reading the whole of the second chapter. It is
sufficient to say she was selected. After a time there was a gentleman
by the name of Haman who, I should think, was in the cabinet, according
to the story. And this man Mordecai began to put on considerable style
because his niece was the king's wife, and he would not bow, or he
would not rise, or he would not meet this gentleman with marks of
distinguished consideration, so he made up his mind to have him hung.
Then they got out an order to kill the Jews, and this Esther went to
see the king. In those days they believed in the Bismarkian style of
government--all power came from the king, not from the people; if
anybody went to see this king without an invitation, and he failed to
hold out his sceptre to him, the person was killed just to preserve the
dignity of the monarch. When Esther arrived he held out the sceptre,
and there-upon she induced him to send out another order for the
fellows who were to kill the Jews, and they killed 75,000 or 80,000 of
them. And they came back and said, "Kill Haman and his ten sons," and
they hung the family up. That is all there is to the story. And yet
this Esther is held up as a model of womanly grace and tenderness, and
there is not a more infamous story in the literature of the world.
The next heroine is Ruth. I admit, that is a very pretty story. But
Ruth was guilty of more things that would be deemed indiscreet than any
girl in Brooklyn. That is all there is about Ruth. The next heroine
is Hannah. And what do you suppose was the matter with her? She made a
coat for her boy; that's all. I have known a woman make a whole suit!
The next heroine was Abigail. She was the wife of Natal. King David
had a few soldiers with him, and he called at the house of Natal, and
asked if he could not get food for his men. Abigail went down to give
him something to eat, and she was very much struck with David, David
evidently fancied her. Natal died within a week. I think he was
poisoned. David and Abigail were married. If that had happened in
Chicago there would have been a coroner's jury, and an inquest; but
that is all there was to that.
The next is Dorcas. She was in the new testament. She was real good
to the ministers. Those ladies have always stood well with the church.
She was real good to the poor. She died one day, and you never hear of
her again.
Then there was that person that was raised from the dead. I would like
to know from a person that had recently been raised from the dead,
where he was when he was wanted, what he was traveling about, and what
he was engaged in. I cannot imagine a more interesting person than one
that has just been raised from the dead. Lazarus comes from the tomb,
and I think sometimes that there must be a mistake about it, because
when they come to die again thousands of people would say, "Why, he
knows all about it!" Would it not be noted if a man had two funerals?
Now, then, these are all the heroines, to show you how little they
thought of woman in that day. In the days of the old testament they
did not even tell us when the mother of us all (Eve) died, nor where
she is buried, nor anything about it. They do not even tell us where
the mother of Christ sleeps, nor when she died. Never is she spoken of
after the morning of the resurrection. He who descended from the cross
went not to see her; and the son had no word for the broken-hearted
mother.
The story is not true. I believe Christ was a great and good man, but
He had nothing about Him miraculous except the courage to tell what he
thought about the religion of His day. The new testament, in relating
what occurred between Christ and his mother, mentions three instances;
once, when they thought He had been lost in Jerusalem, when He said to
them, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" Next,
at the marriage of Cana, when He said to the woman, "What have I to do
with thee?"--words which He never said; and again from the cross,
"Mother, behold Thy Son;" and to the disciple, "Behold thy Mother!"
So of Mary Magdalene. In some respects there is no character in the
new testament that so appeals to us as loving Christ--first at the
sepulchre--and yet when He meets her after the resurrection He had for
her the comfort only of the chilling words, "Touch me not!" I don't
believe it. There were thousands of heroic women then. There are
heroic women now. Think of the women who cling to fallen and disgraced
husbands day by day, until they reach the gutter, and who stoop down to
lift them from that position, and raise them up to be men once more!
Every country is civilized in proportion as it honors woman. There are
women in England working in mines, deformed by labor, that would become
wild beasts were it not for the love they bear for home. Can you find
among the women of the new testament any women that can equal the women
born of Shakespeare's brain? You can find no woman like Isabella,
where reason and purity blend into perfect truth; no woman like Juliet,
where passion and purity meet like red and white within the bosom of a
flower; no woman like Imogen, who said, "What is it to be false?" No
woman like Cordelia, that would not show her wealth of love in hope of
gain; nor like Hermione, who bore the cross of shame for years; nor
like Miranda, who told her love as the flower exposes its bosom to the
sun; nor like Desdemona, who was so pure that she could not suspect
that another could suspect her of a crime.
And we are told that woman sinned first and man second; that man was
made first and woman not till afterwards. The idea is that we could
have gotten along without the woman well enough, but they never could
have gotten along without us. I tell you that love is better than
piety, love is better than all the ceremonial worship of the world, and
it is better to love something than to believe anything on this globe.
So this minister, seeking a mark to throw an arrow somewhere--trying to
find some little place in the armor--charges me with having disparaged
Queen Victoria. That you know is next to blasphemy. Well, I never did
anything of the kind--never said a word against her in in life, neither
as wife, or mother, or Queen--never doubted but that she is a good
woman enough, and I have always admitted that her reputation was good
in the neighborhood where she resides. I never had any other opinion.
All I said in the world was--I was endeavoring to show that we are now
to have an aristocracy of brain and heart--that is all--and I said,
'speaking of Louis Napoleon, he was not satisfied with simply being an
emperor and having a little crown on his head, but wanted to prove that
he had something in his head, so he wrote the life of Julius Caesar,
and that made him a member of the French Academy; and speaking of King
William, upon whose head is the divine petroleum of authority, I asked
how he would like to exchange brains with Haeckel, the philosopher.
Then I went over to England, and said "Queen Victoria wears the garment
of power given her by blind fortune, by eyeless chance; 'George Eliot'
is arrayed in robes of glory, woven in the loom of her own genius."
Thereupon I am charged with disparaging a woman. And this priest, in
order to get even with me, digs open the grave of "George Eliot" and
endeavors to stain her unresisting dust. He calls her an
adulteress--the vilest word in the languages of men--and he does it
because she hated the Presbyterian creed, because she, according to his
definition, was an atheist, because she lived without faith and died
without fear, because she grandly bore the taunts and slanders of the
Christian world. "George Eliot" carried tenderly in her heart the
faults and frailties of her race. She saw the highway of eternal right
through all the winding paths, where folly vainly stalks with
thorn-pierced hands, the fading flowers of selfish joy; and whatever
you may think or I may think of the one mistake in all her sad and
loving life, I know and feel that in the court where her conscience sat
as judge she stood acquitted, pure as light and stainless as a star.
"George Eliot" has joined the choir invisible whose music is the
gladness of this world, and her wondrous lines, her touching poems,
will be read hundreds of years after every sermon in which a priest has
sought to stain her name shall have vanished utterly from human speech.
How appropriate here, with some slight change, the words of Laertes at
Ophelia's grave:
Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May
violets spring; I tell thee, priest and minister, A ministering angel
shall this woman be When thou liest howling.
I have no words with which to express my loathing hatred and
condemnation of the man who will stain a noble woman's grave.
The next argument in favor of the "sacred scriptures" is the argument
of numbers; and this minister congratulates himself that the infidels
could not carry a precinct, or a county, or a state in the United
States. Well, I tell you, they can come proportionately near it--just
in proportion that that part of the country is educated. The whole
world doesn't move together in one life. There has to be some man to
take a step forward and the people follow; and when they get where that
man was, some other Titan has taken another step, and you can see him
there on the great mountain of progress. That is why the world moves.
There must be pioneers, and if nobody is right except he who is with
the majority, then we must turn and walk toward the setting sun. He
says "We will settle this by suffrage." The Christian religion was
submitted to a popular vote in Jerusalem, and what was the result?
"Crucify Him "--an infamous result, showing that you can't depend on
the vote of barbarians. But I am told that there are 300,000,000
Christians in the world. Well, what of it? There are more Buddhists.
And they say, what a number of bibles are printed!--more bibles than
any other book. Does this prove anything? True, because more of them.
Suppose you should find published in the New York Herald something
about you, and you should go to the editor and tell him: "That is a
lie;" and he should say: "That can't be; the Herald has the largest
circulation of any paper in the world." Three hundred millions of
Christians, and here are the nations that prove the truth of
Christianity: Russia 80,000,000 Christians. I am willing to admit it;
a country without freedom of speech, without freedom of press--a
country in which every mouth is a Bastille and every tongue a prisoner
for life--a country in which assassins are the best men in it. They
call that Christian. Girls sixteen years of age, for having spoken in
favor of human liberty, are now working in Siberian mines. That is a
Christian country. Only a little while ago a man shot at the emperor
twice. The emperor was protected by his armor. The man was convicted,
and they asked him if he wished religious consolation. "No." "Do you
believe in a God?" "No;" if there was a God there would be no Russia.
Sixteen millions of Christians in Spain--Spain that never touched a
shore except as a robber--Spain that took the gold and silver of the
new world and used it as an engine of oppression in the old--a country
in which cruelty was worship, in which murder was prayer--a country
where flourished the Inquisition--I admit Spain is a Christian country.
If you don't believe it I do. Read the history of Holland, read the
history of South America, read the history of Mexico--a chapter of
cruelty beyond the power of language to express. I admit that Spain is
orthodox. If you will go there you will find the man who robs you and
asks God to forgive you--a country where infidelity hasn't made much
headway, but, thank God, where there is even yet a dawn, where there
are such men as Castelar and others, who begin to see that one
schoolhouse is equal to three cathedrals and one teacher worth all the
priests.
Italy is another Christian nation, with 28,000,000 Christians. In
Italy lives the only authorized agent of God, the pope. For hundreds
of years Italy was the beggar of the earth, and held out both hands.
Gold and silver flowed from every land into her palms, and she became
covered with nunneries, monasteries, and the pilgrims of the world.
Italy was sacred dust. Her soil was a perpetual blessing, her sky was
an eternal smile. Italy was guilty not simply of the death of the
Catholic church, but Italy was dead and buried and would have been in
her grave still had it not been for Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour.
When the prophecy of Garibaldi shall be fulfilled, when the priests,
with spades in their hands, shall dig ditches to drain the Pontine
marshes, when the monasteries shall be factories, when the whirling
wheels of industry shall drown the drowsy and hypocritical prayers,
then and not till then, will Italy be great and free. Italy is the
only instance in our history and in the history of the world, so far as
we know, of the resurrection of a nation. She is the first fruits of
them that sleep.
Portugal is another Christian country. She made her living in the
slave trade for centuries. I admit that all the blessings that that
country enjoyed flowed naturally from Catholicism, and we believe in
the same scriptures. If you don't believe it, read the history of the
persecution of the Jewish people. I admit that Germany is a Christian
nation; that is, Christians are in power. When the bill was introduced
for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of the Jews, Bismark
spoke against it, and said "Germany is a Christian nation, and
therefore, we cannot pass the bill." Austria is another Christian
nation. If you don't believe it, read the history of Hungary, and, if
you still have doubts, read the history of the partition of Poland.
But there is one good thing in that country. They believe in education,
and education is the enemy of ecclesiasticism. Every thoroughly
educated man is his own church, and his own pope, and his own priest.
They tell me that the United States--our country--is Christian. I deny
it. It is neither Christian nor pagan; it is human. Our fathers
retired all the gods from politics. Our fathers laid down the doctrine
that the right to govern comes from the consent of the governed, and
not from the clouds. Our fathers knew that if they put an infinite God
in the Constitution there would be no room left for the people. Our
fathers used the language of Lincoln, and they made a government for
the people by the people. This is not a Christian country. Some
gentleman said, "How about Delaware?" I told him there was a man in
Washington some twenty or thirty years ago who came there and said he
was a Revolutionary soldier and wanted a pension. He was so bent and
bowed over that the wind blew his shoestrings into his eyes. They
asked him how old he was, and he said fifty years. "Why, good man, you
can't get a pension, because the war was over before you were born.
You mustn't fool us." "Well," said he, "I'll tell you the truth: I
lived sixty years in Delaware, but I never count it, and hope God
won't." And these Christian nations which have been brought forward as
the witnesses of the truth of the scriptures owe $25,000,000,000, which
represents Christian war, Christian cannon, Christian shot, and
Christian shell. The sum is so great that the imagination is dazed in
its contemplation. That is the result of loving your neighbor as
yourself.
The next great argument brought forward by these gentlemen is the
persecution of the Jews. We are told in the nineteenth century that
God has the Jews persecuted simply for the purpose of establishing the
authenticity of the scriptures, and every Jewish home burned in Russia
throws light on the gospel, and every violated Jewish maiden is another
evidence that God still takes an interest in the holy scriptures. That
is their doctrine. They are "fulfilling prophecy." The Christian
grasps the Jew, strips him, robs him, makes him an outcast, and then
points to him as a fulfillment of prophecy; and we are today laying the
foundation of future persecution--we are teaching our children the
monstrous falsehood that Jews crucified God, and the nation consented.
They crucified a good man. What nation has not? What race has not?
Think of the number killed by the Presbyterians; by the Catholics.
Every sect, with maybe two or three exceptions, have crucified their
fellows, and every race has burned its greatest and its best. And yet
we are filling the minds of children with hatred of the Jewish people.
It is a poor business. "Ah?" but they say, "these people are cursed by
God." I say they never had any good fortune until the Jehovah of the
bible deserted them. Whenever they have had a reasonable chance they
have been the most prosperous people in the world. I never saw one
begging. I never saw one in the criminal dock. For hundreds of years
they were not allowed to own any land, for hundreds of years they were
not allowed to work at any trade; they were driven simply to dealing in
money, and in precious stones, and things of that character, and, by a
kind of poetic justice, they have today the control of the money of the
world. I am glad to see that kings and emperors go to the offices of
the Jews, with their hats in their hands, to have their notes
discounted. And yet I am told by clergymen that all this infamy has
been kept up simply to establish the truth of the gospel. I despise
such doctrine. As long as the liberty of one Jew is unsafe, my liberty
is not secure. Liberty for all, and not until then will the liberty of
any be assured. "Ah"; but says this man, "nobody ever died cheerfully
for a lie. The Jewish people have suffered persecution for 1,600
years, and they have suffered it cheerfully." If this doctrine is true,
then Judaism must be true and Christianity must be false. But
martyrdom doesn't prove the truth if the martyr knows it. It simply
proves the barbarity of his persecutors, and has no sincerity. That is
all it proves.
But you must remember that this gentleman who believes in this doctrine
is a Presbyterian, and why should a Presbyterian object? After a few
hundred years of burning he expects to enjoy the eternal auto da fe of
hell--an auto da fe that will be presided over by God and His angels,
and they will be expected to applaud. He is a Presbyterian; and what
is that? It is the worst religion of this earth. I admit that
thousands and millions of Presbyterians are good people, no man ever
being half so bad as his creed. I am not attacking them. I am
attacking their creed. I am attacking what this religion calls
"Tidings of great joy." And, according to that, hundreds of billions
and billions of years ago our fate was irrevocably and forever fixed,
and God in the secret counsels of His own inscrutable will, made up His
mind whom He would save and whom He would damn. When thinking of that
God I always think of the mistake of a Methodist preacher during the
war. He commenced the prayer--and never did one more appropriate for
the Presbyterian God or the Methodist go up--"O, Thou great and
unscrupulous God." This Presbyterian believes that billions of years
before that baby in the cradle--that little dimpled child, basking in
the light of a mother's smile--was born, God had made up His mind to
damn it; and when Talmage looks at one of those children who will
probably be damned he is cheerful about it; he enjoys it. That is
Presbyterianism--that God made man and damned him for His own glory. If
there is such a God, I hate Him with every drop of my blood; and if
there is a heaven it must be where He is not. Now think of that
doctrine! Only a little while ago there was a ship from Liverpool out
eighty days with its rudder washed away; for ten days nothing to
eat--nothing but the bare decks and hunger; and the captain took a
revolver in his hand and put it to his brain and said: "Some of us must
die for the others. And it might as well be I." One of his companions
grasped the pistol and said: "Captain, wait; wait one day more. We can
live another day." And the next morning the horizon was rich with a
sail, and they were saved. And yet if Presbyterianism is true; if that
man had put the bullet through his infinitely generous brain so that
his comrades could have eaten of his flesh and reached their homes and
felt about their necks the dimpled arms of children and the kisses of
wives upon their lips--if Presbyterianism be true, God had a constable
ready there to clutch that soul and thrust it down to eternal hell.
Tidings of great joy. And yet this is religion. Why, if that doctrine
be true, every soldier in the Revolutionary War who died not a
Christian has been damned; every one in the War of 1812, who kept our
flag upon the sea, if he died not a Christian has been damned; and
every one in the Civil War who fought to keep our flag in heaven, not a
Christian, and the ones who died in Andersonville and Libby, not
Christians, are now in the prison of God, where the famine of
Andersonville and Libby would be regarded as a joy. Orthodox
Christianity! Why, we have an account in the bible--it comes from the
other world--from both countries--from heaven and from hell--let us see
what it is. Here is a rich man who dies. The only fault about him
was, he was rich; no other crime was charged against him. We are told
that the rich man died, and when he lifted up his eyes he found no
sympathy, yet even in hell he remembered his five brethren, and prayed
that some one should be sent to them so that they should not come
there. I tell you I had rather be in hell with human sympathy than in
heaven without it.
The bible is not inspired, and ministers know nothing about another
world. They don't know. I am satisfied there is no world of eternal
pain. If there is a world of joy, so much the better. I have never
put out the faintest star of human hope that ever trembled in the night
of life. There was a time when I was not; after that I was; now I am.
And it is just as probable that I will live again as it was that I
could have lived before I did. Let it go. Ah! but what will life be?
The world will be here. Men and women will be here. The page of
history will be open. The walls of the world will be adorned with art,
the niches with sculpture; music will be here, and all there is of life
and joy. And there will be homes here, and the fireside, and there
will be a common hope without a common fear. Love will be here, and
love is the only bow on life's dark cloud. Love was the first to dream
of immortality. Love is the morning and evening star. It shines upon
the child; it sheds its radiance upon the peaceful tomb. Love is the
mother of beauty--the mother of melody, for music is its voice. Love
is the builder of every hope, the kindler of every fire on every
hearth. Love is the enchanter, the magician that changes worthless
things to joy, and makes right royal kings and queens out of common
clay. Love is the perfume of that wondrous flower the heart. Without
that divine passion, without that divine sway, we are less than beasts,
and with it earth is heaven and we are gods.