YOU had better live well and die wicked.
You had better live well and die cursing than live badly and die
praying.
It would not do to have the common people understand that a man could
deny the Bible, refuse to look at the cross, contend that Christ was
only a man, and yet die as calmly as Calvin did after he had murdered
Servetus, or as did King David after advising one son to kill another.
The church has taken great pains to show that the last moments of all
infidels (that Christians did not succeed in burning) were infinitely
wretched and despairing. It was alleged that words could not paint the
horrors that were endured by a dying infidel. Every good Christian was
expected to, and generally did, believe these accounts. They have been
told and retold in every pulpit of the world. Protestant ministers have
repeated the inventions of Catholic priests, and Catholics, by a kind
of theological comity, have sworn to the falsehoods told by Protestants.
Upon this point they have always stood together, and will as long as the
same calumny can be used by both.
Upon the death-bed subject the clergy grow eloquent. When describing the
shudderings and shrieks of the dying unbeliever, their eyes glitter with
delight.
It is a festival.
They are no longer men. They become hyenas. They dig open graves. They
devour the reputations of the dead.
It is a banquet.
Unsatisfied still, they paint the terrors of hell. They gaze at the
souls of the infidels writhing in the coils of the worm that never dies.
They see them in flames--in oceans of fire--in gulfs of pain--in abysses
of despair. They shout with joy. They applaud.
It is an _auto da fe_, presided over by God and his angels.
The men they thus describe were not atheists; they were all believers
in God, in special providence, and in the immortality of the soul. They
believed in the accountability of man--in the practice of virtue, in
justice, and liberty, but they did not believe in that collection of
follies and fables called the Bible.
In order to show that an infidel must die overwhelmed with remorse and
fear, they have generally selected from all the "unbelievers" since the
day of Christ five men--the Emperor Julian, Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot,
David Hume, and Thomas Paine.
Hardly a minister in the United States has attempted to "answer" me
without referring to the death of one or more of these men.
In vain have these calumniators of the dead been called upon to prove
their statements. In vain have rewards been offered to any priestly
maligner to bring forward the evidence.
Let us once for all dispose of these slanders--of these pious calumnies.