To teach the alphabet is to inaugurate a revolution.
To build a school house is to construct a fort.
Every library is an arsenal filled with the weapons and ammunition of
Progress, and every fact is a monitor with sides of iron and a turret of
steel.
I thank the inventors, the discoverers, the thinkers. I thank Columbus
and Magellan. I thank Galileo, and Copernicus, and Kepler, and Des
Cartes, and Newton, and La Place. I thank Locke, and Hume, and Bacon,
and Shakespeare, and Kant, and Fichte, and Liebnitz, and Goethe. I thank
Fulton, and Watts, and Volta, and Galvani, and Franklin, and Morse, who
made lightning the messenger of man. I thank Humboldt, the Shakespeare
of science. I thank Crompton and Arkwright, from whose brains leaped the
looms and spindles that clothe the world. I thank Luther for protesting
against the abuses of the church, and I denounce him because he was
the enemy of liberty. I thank Calvin for writing a book in favor of
religious freedom, and I abhor him because he burned Servetus. I thank
Knox for resisting episcopal persecution, and I hate him because he
persecuted in his turn. I thank the Puritans for saying "Resistance to
tyrants is obedience to God," and yet I am compelled to say that they
were tyrants themselves. I thank Thomas Paine because he was a believer
in liberty, and because he did as much to make my country free as any
other human being. I thank Voltaire, that great man who, for half a
century, was the intellectual emperor 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 Darwin, Haeckel and Buchner, Spencer,
Tyndall and Huxley, Draper, Leckey and Buckle. I thank the inventors,
the discoverers, the thinkers, the scientists, the explorers. 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. They are the Titans who carried Olympus by assault, and
who will soon stand victors upon Sinai's crags.
We are beginning to learn that to exchange a mistake for the truth--a
superstition for a fact--to ascertain the real--is to progress.
Happiness is the only possible good, and all that tends to the happiness
of man is right, and is of value. All that tends to develop the bodies
and minds of men; all that gives us better houses, better clothes,
better food, better pictures, grander music, better heads, better
hearts; all that renders us more intellectual and more loving, nearer
just; that makes us better husbands and wives, better children, better
citizens--all these things combined produce what I call Progress.
Man advances only as he overcomes the obstructions of Nature, and this
can be done only by labor and by thought. Labor is the foundation of
all. Without labor, and without great labor, progress is impossible. The
progress of the world depends upon the men who walk in the fresh furrows
and through the rustling corn; upon those who sow and reap; upon those
whose faces are radiant with the glare of furnace fires; upon the
delvers in the mines, and the workers in shops; upon those who give to
the winter air the ringing music of the axe; upon those who battle with
the boisterous billows of the sea; upon the inventors and discoverers;
upon the brave thinkers.
From the surplus produced by labor, schools and universities are built
and fostered. From this surplus the painter is paid for the productions
of the pencil; the sculptor for chiseling shapeless rock into forms
divinely beautiful, and the poet for singing the hopes, the loves, the
memories, and the aspirations of the world. This surplus has given us
the books in which we converse with the dead and living kings of the
human race. It has given us all there is of beauty, of elegance, and of
refined happiness.
I am aware that there is a vast difference of opinion as to what
progress really is; that many denounce the ideas of to-day as
destructive of all happiness--of all good. I know that there are many
worshipers of the past. They venerate the ancient because it is ancient.
They see no beauty in anything from which they do not blow the dust of
ages with the breath of praise. They say, no masters like the old; no
religion, no governments like the ancient; no orators, no poets, no
statesmen like those who have been dust for two thousand years. Others
love the modern simply because it is modern.
We should have gratitude enough to acknowledge the obligations we are
under to the great and heroic of antiquity, and independence enough not
to believe what they said simply because they said it.
With the idea that labor is the basis of progress goes the truth that
labor must be free. The laborer must be a free man.
The free man, working for wife and child, gets his head and hands in
partnership.
To do the greatest amount of work in the shortest space of time, is the
problem of free labor.
Slavery does the least work in the longest space of time.
Free labor will give us wealth. Free thought will give us truth.
Slowly but surely man is freeing his imagination of these sexless
phantoms, of these cruel ghosts. Slowly but surely he is rising above
the superstitions of the past. He is learning to rely upon himself.
He is beginning to find that labor is the only prayer that ought to be
answered, and that hoping, toiling, aspiring, suffering men and women
are of more importance than all the ghosts that ever wandered through
the fenceless fields of space.
The believers in ghosts claim still, that they are the only wise and
virtuous people upon the earth; claim still, that there is a difference
between them and unbelievers so vast, that they will be infinitely
rewarded, and the others infinitely punished.
I ask you to-night, do the theories and doctrines of the theologians
satisfy the heart or brain of the Nineteenth Century?
Have the churches the confidence of mankind?
Does the merchant give credit to a man because he belongs to a church?
Does the banker loan money to a man because he is a Methodist or
Baptist?
Will a certificate of good standing in any church be taken as collateral
security for one dollar?
Will you take the word of a church member, or his note, or his oath,
simply because he is a church member?
Are the clergy, as a class, better, kinder and more generous to their
families--to their fellow-men--than doctors, lawyers, merchants and
farmers?
Does a belief in ghosts and unreasonable things necessarily make people
honest?
When a man loses confidence in Moses, must the people lose confidence in
him?
Does not the credit system in morals breed extravagance in sin?
Why send missionaries to other lands while every penitentiary in ours is
filled with criminals?--
Is it philosophical to say that they who do right carry a cross?
Is it a source of joy to think that perdition is the destination of
nearly all of the children of men?
Is it worth while to quarrel about original sin--when there is so much
copy?
Does it pay to dispute about baptism, and the trinity, and
predestination, and apostolic succession and the infallibility of
churches, of popes and of books? Does all this do any good?
Are the theologians welcomers of new truths? Are they noted for their
candor? Do they treat an opponent with common fairness? Are they
investigators? Do they pull forward, or do they hold back?
Is science indebted to the church for a solitary fact?
What church is an asylum for a persecuted truth?
What great reform has been inaugurated by the church?
Did the church abolish slavery?
Has the church raised its voice against war?
I used to think that there was in religion no real restraining force.
Upon this point my mind has changed. Religion will prevent man from
committing artificial crimes and offenses.
A man committed murder. The evidence was so conclusive that he confessed
his guilt.
He was asked why he killed his fellow-man.