Books: Lectures Of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Vol. I

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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.

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