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

C >> Col. Robert Green Ingersoll >> Lectures Of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Vol. I

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27