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

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According to them, all of the diseases were produced as a punishment by
the good ghosts, or out of pure malignity by the bad ones. There were,
properly speaking, no diseases; the sick were simply possessed by
ghosts. The science of medicine consisted in knowing how to persuade
these ghosts to vacate the premises and for thousands of years all
diseases were treated with incantations, hideous noises, with the
beating of drums and gongs; everything was done to make the position of
a ghost as unpleasant as possible; and they generally succeeded in
making things so disagreeable that if the ghost did not leave, the
patient died. These ghosts were supposed to be different in rank, power
and dignity. Now, then, a man pretended to have won the favor of some
powerful ghost who gave him power over the little ones. Such a man
became a very great physician. It was found that a certain kind of
smoke was exceedingly offensive to the nostrils of your ordinary ghost.
With this smoke the sick room would be filled until the ghost vanished
or the patient died. It was also believed that certain words, when
properly pronounced, were the most effective weapons, for it was for a
long time supposed that Latin words were the best, I suppose because
Latin was a dead language. For thousands of years medicine consisted in
driving the devils out of men. In some instances bargains and promises
were made with the ghosts. One case is given where a multitude of
devils traded a man off for a herd of swine. In this transaction the
devils were the losers, the swine having immediately drowned themselves
in the sea. This idea of disease appears to have been almost universal
and is not yet extinct. The contortions of the epileptic, the strange
twitching of those afflicted with cholera, were all seized as proof that
the bodies of men were filled with vile and malignant spirits. Whoever
endeavored to account for these things by natural causes; whoever
endeavored to cure disease by natural means was denounced as an Infidel.
To explain anything was a crime. It was to the interest of the
sacerdotal class that all things should be accounted for by the will and
power of God and the devil. The moment it is admitted that all
phenomena are within the domain of the natural, and that all the prayers
in the world cannot change one solitary fact, the necessity for the
priest disappears. Religion breathes the idea of miracles. Take from
the minds of men the idea of the supernatural, and superstition ceases
to exist; for this reason the Church has always despised the man who
explains the wonderful. The moment that it began to be apparent that
prayer could do nothing for the body, the priest shifted his ground and
began praying for the soul.

After the devil was substantially abandoned in the practice of medicine,
and when it was admitted that God had nothing to do with ordinary coughs
and colds, it was still believed that all the diseases were sent by Him
as punishment for the people; it was thought to be a kind of blasphemy
to even stay the ravages of pestilence. Formerly, when a pestilence
fell upon a people, the arguments of the priest were boundless. He told
the people that they had refused to pay their tithes, and they had
doubted some of the doctrines of the church, that in their hearts they
had contempt for some of the priests of the Lord, and God was now taking
his revenge, and the people, for the most part, believed this issue of
falsehood, and hastened to fall upon their knees and to pour out their
wealth upon the altars of hypocrisy.

The Church never wanted disease to be absolutely under the control of
man. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, preached a sermon
against vaccination. His idea was that if God had decreed that through
all eternity certain men should die of small pox, it was a frightful sin
to endeavor to prevent it; that plagues and pestilence were instruments
in the hands of God with which to gain the love and worship of mankind;
to find the cure for the disease was to take the punishment from the
Church. No one tries to cure the ague with prayer because quinine has
been found to be altogether more reliable. Just as soon as a specific
is found for a disease, that disease is left out of the list of prayer.
The number of diseases with which God from time to time afflicts mankind
is continually decreasing, because the number of diseases that man can
cure is continually increasing. In a few years all diseases will be
under the control of man. The science of medicine has but one enemy--
superstition. Man was afraid to save his body for fear he would lose
his soul. Is it any wonder that the people in those days believed in
and taught the infamous doctrine of eternal punishment, that makes God a
heartless monster and man a slimy hypocrite and slave?

The ghosts were also historians, and wrote the grossest absurdities.
They wrote as though they had been eye witnesses of every occurrence.
They told all the past, they predicted all the future, with an impudence
that amounted to sublimity. They said that the Tartars originally came
from hell, and that they were called Tartars because that was one of the
names of hell. These gentlemen accounted for the red on the breasts of
robins from the fact that those birds used to carry water to the unhappy
infants in hell. Other eminent historians say that Nero was in the
habit of vomiting frogs. When I read that, I said some of the croakers
of the present day would be better for such a vomit. Others say that
the walls of a city fell down in answer to prayer. They tell us that
King Arthur was not born like other mortals; that he had great luck in
killing giants; that one of the giants that he killed wore clothes
woven from the beards of kings that he had slain, and, to cap the
climax, the authors of this history were rewarded for having written the
only reliable history of their country. These are the men from whom we
get our creeds and our confessions of faith.

In all the histories of those days there is hardly a truth. Facts were
not considered of any importance. They wrote, and the people believed
that the tracks of Pharaoh's chariot were still visible upon the sands
of the Red Sea, and that they had been miraculously preserved as
perpetual witnesses of the miracles that had been performed, and they
said to any man who denied it, "Go there and you will find the tracks
still upon the sand." They accounted for everything as the work of good
and evil spirits; with cause and effect they had nothing to do. Facts
were in no way related to each other. God, governed by infinite
caprice, filled the world with miracles and disconnected events, and
from his quiver came the arrows of pestilence and death. The moment the
idea is abandoned that everything in this universe is natural--that all
phenomena are the necessary links in the endless chain of being--the
conception of history becomes impossible that the ghost of the present
is not the child of the past; the present is not the mother of the
future. In the domain of superstition all is accident and caprice; and
do not, I pray you, forget that the writers of our creeds and
confessions of faith believed this to be a world of chance. Nothing
happens by accident; nothing happens by chance. In the wide universe
everything is necessarily produced, every effect has behind it a cause,
every effect is in its turn a cause, and there is in the wide domain of
the infinite not room enough for a miracle.

When I say this, I mean this is my idea. I may be wrong, but that is my
idea. It was believed by our intelligent ancestors that all law derived
its greatness and force from the fact that it had been communicated to
man by ghosts. Of course, it is not pretended that the ghosts told
everybody the law, but they told it to a few, and the few told it to the
people, and the people, as a rule, paid them exceedingly well for the
trouble. It was a long time before the people commenced making laws for
themselves, and, strange as it may appear, most of their laws are vastly
superior to the ghost article. Through the web and woof of human
legislation gradually began to run and shine and glitter the golden
thread of justice.

During these years of darkness it was believed that, rather than see an
act of injustice done, rather than see the guilty triumph, some ghost
would interfere and I do wish, from the bottom of my heart, that that
was the truth. There never was forced upon my heart a more frightful
conviction than this--the right does not always prevail; there never
was forced upon my mind a more cruel conclusion than this--innocence is
not always a sufficient shield. I wish it was. I wish, too, that man
suffered nothing but that which he brings upon himself and yet I find
that in nine districts in India, between the 1st day of last January and
the 1st day of June, 2,800,000 people starved to death, and that little
children, with their lips upon the breasts of famine, died, wasted away.
And why, simply because a little while before the wind did not veer the
one hundredth part of a degree, and send clouds over the country,
freighted with rain, freighted with love and joy. But if that wind had
just turned that way there would have been happy men, women and
children, all clad in the garments of health. I wish that I could know
in my heart that there was some power that would see to it that men and
women got exact justice somewhere. I do wish that I knew--the right
would prevail--that innocence was an infinite shield.

During these years it was believed that rather than see an act of
injustice done some ghost would interfere. This belief, as a rule, gave
great satisfaction to the victorious party, and, as the other man was
dead, no complaint was ever made by him. This doctrine was a
sanctification of brute force and chance. Prisoners were made to grasp
hot irons, and if it burned them their guilt was established. Others
were tied hands and feet and cast into the sea, and if they sank, the
verdict of guilt was unanimous; if they did not sink then they said
water is such a pure element that it refuses to take a guilty person,
and consequently he is a witch or wizard. Why, in England, persons
accused of crime could appeal to the cross, and to a piece of
sacramental bread. If he could swallow this without choking he was
acquitted. And this practice was continued until the time of King
Edward, who was choked to death; after which it was discontinued.

Ghosts and their followers always took delight in torturing with unusual
pain any infraction of their laws, and generally death was the penalty.
Sometimes, when a man committed only murder, he was permitted to flee to
a place of refuge--murder being only a crime against man--but for saying
certain words, or denying certain doctrines, or for worshiping wrong
ghosts, or for failing to pray to the right one, or for laughing at a
priest, or for saying that wine was not blood, or bread was not flesh,
or for failing to regard rams' horns as artillery, or for saying that a
raven as a rule, was a poor landlord, death, produced by all the ways
that ingenuity or hatred could devise, was the penalty suffered by these
men. I tell you tonight law is a growth; law is a science. Right and
wrong exist in the nature of things. Things are not right because they
are commanded; they are not wrong because they are prohibited. They
are prohibited because we believe them wrong; they are commended because
we believe them right. There are real crimes enough without creating
artificial ones. All progress in legislation for a thousand years has
consisted in repealing the laws of the ghosts. The idea of right and
wrong is born of man's capacity to enjoy and suffer. If man could not
suffer, if he could not inflict injury upon his brother, if he could
neither feel nor inflict punishment, the idea of law, the idea of right,
the idea of wrong, never could have entered into his brain. If man
could not suffer, if he could not inflict suffering, the word conscience
never would have passed the lips of man. There is one good--happiness.
There is one sin--selfishness. All laws should be for the preservation
of the one and the destruction of the other. Under the regime of the
ghosts the laws were not understood to exist in the nature of things;
they were supposed to be irresponsible commands, and these commands were
not supposed to rest upon reason; they were simply the product of
arbitrary will. These penalties for the violations of those laws were
as cruel as the penalties were absurd. There were over two hundred
offenses for which man was punished with death. Think of it! And these
laws are said to have come from a most merciful God. And yet we have
become civilized to that degree in this country that in the State of New
York there is only one crime punishable with death. Think of it! Did I
not tell you that we were now civilizing our gods? The tendency of
those horrible laws, the tendency of those frightful penalties, was to
blot the idea of justice from the human soul. Now, I want to show you
how perfectly every department of human knowledge, or rather of
ignorance, was saturated with superstition. I will for a moment refer
to the science of language.

It was thought by our fathers that Hebrew was the original language;
that it was taught to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by the Almighty
himself. Every fact inconsistent with that idea was thrown away.
According to the ghosts, the trouble at the Tower of Babel accounted for
the fact that all the people did not speak the Hebrew language. The
Babel question settled all questions in the science of language. After
a time so many facts were found to be so inconsistent with the Hebrew
idea that it began to fall into disrepute, and other languages began to
be used. Andrew Kent published a work on the science of language, in
which he stated that God spoke to Adam, and Adam answered, in Hebrew,
and that the serpent probably spoke to Eve in French. In 1580 another
celebrated work was published at Antwerp, in which the whole matter was
put at rest, showing beyond a doubt that the language spoken in Paradise
was neither more nor less than plain Holland Dutch. Another celebrated
writer, a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, discouraged the idea that
all languages could be traced to one; he maintained that language was
of natural growth; that we speak as naturally as we grow; we talk as
naturally as sings a bird, or as blooms and blossoms a flower.
Experience teaches us that this be so; words are continually dying and
continually may being born--words are the garments of thought. Through
the lapse of time some were as rude as the skins of wild beasts, and
others pleasing and cultured like silk and gold. Words have been born
of hatred and revenge, of love and self sacrifice and fear, of agony and
joy the stars have fashioned them, and in them mingled the darkness and
the dawn.

Every word that we get from the past is, so to speak, a mummy robed in
the linen of the grave. They are the crystallizations of human history,
of all that man enjoyed, of all that man has suffered, his victories and
defeats, all that he has lost and won. Words are the shadows of all
that has been; they are the mirrors of all that is. The ghosts also
enlightened our fathers in astronomy and geology. According to them the
world was made out of nothing, and a little more nothing having been
taken than was used in the construction of the world, the stars were
made out of the scraps that were left over. Cosmos, in the sixth
century, taught that the stars were impelled by angels, who carried them
upon their shoulders, rolled them in front of them, or drew them after.
He also taught that each angel who pushed a star took great pains to
observe what the other angels were doing, so that the relative distances
between the stars might always remain the same.

He stated that this world was a vast body of water, with a strip of land
on the outside; that Adam and Eve lived on the outer strip; that their
descendants were drowned on the outer strip, all except Noah and his
family; he accounted for night and day by saying that on the outer
strip of land was a mountain, around which the sun revolved, producing
darkness when it was hidden from sight, and daylight when it emerged;
he also declared the earth to be flat. This he proved by many passages
from the Bible; among other reasons for believing the earth to be flat
he referred to a passage in the New Testament, which says that Christ
shall come again in glory and power, and every eye shall see him, and
said, now, if the world is round how are the people on the other side
going to see Christ when he comes? That settled the question, and the
church not only indorsed this book but declared that whoever believed
either less or more was a heretic and would be dealt with as such.

In those blessed days ignorance was a king and science was an outcast.
The church knew that the moment the earth ceased to be the center of the
universe, and became a mere speck in the starry sphere of existence,
every religion would become a thing of the past. In the name and by the
authority of the ghosts, men enslaved their fellowmen; they trampled
upon the rights of women and children. In the name and by the authority
of ghosts, they bought and sold each other. They filled heaven with
tyrants and the earth with slaves. They filled the present with
intolerance and the future with horror. In the name and by the authority
of the ghosts, they declared superstition to be the real religion. In
the name and by the authority of the ghosts, they imprisoned the human
mind; they polluted the conscience, they subverted justice, and they
sainted hypocrisy. I have endeavored in some degree to show you what
has been and always will be when men are governed by superstition.

When they destroy the sublime standard of reason; when they take the
words of others and do not investigate them themselves, even the great
men of those days appear nearly as weak as the most ignorant. One of
the greatest men of the world, an astronomer second to none, discoverer
of the three great laws that explain the solar system, was an astrologer
and believed that he could predict the career of a man by finding what
star was in the ascendant at his birth. He believed in what is called
the music of the spheres, and he ascribed the qualities of the music--
alto, bass, tenor and treble--to certain of the planets. Another man
kept an idiot, whose words he put down and then put them together in
such a manner as to make promises, and waited patiently to see that they
were fulfilled. Luther believed he had actually seen the devil and
discussed points of theology with him. The human mind was enchained.
Every idea, almost, was a mystery. Facts were looked upon as worthless;
only the wonderful was worth preserving. Devils were thought to be the
most industrious beings in the universe, and with these imps every
occurrence of an unusual character was connected. There was no order,
certainty; everything depended upon ghosts and phantoms, and man, for
the most part, considered himself at the mercy of malevolent spirits.
He protected himself as best he could with holy water, and with tapers,
and wafers, and cathedrals. He made noises to frighten the ghosts and
music to charm them; he fasted when he was hungry and he feasted when
he was not; he believed everything unreasonable; he humbled himself;
he crawled in the dust; he shut the doors and windows; and excluded
every ray of light from his soul; and he delayed not a day to repair
the walls of his own prison; and from the garden of the human heart
they plucked and trampled into the bloody dust the flowers and blossoms;
they denounced man as totally depraved; they made reason blasphemy;
they made pity a crime; nothing so delighted them as painting the
torments and tortures of the damned. Over the worm that never dies they
grew poetic. According to them, the cries ascending from hell were the
perfume of heaven.

They divided the world into saints and sinners, and all the saints were
going to heaven, and all the sinners yonder. Now, then, you stand in
the presence of a great disaster. A house is on fire, and there is seen
at a window the frightened face of a woman with a babe in her arms,
appealing for help; humanity cries out: "Will someone go to the
rescue?" They do not ask for a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Catholic;
they ask for a man; all at once there starts from the crowd one that
nobody ever suspected of being a saint; one may be, with a bad
reputation; but he goes up the ladder and is lost in the smoke and
flame; and a moment after he emerges, and the great circles of flame
hiss around him; in a moment more he has reached the window; in
another moment, with the woman and child in his arms, he reaches the
ground and gives his fainting burden to the bystanders and the people
all stand hushed for a moment, as they always do at such times, and then
the air is rent with acclamations. Tell me that that man is going to be
sent to hell, to eternal flames, who is willing to risk his life rather
than a woman and child should suffer from the fire one moment! I
despise that doctrine of hell! Any man that believes in eternal hell is
afflicted with at least two diseases--petrifaction of the heart and
petrifaction of the brain.

I have seen upon the field of battle a boy sixteen years of age struck
by a fragment of a shell; I have seen him fall; I have seen him die
with a curse upon his lips and the face of his mother in his heart.
Tell me that his soul will be hurled from the field of battle where he
lost his life that his country might live--where he lost his life for
the liberties of man--tell me that he will be hurled from that field to
eternal torment! I pronounce it an infamous lie. And yet, according to
these gentlemen, that is to be the fate of nearly all the splendid
fellows in this world.

I had in my possession a little while ago a piece of fresco that used to
adorn a church at Stratford-on-Avon, the place where Shakespeare
lived, and there was a picture representing the morning of the
resurrection and people were getting out of their graves and devils were
grabbing them by their heels. And there was an immense monster, with
jaws open so wide that a man could walk down its throat, and the flames
were issuing therefrom, and there were devils driving people in droves
down the throat of this monster; and there was an immense kettle in
which they had put these men, and the fire was being stirred under it,
and hot pitch was being poured on top, and little devils were setting it
on fire and then on the walls there were hundreds hung up by their
tongues to hooks and nails; and then the saved--there were some five or
six saved--upon the horizon, and they had a most self-satisfied grin of
"I told you so."

At the risk of being tiresome, I have said that I have to show the
direction of the human mind in slavery, the effects of widespread
ignorance, and the result of fear. I want to convince you that every
form of slavery, physical or mental, is a viper that will finally fill
with poison the breast of any man alive. I want to show you that there
should be republicanism in the domain of thought as well as in civil
government. The first step toward progress is for man to cease to be
the slave of the creatures of his creation. Men found at last that the
event is more valuable than the prophecy, especially if it never comes
to pass. They found that diseases were not produced by spirits; that
they could not be cured by frightening them away. They found that death
was as natural as life. They began to study the anatomy and chemistry
of the human body, and they found that all was natural, and the conjurer
and the sorcerer were dismissed, and the physician and surgeon were
employed. They learned that being born under a star or planet had
nothing to do with their luck; the astrologer was discharged and the
astronomer took his place. They found that the world had swept through
the constellation for millions of ages. They found that diseases were
produced as easily as grass, and were not sent as punishment on men for
failing to believe a creed. They found that man, through intelligence,
could take advantage of the affairs of nature; that he could make the
waves, the winds, the flames, and the lightnings slaves at his bidding
to administer to his wants; they found the ghosts knew nothing of
benefit to man; that they were entirely ignorant of history; that they
were bad doctors and worse surgeons; that they knew nothing of the law
and less of justice that they were poor politicians; that they were
tyrants, and that they were without brains and utterly destitute of
hearts.

The condition of this world during the dark ages shows exactly the
result of enslaving the souls of men. In those days there was no
liberty. Liberty was despised, and the laborer was considered but
little above the beast. Ignorance, like a vast cowl, covered the brain
of the world; superstition ran riot, and credulity sat upon the throne
of the soul. Murder and hypocrisy were the companions of man, and
industry was a slave. Every country maintained that it was no robbery
to take the property of Mohammedans by force, and no murder to kill the
owner. Lord Bacon was the first man who maintained that a Christian
country was bound to keep its plighted faith with a Mohammedan nation.
Every man who could read or write was suspected of being a heretic in
those days. Only one person in 40,000 could read or write. All thought
was discouraged. The whole earth was ruled by the mitre and sceptre, by
the altar and throne, by fear and force, by ignorance and faith, by
ghouls and ghosts. In the 15th century the following law was in force
in England: "Whosoever reads the Scripture in the mother tongue shall
forfeit land, cattle, life and goods, for themselves and their heirs
forever, and should be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the
crown, and traitors to the land."

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