Part 3

Now, if we take the average, we have one assassination, or one attempt to assassinate, for 180,222 inhabitants in the aggregate of the four Protestant nations; and one assassination, or one attempt to assassinate, for 16,153 inhabitants in the four Catholic nations; in other words, eleven times more of these crimes among the Roman Catholic nations. The contrast between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Spain is so very striking, and is painted by a writer in such lively colors that one is tempted to believe that the picture was intended to serve as a demonstration.

“Spain is a dispossessed queen. For two hundred years and more diamonds have been falling from her glittering crown. The source of her wealth, well or ill-gotten, is exhausted forever. Her treasures are lost, her colonies are gone; she is deprived of the prestige of that external opulence which veiled, or, at least dissembled her real and utter poverty. The nation is exhausted to such a degree, and has been so long unhappy, that each individual feels but his own misery. His country has ceased to exist for him. Even those time are gone when the guerillas called the citizens to arms for the sole and generous purpose of vindicating the national honor. The despondency and apathy of the nation are visible even in the battles fought by the Spaniards among themselves in their civil dissensions. They fight from habit, and discharge their muskets at their countrymen because they can do nothing else, and because every shot from their guns may bring them a piece of bread. A nation reduced to such a state is low indeed; the chilliness of death is very near seizing upon its extremities. What a length of time it will require to heal the wounds of these populations, so brave and so devoted! How much gold, how much blood have been lavished during the last seven years without an object, without any conceived plan!

“What would Charles the Fifth say, if, rising from his grave he saw his great and glorious Spain struggling thus miserably in dread uncertainty of her future destinies? ‘Where are my colonies? Where are my Batavian provinces? Where is my gigantic power, and the glory of Spain, which resounded from one hemisphere to the other? What have you done with my inheritance, ye cowardly and unskillful men? Where are my treasures; where the victorious fleets that crossed the ocean to bring back in profusion to my empire the gold and gems of the New World?’ The question naturally arises, what can be the cause of so many evils? of such utter misery, such extreme ignorance, such disgusting sloth?

“_Tyranny_, says the politician.

“_Catholicism_, says the Protestant.

“_The Inquisition_, adds the historian.

“But these three replies form but one; they are the three sides of a prism, which, united, give the entire ray of truth. In truth, Catholicism is the father, the Inquisition and tyranny the daughters. We are not the first to pen these words; we only repeat what we have read in the lines we are now going to submit to the perusal of our readers. It is sufficient for us to have pointed out the connection of the different causes which will be assigned by our authorities.

“That Catholicism produced the Inquisition, a tribunal of priests, judging heretics, it is unnecessary to demonstrate, for the very nature of the institution renders it evident. The ruling idea of Catholicism, the principle of authority, was the germ of the Inquisition. It was impossible that the Romish Church should not extend its principle to its penal code; it does not doubt in matters of faith, neither does it doubt in criminal matters. This is the reason why, in the church, the accused and the guilty have but one and the same appellation. Whoever is arraigned at her tribunal has heaven and earth against him; the interrogatory is already a species of torture. When the church accuses, she seems already convinced; all her efforts tend to extort the confession of the crime, which, in virtue of her infallibility, she discovers in darkness; from this anticipated conviction of the guilt of the accused are produced all those ambushes and snares laid for the purpose of obtaining, by surprise, the confession of the accused. The names of the witnesses are concealed or falsified. Everywhere, in the most trifling details, it is strikingly evident that, truth is on one side, and the demon on the other.” [See Tardiff, pp. 139, 140.]

In the second place, that Catholicism has produced the Spanish absolutism of the Catholic kings is sufficiently shown by the very name given to these kings.

“Another no less deplorable consequence of the position of the clergy in Spain and Portugal is, that they have no sooner confounded the cause of religion with that of despotism, than this error, producing its consequences, leads to a monstrous abuse of the word of God. Political fury has invaded the pulpit and stained it with abject and sacrilegious adulation.... The lips, whose mission is to speak peace, charity and mutual love, have spoken the language of hatred and vengeance; horrible vows, abominable threats in the presence of the tabernacles in which abides the Son of Man, who sacrificed his life for the salvation of his brethren.” [Affairs de Rome, pp. 250 to 254.]

“Spain, since Phillip II., has remained closed and uninfluenced by the ordinary progress of the human mind elsewhere. The monkish and despotic spirit has long preserved itself in the midst of ignorance, without, indeed, acquiring strength from abroad, but at the same time without permitting the intelligence of the nation to borrow foreign arms against it.” [Idem, p. 53.]

We shall now see this Spanish Catholicism at work; for three centuries, assisted by its worthy offspring, absolutism and the Inquisition, and at every ruin, at every crime you meet with, if you ask who has done this, the reply will assuredly be: the church of the Pope, the tyranny of the Catholic kings, the Inquisition of the priests. To convince yourselves of the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of history, written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long enjoyed unquestionable authority.

The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the Catholic Inquisition. “Spain,” says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, “exterminated them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. The Jews and the Moors left it in turn, carrying with them, the former trade, the latter agriculture, from this disinherited land, to which the New World, to repair so many losses, vainly bequeathed her sterile treasures. And let it not be said that Spain, in thus depriving herself of her most active citizens, was not aware of the extent of her loss. All her historians concur in the statement that in acting thus she sacrificed her temporal interests to her religious convictions, and all are at a loss for words to extol such a glorious sacrifice.

“In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently; her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war with those ideas; but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career in which she can never stop.” [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]

“It required,” says M. Sismondi, “about one generation to accustom the Spaniards to the sanguinary proceedings of the Inquisition, and to fanaticise the people. This work, dictated by an infernal policy, was scarcely accomplished, when Charles the Fifth began his reign. It was probably the fatal spectacle of the auto-dä-fe that imparted to the Spanish soldiers their ferocity, so remarkable during the whole of that period, which before that time was so foreign to the national character.” [Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated Spain? THE INQUISITION. “To calculate,” says Liorente, secretary to the Holy office, “the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of the Jews, the conquered Moors and the baptized Moorish, we add about 500,000 families entirely destroyed by the executions of the Holy (?) office, it will be proved beyond a doubt that had it not been for this tribunal, and the influence of its maxims, Spain would possess 12,000,000 souls above her present population, supposed to amount to 11,000,000.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 242.]

“The Inquisition ruined and branded with infamy more than 340,000 persons, whose disgrace was reflected on their families, and who bequeathed only opprobrium and misery to their children. Add to these more than 100,000 families who emigrated in order to escape from the blood-thirsty tribunal, and it will be seen that the Inquisition has been the most active instrument of the ruin of Spain. But the most disastrous of all the acts which it occasioned was the expulsion of the Moors. If we add to those who were banished from Spain the countless numbers who perished in the insurrection of the sixteenth century, and the 800,000 Jews who left the kingdom, it will be seen that the country lost in the course of a hundred and twenty years about three millions of its most industrious inhabitants.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 60, 61.]

“The advisors of Phillip III. said to him with affright: The houses are falling in ruins, and none rebuild them; the inhabitants flee from the country; villages are abandoned, fields left uncultivated, and churches deserted. The Cortes in their turn said to him: if the evil is not remedied, there will soon be no peasants left to till the ground, no pilots to steer the ships; none will marry. The kingdom can not subsist another century if a wholesome remedy be not found.”

What was the cause of the ignorance so general and so profound in Spain? The Catholic Inquisition. “The commissaries of the Holy office received orders to oppose the introduction of books written by the partisans of modern philosophy, as reprobated by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and ordered information to be given against persons known to be attached to the principles of the insurrection.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 99.] “Theological censures attacked even works on politics, and on natural, civil and international law. The consequence is, that those appointed to examine publications condemn and proscribe all works necessary for the diffusion of knowledge among the Spaniards. The books that have been published on mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy and several other branches of science connected with those, are not treated with more favor.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 420.] “The Inquisition is, perhaps, the most active cause of that intellectual death that visited Spain at the close of the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests, their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to 321.] “Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the answer is still, Catholic superstition!” [Napoleon Roussell.]

Infidels, who are noted leaders in “Free Thought,” as it is termed, are invariably men whose religious education was in the religious literature of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated, and he is, at once, an infidel. No man is to blame for setting his face like a flint against old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, and high-toned Calvinism, nor for repudiating Papal and clerical authority known in the Spanish Inquisition with all its horrible, unscriptural and ungodly barbarities. But why it is that the infidel’s religious foot should set away back yonder in the smoke of the dark ages, and his scientific foot away down here with the railroad and telegraph, is rather difficult of solution. It is rather amusing, since all well-educated American Catholics condemn the Inquisition along with all the abominable cruelties of the dark ages. And, as for Calvinism, there is not enough left for seed if it was properly distributed—_it is old and thin._

“EVEN NOW ARE THERE MANY ANTI-CHRISTS.”

Col. Ingersoll says: “He (Paine) knew that every abuse had been embalmed in scripture, that every outrage was in partnership with some holy text.” If such was really true every rascal, scoundrel and villain should carry a copy of the Bible. Do they? Are they in affinity with the Bible? Are they even friendly to it? Things that are in affinity with each other are drawn together. “A fellow feeling makes us very kind.” “By their fruits ye shall know them.” “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Before the Bible went to the Sandwich Islands Col. Ingersoll would have been hailed as a very proper object for a sumptuous feast. He would have acted wisely in making his last will before starting, but now, since that book has gone there which embalms every crime (?) he would find an asylum of safety in which to repose his weary limbs. _How is this?_ Is every outrage in partnership with some holy text? If so, the Bible would be just one more reason for the continuance of cannibalism. The secret of Mr. Ingersoll’s tirade upon the Bible may be accounted for when we measure the magnitude of his infidelity. It is no shallow sort of unbelief, but, on the contrary, it is deep seated, and one with the infidelity of his excelling predecessors. Ingersoll intends to have no superior in unbelief—you know he is ambitious. Let us give you a little speech that was made, by one of his particular friends and co-laborers in this unholy crusade, at Geneva, in 1868. Here it is:

“Brethren, I am come to announce unto you a new gospel, which must penetrate to the very ends of the world. This gospel admits of no half measures and hesitations. The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. The Lie must be stamped out and give way to truth.

“It is our mission to destroy the _Lie_; and to effect this, we must begin at the very commencement. Now the beginning of all those lies which have ground down this poor world in slavery is God. For many hundred years monarchs and priests have inoculated the hearts and minds of mankind with this notion of a God ruling over the world. They have also invented for the people the notion of another world, in which their God is to punish with eternal torture (not a Bible term) those who have refused to obey their degrading laws here on earth. This God is nothing but the personification of absolute tyranny, and has been invented with a view of either frightening or alluring nine-tenths of the human race into submission to the remaining tenth. If there were really a God, surely he would use that lightning which he holds in his hand to destroy those thrones, to the steps of which mankind is chained. He would assuredly use it to overthrow those altars where the truth is hidden by clouds of lying incense. Tear out of your hearts the belief in the existence of God; for as long as an atom of that silly superstition remains in your minds you will never know what freedom is.”

This has the genuine _Ingersoll ring_ upon the subject of “_Liberty of Man, Woman and Child._” “When you have got rid of this belief in this priest-begotten God, and when, moreover, you are convinced that your existence, and that of the surrounding world, is due to the _conglomeration of atoms_, in accordance with the law of gravity and attraction, then, and then only, you will have accomplished the first steps toward liberty, and will experience less difficulty in ridding your minds of that second lie which tyranny has invented.

“The first lie is _God_. The second lie is _Right_. Might invented the fiction of Right in order to insure and strengthen her reign; that Right which she herself does not heed, and which only serves as a barrier against any attacks which may be made by the trembling and stupid masses of mankind.

“_Might_, my friends, forms the sole ground-work of society. Might makes and unmakes laws, and that might should be in the hands of the majority. It should be in the possession of those nine-tenths of the human race whose immense power has been rendered subservient to the remaining tenth by means of that lying fiction of _Right_, before which you are accustomed to bow your heads and to drop your arms. Once penetrated with a clear conviction of _your own might_, you will be able to destroy this _mere notion of right_.

“And when you have freed your minds from the fear of a God, and from that childish respect for _the fiction of Right_, then all the remaining chains which bind you, and which are called _science, civilization, property, marriage, morality and justice, will snap asunder like threads_.

“Let your own happiness be your only law. But in order to get this law recognized, and to bring about the proper relations which should exist between the majority and minority of mankind, you must destroy everything which exists in the shape of state or social organization. So educate yourselves and your children that, when the great moment for constituting the new world arrives, your eyes may not be blinded and deceived by the falsehoods of the tyrants of throne and altar.

“Our first work must be destruction and annihilation of everything as it now exists. You must accustom yourselves to destroy everything, the good with the bad; for if but an atom of this world remains the new will never be created.

“According to the priests’ fables, in days of old, a deluge destroyed all mankind, but their God especially saved Noah in order that the seeds of tyranny and falsehoods might be perpetuated in the new world. When you once begin your work of destruction, and when the floods of enslaved masses of the people rise and engulph temples and palaces, then take heed that no ark be allowed to rescue any atom of this old world which we consecrate to destruction.”

_A representative of the kingdom of darkness._

“Destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they know not.”

WHAT IS TO BE THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

“Brahmanism has avoided the fatal mistake of Catholic and Protestant philosophy by assuming an impersonal deity in three modes of manifestation, while Christian thinkers have played around the logical contradiction of one personality in three equal persons for fifteen hundred years. We must utterly break with the idea of a personal God, and accept that of one impersonal essence behind all phenomena.” [Hartmann’s future religion.]

Must we do this? Is there any necessity for it? What have we to do with “the fatal mistake of Catholic and Protestant philosophy?” It was a _mistake_, that’s all! “Christian thinkers have played around the logical contradiction of one personality in three equal persons for fifteen hundred years.” _Have they? ’Tis well!_ Christianity requires no man to step into logical contradiction and stand there. They have done this “for fifteen hundred years.” Well, it has been about that long since men, in the prelude of the dark ages, began to speculate foolishly about the subject of the Divine existence. There was a purer atmosphere in the first centuries of the Christian era, in which primitive Christians enjoyed better conceptions of the Divine Being, to which it is the privilege of Christians to return. Is it the _only alternative_ “to break with the idea of a personal God, and accept that of one impersonal essence behind all phenomena?” _No!_ We Christians affirm nothing that can necessarily be construed with the Catholic and Protestant “mistake” concerning the _Trinity_, nor anything that can be construed with ultra Unitarianism, which treats of our Lord and Savior simply as an extraordinarily inspired man. Neither are we under any logical necessity to “break with the idea of a personal God,” and form an alliance with Atheistic philosophy through the adoption of the idea of a Pantheistic “essence behind all phenomena.” Such speculative _nonsense_ may be the best that a mind can do while it is in its own ignorance upon the subject of what it takes to constitute personality, and while it is also surrounded with nothing but the darkness of the dark ages, which has been the legitimate accompaniment of “the Catholic and Protestant _fatal mistake_,” but it is not the best that an intelligent mind, clothed with the sunlight of the gospel of Christ, and intelligently educated upon the subject of _personality_ can do. _No!_ The intelligently informed mind can stand upon the everlasting bed-rock of truth, which has been raised to the highest mountain top of Christian thought by the pure, unadulterated teachings of the Savior of men, which lie behind the fifteen hundred years of jargon upon the questions of Trinitarian and Unitarian “_isms_.”

“God is a spirit.” That settles the question of “person” with every well instructed Christian mind. “What man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him; even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.” The Spirit of God is the _Supreme intelligence_. And, being such, he is the _Supreme person_, for where there is _intelligence_ there is person. The attributes of personality belong to intelligence, and they belong to nothing else. If you have an _intelligent_ essence, it is, of a logical and scientific necessity, a person. Let some Pantheistic “wiseacre” grapple with this thought.

The fatal mistakes are not all confined to Catholics and Protestants; Pantheists and Scientists have made full as many mistakes. The great mistake upon the subject of the Divine existence, which Scientists and Pantheists have made, is the conclusion that person is simply and necessarily _material_, or animal existence. So they say, if God is a person he must be a great big _almighty_ man, having great arms and legs, etc. I have the first Atheist or Pantheist to meet in conversation that understands the truth of science in reference to this question of _person_.

It is claimed that a Monotheistic Pantheism, that is, the idea of _one essence_, not person, but _essence_, is to _unite_, or make one, the whole human family upon the scientific (sciolistic) base that man himself is one grand part of the grand all-pervading, impersonal essence.

Religions have their practical results, and, consequently, bearings upon human society. The Monotheistic idea, which, it is claimed, is to equalize all beings and things throughout this vast universe, in the conception that all are parts of the same grand all-pervading essence, can have only the following results: First, to wipe out all ideas of a future retribution, for want of judge, for want of governor; second, to destroy all distinctions consequent upon the ideas of a divine moral kingdom, or Kingdom of God among men; third, to loosen up the religious and moral restraints by removing the religious sanctions, or promises and threats, which relate to the future retribution.