Part 19

How did your Devil, who was at one time an angel of light, come to sin? There was no other devil to tempt him. He was in perfectly good society--in the company of God--of the Trinity. All of his associates were perfect. How did he fall? He knew that God was infinite, and yet he waged war against him and induced about a third of the angels to volunteer. He knew that he could not succeed; knew that he would be defeated and cast out; knew that he was fighting for failure.

Why was God so unpopular? Why were the angels so bad?

According to the Christians, these angels were spirits. They had never been corrupted by flesh--by the passion of love. Why were they so wicked?

Why did God create those angels, knowing that they would rebel? Why did he deliberately sow the seeds of discord in heaven, knowing that he would cast them into the lake of eternal fire--knowing that for them he would create the eternal prison, whose dungeons would echo forever the sobs and shrieks of endless pain?

How foolish is infinite wisdom!

How malicious is mercy!

How revengeful is boundless love!

Again, I say that no sensible man in all the world believes in devils.

Why does God allow these devils to enjoy themselves at the expense of his ignorant children? Why does he allow them to leave their prison? Does he give them furloughs or tickets-of-leave?

Does he want his children misled and corrupted so that he can have the pleasure of damning their souls?

VII. THE MAN OF STRAW.

Some of the preachers who have answered me say that I am fighting a man of straw.

I am fighting the supernatural--the dogma of inspiration--the belief in devils--the atonement, salvation by faith--the forgiveness of sins and the savagery of eternal pain. I am fighting the absurd,-the monstrous, the cruel.

The ministers pretend that they have advanced--that they do not believe the things that I attack. In this they are not honest.

Who is the "man of straw"?

The man of straw is their master. In every orthodox pulpit stands this man of straw--stands beside the preacher--stands with a club, called a "creed," in his upraised hand. The shadow of this club falls athwart the open Bible--falls upon the preacher's brain, darkens the light of his reason and compels him to betray himself.

The man of straw rules every sectarian school and college--every orthodox church. He is the censor who passes on every sermon. Now and then some minister puts a little sense in his discourse--tries to take a forward step. Down comes the club, and the man of straw demands an explanation--a retraction. If the minister takes it back--good. If he does not, he is brought to book. The man of straw put the plaster of silence on the lips of Prof. Briggs, and he was forced to leave the church or remain dumb.

The man of straw closed the mouth of Prof. Smith, and he has not opened it since.

The man of straw would not allow the Presbyterian creed to be changed.

The man of straw took Father McGlynn by the collar, forced him to his knees, made him take back his words and ask forgiveness for having been abused.

The man of straw pitched Prof. Swing out of the pulpit and drove the Rev. Mr. Thomas from the Methodist Church.

Let me tell the orthodox ministers that they are trying to cover their retreat.

You have given up the geology and astronomy of the Bible. You have admitted that its history is untrue. You are retreating still. You are giving up the dogma of inspiration; you have your doubts about the flood and Babel; you have given up the witches and wizards; you are beginning to throw away the miraculous; you have killed the little devils, and in a little while you will murder the Devil himself.

In a few years you will take the Bible for what it is worth. The good and true will be treasured in the heart; the foolish, the infamous, will be thrown away.

The man of straw will then be dead.

Of course, the real old petrified, orthodox Christian will cling to the Devil. He expects to have all of his sins charged to the Devil, and at the same time he will be credited with all the virtues of Christ. Upon this showing on the books, upon this balance, he will be entitled to his halo and harp. What a glorious, what an equitable, transaction! The sorcerer Superstition changes debt to credit. He waves his wand, and he who deserves the tortures of hell receives an eternal reward.

But if a man lacks faith the scheme is exactly reversed. While in one case a soul is rewarded for the virtues of another, in the other case a soul is damned for the sins of another. This is justice when it blossoms in mercy.

Beyond this idiocy cannot go.

VIII. KEEP THE DEVILS OUT OF CHILDREN.

William Kingdon Clifford, one of the greatest men of this century, said: "If there is one lesson that history forces upon us in every page, it is this: Keep your children away from the priest, or he will make them the enemies of mankind."

In every orthodox Sunday school children are taught to believe in devils. Every little brain becomes a menagerie, filled with wild beasts from hell. The imagination is polluted with the deformed, the monstrous and malicious. To fill the minds of children with leering fiends--with mocking devils--is one of the meanest and basest of crimes. In these pious prisons--these divine dungeons--these Protestant and Catholic inquisitions--children are tortured with these cruel lies. Here they are taught that to really think is wicked; that to express your honest thought is blasphemy; and that to live a free and joyous life, depending on fact instead of faith, is the sin against the Holy Ghost.

Children thus taught--thus corrupted and deformed--become the enemies of investigation--of progress. They are no longer true to themselves. They have lost the veracity of the soul. In the language of Prof. Clifford, "they are the enemies of the human race."

So I say to all fathers and mothers, keep your children away from priests; away from orthodox Sunday schools; away from the slaves of superstition.

They will teach them to believe in the Devil; in hell; in the prison of God; in the eternal dungeon, where the souls of men are to suffer forever. These frightful things are a part of Christianity. Take these lies from the creed and the whole scheme falls into shapeless ruin. This dogma of hell is the infinite of savagery--the dream of insane revenge. It makes God a wild beast--an infinite hyena. It makes Christ as merciless as the fangs of a viper. Save poor children from the pollution of this horror. Protect them from this infinite lie.

IX. CONCLUSION.

I admit that there are many good and beautiful passages in the Old and New Testament; that from the lips of Christ dropped many pearls of kindness--of love. Every verse that is true and tender I treasure in my heart. Every thought, behind which is the tear of pity, I appreciate and love. But I cannot accept it all. Many utterances attributed to Christ shock my brain and heart. They are absurd and cruel.

Take from the New Testament the infinite savagery, the shoreless malevolence of eternal pain, the absurdity of salvation by faith, the ignorant belief in the existence of devils, the immorality and cruelty of the atonement, the doctrine of non-resistance that denies to virtue the right of self-defence, and how glorious it would be to know that the remainder is true! Compared with this knowledge, how everything else in nature would shrink and shrivel! What ecstasy it would be to know that God exists; that he is our father and that he loves and cares for the children of men! To know that all the paths that human beings travel, turn and wind as they may, lead to the gates of stainless peace! How the heart would thrill and throb to know that Christ was the conqueror of Death; that at his grave the all-devouring monster was baffled and beaten forever; that from that moment the tomb became the door that opens on eternal life! To know this would change all sorrow into gladness. Poverty, failure, disaster, defeat, power, place and wealth would become meaningless sounds. To take your babe upon your knee and say: "Mine and mine forever!" What joy! To clasp the woman you love in your arms and to know that she is yours and forever--yours though suns darken and constellations vanish! This is enough: To know that the loved and dead are not lost; that they still live and love and wait for you. To know that Christ dispelled the darkness of death and filled the grave with eternal light. To know this would be all that the heart could bear. Beyond this joy cannot go. Beyond this there is no place for hope.

How beautiful, how enchanting, Death would be! How we would long to see his fleshless skull! What rays of glory would stream from his sightless sockets, and how the heart would long for the touch of his stilling hand! The shroud would become a robe of glory, the funeral procession a harvest home, and the grave would mark the end of sorrow, the beginning of eternal joy.

And yet it were better far that all this should be false than that all of the New Testament should be true.

It is far better to have no heaven than to have heaven and hell; better to have no God than God and Devil; better to rest iii eternal sleep than to be an angel and know that the ones you love are suffering eternal pain; better to live a free and loving life--a life that ends forever at the grave--than to be an immortal slave.

The master cannot be great enough to make slavery sweet. I have no ambition to become a winged servant, a winged slave. Better eternal sleep. But they say, "If you give up these superstitions, what have you left?"

Let me now give you the declaration of a creed.

DECLARATION OF THE FREE

We have no falsehoods to defend-- We want the facts; Our force, our thought, we do not spend In vain attacks. And we will never meanly try To save some fair and pleasing lie.

The simple truth is what we ask, Not the ideal; We've set ourselves the noble task To find the real. If all there is is naught but dross, We want to know and bear our loss.

We will not willingly be fooled, By fables nursed; Our hearts, by earnest thought, are schooled To bear the worst; And we can stand erect and dare All things, all facts that really are.

We have no God to serve or fear, No hell to shun, No devil with malicious leer. When life is done An endless sleep may close our eyes, A sleep with neither dreams nor sighs.

We have no master on the land-- No king in air-- Without a manacle we stand, Without a prayer, Without a fear of coming night, We seek the truth, we love the light.

We do not bow before a guess, A vague unknown; A senseless force we do not bless In solemn tone. When evil comes we do not curse, Or thank because it is no worse.

When cyclones rend--when lightning blights, 'Tis naught but fate; There is no God of wrath who smites In heartless hate. Behind the things that injure man There is no purpose, thought, or plan.

We waste no time in useless dread, In trembling fear; The present lives, the past is dead, And we are here, All welcome guests at life's great feast-- We need no help from ghost or priest.

Our life is joyous, jocund, free-- Not one a slave Who bends in fear the trembling knee, And seeks to save A coward soul from future pain; Not one will cringe or crawl for gain.

The jeweled cup of love we drain, And friendship's wine Now swiftly flows in every vein With warmth divine. And so we love and hope and dream That in death's sky there is a gleam.

We walk according to our light, Pursue the path That leads to honor's stainless height, Careless of wrath Or curse of God, or priestly spite, Longing to know and do the right.

We love our fellow-man, our kind, Wife, child, and friend. To phantoms we are deaf and blind, But we extend The helping hand to the distressed; By lifting others we are blessed.

Love's sacred flame within the heart And friendship's glow; While all the miracles of art Their wealth bestow Upon the thrilled and joyous brain, And present raptures banish pain.

We love no phantoms of the skies, But living flesh, With passion's soft and soulful eyes, Lips warm and fresh, And cheeks with health's red flag unfurled, The breathing angels of this world.

The hands that help are better far Than lips that pray. Love is the ever gleaming star That leads the way, That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, But on a paradise in this.

We do not pray, or weep, or wail; We have no dread, No fear to pass beyond the veil That hides the dead. And yet we question, dream, and guess, But knowledge we do not possess.

We ask, yet nothing seems to know; We cry in vain. There is no "master of the show" Who will explain, Or from the future tear the mask; And yet we dream, and still we ask

Is there beyond the silent night An endless day? Is death a door that leads to light? We cannot say. The tongueless secret locked in fate We do not know.--

We hope and wait.

PROGRESS.

* This is the first lecture ever delivered by Mr. Ingersoll. The stars indicate the words missing in the manuscript. It was delivered in Pekin, 111., in 1860, and again in Bloomington, 111., in 1804.

IT is admitted by all that happiness is the only good, happiness in its highest and grandest sense and the most * * springs * * of * * refined * * generous * *

Conscience * * tends * * indirectly * * truly we * * physically * * to develop the wonderful powers of the mind is progress.

It is impossible for men to become educated and refined without leisure and there can be no leisure without wealth and all wealth is produced by labor, nothing else. Nothing can * * the hands * * and * * fabrics * * service of civil * * and crumbles * * of all, and yet even in free America labor is not honored as it deserves.

We should remember that the prosperity of the world depends upon the men who walk in the fresh furrows and through the rustling corn, upon those whose faces are radiant with the glare of furnaces, upon the delvers in dark mines, the workers in shops, upon those who give to the wintry air the ringing music of the axe, and upon those who wrestle with the wild waves of the raging sea.

And it is from the surplus produced by labor that schools are built, that colleges and universities are founded and endowed. From this surplus the painter is paid for the immortal productions of the pencil. This pays the sculptor for chiseling the shapeless rock into forms of beauty almost divine, and the poet for singing the hopes, the loves and aspirations of the world.

This surplus has erected all the palaces and temples, all the galleries of art, has given to us all the books in which we converse, as it were, with the dead kings of the human race, and has supplied us with all there is of elegance, of beauty and of refined happiness in the world.

I am aware that the subject chosen by me is almost infinite and that in its broadest sense it is absolutely beyond the present comprehension of man.

I am also aware that there are many opinions as to what progress really is, that what one calls progress, another denominates barbarism; that many have a wonderful veneration for all that is ancient, merely because it is ancient, and they see no beauty in anything from which they do not have to blow the dust of ages with the breath of praise.

They say, no masters like the old, no governments like the ancient, no orators, no poets, no statesmen like those who have been dust for two thousand years. Others despise antiquity and admire only the modern, merely because it is modern. They find so much to condemn in the past, that they condemn all. I hope, however, that I have gratitude enough to acknowledge the obligations I am under to the great and heroic minds of antiquity, and that I have manliness and independence enough not to believe what they said merely because they said it, and that I have moral courage enough to advocate ideas, however modern they may be, if I believe that they are right. Truth is neither young nor old, is neither ancient nor modern, but is the same for all times and places and should be sought for with ceaseless activity, eagerly acknowledged, loved more than life, and abandoned--never. In accordance with the idea that labor is the basis of all prosperity and happiness, is another idea or truth, and that is, that labor in order to make the laborer and the world at large happy, must be free. That the laborer must be a free man, the thinker must be free. I do not intend in what I may say upon this subject to carry you back to the remotest antiquity,--back to Asia, the cradle of the world, where we could stand in the ashes and ruins of a civilization so old that history has not recorded even its decay. It will answer my present purpose to commence with the Middle Ages. In those times there was no freedom of either mind or body in Europe. Labor was despised, and a laborer was considered as scarcely above the beasts. Ignorance like a mantle covered the world, and superstition ran riot with the human imagination. The air was filled with angels, demons and monsters. Everything assumed the air of the miraculous. Credulity occupied the throne of reason and faith put out the eyes of the soul. A man to be distinguished had either to be a soldier or a monk. He could take his choice between killing and lying. You must remember that in those days nations carried on war as an end, not as a means. War and theology were the business of mankind. No man could win more than a bare existence by industry, much less fame and glory. Comparatively speaking, there was no commerce. Nations instead of buying and selling from and to each other, took what they wanted by brute force. And every Christian country maintained that it was no robbery to take the property of Mohammedans, and no murder to kill the owners with or without just cause of quarrel. Lord Bacon was the first man of note who maintained that a Christian country was bound to keep its plighted faith with an Infidel one. In those days reading and writing were considered very dangerous arts, and any layman who had acquired the art of reading was suspected of being a heretic or a wizard.

It is almost impossible for us to conceive of the ignorance, the cruelty, the superstition and the mental blindness of that period. In reading the history of those dark and bloody years, I am amazed at the wickedness, the folly and presumption of mankind. And yet, the solution of the whole matter is, they despised liberty; they hated freedom of mind and of body. They forged chains of superstition for the one and of iron for the other. They were ruled by that terrible trinity, the cowl, the sword and chain.

You cannot form a correct opinion of those ages without reading the standard authors, so to speak, of that time, the laws then in force, and by ascertaining the habits and customs of the people, their mode of administering the laws, and the ideas that were commonly received as correct. No one believed that honest error could be innocent; no one dreamed of such a thing as religious freedom. In the fifteenth century the following law was in force in England: "That whatsoever they were that should read the Scriptures in the mother tongue, they should forfeit land, cattle, body, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land." The next year after this law was in force, in one day thirty-nine were hanged for its violation and their bodies afterward burned.

Laws equally unjust, bloody and cruel were in force in all parts of Europe. In the sixteenth century a man was burned in France because he refused to kneel to a procession of dirty monks. I could enumerate thousands of instances of the most horrid cruelty perpetrated upon men, women and even little children, for no other reason in the world than for a difference of opinion upon a subject that neither party knew anything about. But you are all, no doubt, perfectly familiar with the history of religious persecution.

There is one thing, however, that is strange indeed, and that is that the reformers of those days, the men who rose against the horrid tyranny of the times, the moment they attained power, persecuted with a zeal and bitterness never excelled. Luther, one of the grand men of the world, cast in the heroic mould, although he gave utterance to the following sublime sentiment: "Every one has the right to read for himself that he may prepare himself to live and to die," still had no idea of what we call religious freedom. He considered universal toleration an error, so did Melancthon, and Erasmus, and yet, strange as it may appear, they were exercising the very right they denied to others, and maintaining their right with a courage and energy absolutely sublime.

John Knox was only in favor of religious freedom when he was in the minority, and Baxter entertained the same sentiment. Castalio, a professor at Geneva, in Switzerland, was the first clergyman in Europe who declared the innocence of honest error, and who proclaimed himself in favor of universal toleration. The name of this man should never be forgotten. He had the goodness, the courage, although surrounded with prisons and inquisitions, and in the midst of millions of fierce bigots, to declare the innocence of honest error, and that every man had a right to worship the good God in his own way.

For the utterance of this sublime sentiment his professorship was taken from him, he was driven from Geneva by John Calvin and his adherents, although he had belonged to their sect.

He was denounced as a child of the Devil, a dog of Satan, as a murderer of souls, as a corrupter of the faith, and as one who by his doctrines crucified the Savior afresh. Not content with merely driving him from his home, they pursued him absolutely to the grave, with a malignity that increased rather than diminished. You must not think that Calvin was alone in this; on the contrary he was fully sustained by public opinion, and would have been sustained even though he had procured the burning of the noble Castalio at the stake. I cite this instance not merely for the purpose of casting odium upon Calvin, but to show you what public opinion was at that time, when such things were ordinary transactions. Bodi-nus, a lawyer in France, about the same time advocated something like religious liberty, but public opinion was overwhelmingly against him and the people were at all times ready with torch and brand, chain, and fagot to get the abominable heresy out of the human mind, that a man had a right to think for himself. And yet Luther, Calvin, Knox and Baxter, in spite, as it were, of themselves, conferred a great and lasting benefit upon mankind; for what they did was at least in favor of individual judgment, and one successful stand against the church produced others, all of which tended to establish universal toleration. In those times you will remember that failing to convert a man or woman by the ordinary means, they resorted to every engine of torture that the ingenuity of bigotry could devise; they crushed their feet in what they called iron boots; they roasted them upon slow fires; they plucked out their nails, and then into the bleeding quick thrust needles; and all this to convince them of the truth. I suppose that we should love our neighbor as ourselves.