and makes her the bond-woman of senseless faith.
If a man should tell you he had the most beautiful painting in the world, and after taking you where it was should insist upon having your eyes shut, you would likely suspect either that he had no painting or that it was some pitiful daub. Should he tell you that he was a most excellent performer on the violin, and yet refused to play unless your ears were stopped, you would think, to say the least of it, that he had an odd way of convincing you of his musical ability. But would this conduct be any more wonderful than that of a religionist who asks that before examining his creed you will have the kindness to throw away your reason? The first gentleman says: "Keep your eyes shut; my picture will bear everything but being seen. Keep your ears stopped; my music objects to nothing but being heard." The last says: "Away with your reason; my religion dreads nothing but being understood."
So far as I am concerned, I most cheerfully admit that most Christians are honest and most ministers sincere. We do not attack them; we attack their creed. We accord to them the same rights that we ask for ourselves. We believe that their doctrines are hurtful, and I am going to do what I can against them. We believe that the frightful text, "He that believes shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned," has covered the earth with blood. You might as well say that all that have red hair shall be damned. It has filled the heart with arrogance, cruelty, and murder. It has caused the religious wars; bound hundreds of thousands to the stake; founded inquisitions; filled dungeons; invented instruments of torture; taught the mother to hate her child; imprisoned the mind; filled the world with ignorance; persecuted the lovers of wisdom; built the monasteries and convents; made happiness a crime, investigation a sin, and self-reliance a blasphemy. It has poisoned the springs of learning; misdirected the energies of the world; filled all countries with want; housed the people in hovels; fed them with famine; and but for the efforts of a few brave infidels, it would have taken the world back to the midnight of barbarism, and left the heavens without a star.
The maligners of Paine say that he had no right to attack this doctrine, because he was unacquainted with the dead languages, and, for this reason, it was a piece of pure impudence to investigate the scriptures.
Is it necessary to understand Hebrew in order to know that cruelty is not a virtue, that murder is inconsistent with infinite goodness, and that eternal punishment can be inflicted upon man only by an eternal fiend? Is it really essential to conjugate the Greek verbs before you can make up your mind as to the probability of dead people getting out of their graves? Must one be versed in Latin before he is entitled to express his opinion as to the genuiness of a pretended revelation from God? Common sense belongs exclusively to no tongue. Logic is not confirmed to, nor has it been buried with, the dead languages. Paine attacked the Bible as it is translated. If the translation is wrong, let its defenders correct it.
The Christianity of Paine's day is not the Christianity of our time. There has been a great improvement since then. It is better now because there is less of it. One hundred and fifty years ago the foremost preachers of our time—that gentleman who preaches in this magnificent hall—would have perished at the stake. Lord, Lord, how John Calvin would have liked to have roasted this man, and the perfume of his burning flesh would have filled heaven with joy. A Universalist would have been torn to pieces in England, Scotland, and America. Unitarians would have found themselves in the stocks, pelted by the rabble with dead cats, after which their ears would have been cut off, their tongues bored, and their foreheads branded. Less than one hundred and fifty years ago the following law was in force in Maryland:
"Be it enacted by the right honorable, the lord proprietor, by and with the advice and consent of his lordship's governor, and the upper and lower houses of the assembly, and the authority of the same: That if any person shall hereafter, within this province, willingly, maliciously, and advisedly, by writing or speaking, blaspheme or curse God, or deny our Savior, Jesus Christ, to be the son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, or the God-head of any of the three persons, or the unity of the God-head, or shall utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or the persons thereof and shall therefore be convicted by verdict, shall, for the first offense, be bored through the tongue, and fined £20, to be levied on his body. As for the second offense, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in the forehead the letter B, and fined £40. And that for the third offense, the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy."
The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and was in force in the District of Columbia up to 1875. Laws like this were in force in most of the colonies and in all countries where the church had power.
In the Old Testament the death penalty was attached hundreds of offenses. It has been the same in all Christian countries. Today, in civilized governments, the death penalty is attached only to murder and treason; and in some it has been entirely abolished. What a commentary upon the divine systems of the World!
In the days of Thomas Paine the church was ignorant, bloody, and relentless. In Scotland the "kirk" was at the summit of its power. It was a full sister of the Spanish Inquisition. It waged war upon human nature. It was the enemy of happiness, the hater of joy, and the despiser of liberty. It taught parents to murder their children rather than to allow them to propagate error. If the mother held opinions of which the infamous "kirk" disapproved, her children were taken from her arms, her babe from her very bosom, and she was not allowed to see them, or write them a word. It would not allow ship-wrecked sailors to be rescued from drowning on Sunday.
Oh, you have no idea what a muss it kicks up in heaven to have anybody swim on Sunday. It fills all the wheeling worlds with sadness to see a boy in a boat, and the attention of the recording secretary is called to it. In a voice of thunder they say, "Upset him!" It sought to annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious, heartless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: "The kirk holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy." And this same Scotch kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the moral grandeur to say, "The world is my country, and to do good my religion." And this same kirk abhorred the man who said, "Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a true system."
At that time nothing so delighted the church as the beauties of endless torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century a boy by the name of Thomas Aikenhead was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for having denied the inspiration of the scriptures, and for having, on several occasions, when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm. Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was found guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of the scaffold and covered with stones, and though his mother came with her face covered with tears, begging for the corpse, she was denied and driven away in the name of charity. That is religion, and in the velvet of their politeness there lurks the claws of the tiger. Just give them the power and see how quick I would leave this part of the country. They know I am going to be burned forever; they know I am going to hell, but that don't satisfy them. They want to give me a little foretaste here.
Prosecutions and executions like these were common in every Christian country, and all of them based upon the belief that an intellectual conviction is a crime. No wonder the church hated and traduced the author of the "Age of Reason." England was filled with Puritan gloom and Episcopal ceremony. The ideas of crazy fanatics and extravagant poets were taken as sober facts. Milton had clothed Christianity in the soiled and faded finery of the gods—had added to the story of Christ the fables of mythology. He gave to the Protestant church the most outrageously material ideas of the Deity. He turned all the angels into soldiers—made heaven a battle-field, put Christ in uniform, and described God as a militia-general. His works were considered by the Protestants nearly as sacred as the Bible itself, and the imagination of the people was thoroughly polluted by the horrible imagery, the sublime absurdity of the blind Milton.
