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          Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201

                          ****     ****

                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                               AND

                         OTHER LECTURES.
                               BY
                       HELEN H. GARDENER.

   AUTHOR OF "A Thoughtless Yes;" "Is This Your Son, My Lord,"
        A Radical Novel "Sex In Brain;" And Other Essays.

                     WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
                      ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.

                           Copyright.
                        BY HELEN GARDENER
                              1885

                       THIRTEENTH EDITION.

                            NEW YORK:
                    THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
                       28 LAFAYETTE PLACE.
                          ****     ****
                       THIS LITTLE VOLUME,
                               is
                     RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
                  WITH THE LOVE OF THE AUTHOR,
                               To
                       MRS. EVA INGERSOLL,

     THE BRAVE, HAPPY WIFE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST ORATOR,
                  AND A WOMAN'S TRUEST FRIEND.
   IN HER BEAUTIFUL HOME-LIFE SUPERSTITION AND FEAR HAVE NEVER
            ENTERED; "HUMAN EQUALITY AND FREEDOM HAVE
                   THEIR HIGHEST ILLUSTRATION;
                               AND
     TIME HAS DEEPENED YOUTHFUL LOVE INTO A DIVINER WORSHIP
             THAN ANGELS OFFER OR THAN GODS INSPIRE.


                          INTRODUCTION.

     NOTHING gives me more pleasure, nothing gives greater promise
for the future, than the fact that woman is achieving intellectual
and physical liberty. It is refreshing to know that here, in our
country, there are thousands of women who think and express their
own thoughts -- who are thoroughly free and thoroughly



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

conscientious -- who have neither been narrowed nor corrupted by a
heartless creed -- who do not worship a being in heaven whom they
would shudderingly loathe on earth. Women who do not stand before
the altar of a cruel faith with downcast eyes of timid
acquiescence, and pay to impudent authority the tribute of a
thoughtless yes. They are no longer satisfied with being told. They
examine for themselves. They have ceased to be the prisoners of
society -- the satisfied serfs of husbands or the echoes of
priests. They demand the rights that naturally belong to
intelligent human beings. If wives, they wish to be the equals of
husbands -- if mothers, they wish to rear their children in the
atmosphere of love, liberty and philosophy. They believe that woman
can discharge all her duties without the aid of superstition, and
preserve all that is true, pure and tender without sacrificing in
the temple of absurdity the convictions of the soul.

     Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. She has lacked
-- not mind -- but opportunity. In the long night of barbarism
physical strength, and the cruelty to use it, were the badges of
superiority. Muscle was more than mind, In the ignorant age of
Faith the loving nature of woman was abused, her conscience was
rendered morbid and diseased. It might almost be said that she was
betrayed by her own virtues. At best, she secured, not opportunity,
but flattery, the preface to degradation. She was deprived of
liberty and without that nothing is worth the having. She was
taught to obey without question, and to believe without thought.
There were universities for men before the alphabet had been taught
to woman. At the intellectual feast there were no places for wives
and mothers. Even now they sit at the second table and eat the
crusts and crumbs. The schools for women, at the present time, are
just far enough behind those for men to fall heirs to the
discarded. On the, same principle, when a doctrine becomes too
absurd for the pulpit, it is given to the Sunday School. The ages
of muscle, and miracle -- of fists and faith -- are passing away.
Minerva occupies at last a higher niche than Hercules. Now, a word
is stronger than a blow.

     At last we see women who depend upon themselves -- who stand
self poised the shocks of this sad world without leaning for
support against a church -- who do not go to the literature of
barbarism for consolation, nor use the falsehoods and mistakes of
the past for the foundation of their hope -- women brave enough and
tender enough to meet and bear the facts and fortunes of this
world.

     The men who declare that woman is the intellectual inferior of
man, do not, and cannot, by offering themselves in evidence,
substantiate their declaration.

     Yet, I must admit that there are thousands of wives who still
have faith in the saving power of superstition -- who still insist
on attending church while husbands prefer the shores, the woods, or
the fields. In this way families are divided. Parents grow apart,
and unconsciously the pearl of greatest price is thrown away. The
wife ceases to be the intellectual companion of the husband. She
reads the "Christian Register," sermons in the Monday papers, and
a little gossip about folks and fashions, while he studies the


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

works of Darwin, Haeckel and Humboldt. Their sympathies become
estranged. They are no longer mental friends. The husband smiles at
the follies of the wife and she weeps for the supposed sins of the
husband. Such wives should read this book. They should not be
satisfied to remain forever in the cradle of thought, amused with
the toys of superstition.

     The parasite of woman is the priest.

     It must also be admitted that there are thousands of men who
believe that superstition is good for women and children -- who
regard falsehood as the fortress of virtue, and feel indebted to
ignorance for the purity of daughters and the fidelity of wives.
These men think of priests as detectives in disguise, and regard
God as a policeman who prevents elopements. Their opinions about
religion are as correct as their estimate of woman.

     The church furnishes but little food for the mind. People of
intelligence are growing tired of the platitudes of the pulpit --
the iterations of the itinerants. The average sermon is "as tedious
as a twice-told tale vexing the ears of a drowsy man."

     One Sunday a gentleman who is a great inventor called at my
house. Only a few words had passed between us, when he arose,
saying that he must go as it was time for church. Wondering that a
man of his mental wealth could enjoy the intellectual poverty of
the pulpit, I asked for an explanation, and he gave me the
following: "You know that I am an inventor. Well, the moment my
mind becomes absorbed in some difficult problem, I am afraid that
something may happen to distract my attention. Now, I know that I
can sit in church for an hour without the slightest danger of
having the current of my thought disturbed."

     Most women cling to the Bible because they have been taught
that to give up that book is to give up all hope of another life --
of ever meeting again the loved and lost. They have also been
taught that the Bible is their friend, their defender, and the real
civilizer of man.

     Now if they will only read this book -- these three lectures,
without fear, and then read the Bible, they will see that the truth
or falsity of the dogma of inspiration. has nothing to do with the
question of immortality, Certainly the Old Testament does not teach
us that there is another life, and upon that question, even the New
is obscure and vague. The hunger of the heart finds only a few
small and scattered crumbs. There is nothing definite, solid, and
satisfying. United with the idea of immortality we find the
absurdity of the resurrection. A prophecy that depends for its
fulfillment upon an impossibility, cannot satisfy the brain or
heart.

     There are but few who do not long for a dawn beyond the night.
And this longing is born of, and nourished by, the heart. Love
wrapped in shadow -- bending with tear-filled eyes above its dead,
convulsively clasps the outstretched hand of hope.

     I had the pleasure of introducing Helen H. Gardener to her
first audience, and in that introduction said a few words that I
will repeat.
                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     "We do not know, we can not say whether death is a wall or a
door, the beginning or end of a day, the spreading of pinions to
soar, or the folding forever of wings. The rise or the set of a
sun, of an endless life that brings rapture and love to every one.

     "Under the seven-hued arch of hope let the dead sleep."

     They will also discover, as they read the "Sacred Volume,"
that it is not the friend of woman. They will find that the writers
of that book, for the most part, speak of woman as a poor beast of
burden -- a serf, a drudge, a kind of necessary evil -- as mere
property. Surely a book that upholds polygamy is not the friend of
wife and mother.

     Even Christ did not place woman on an equality with man. He
said not one word about the sacredness of home, the duties of the
husband to the wife -- nothing calculated to lighten the hearts of
those who bear the saddest burdens of this life.

     They will also find that the Bible has not civilized mankind.
A book that establishes and defends slavery and wanton war is not
calculated to soften the hearts of those who believe implicitly
that it is the work of God. A book that not only permits, but
command religious persecution, has not in my judgment developed the
affection nature of man. Its influence has been bad and bad only.
It has filled the world with bitterness revenge, and crime, and
retarded in countless ways the progress of our race.

     The writer of this little volume has read the Bible with open
eyes. The mist of sentimentality has not clouded her vision. She
has had the courage to tell the result of her investigations. She
has been quick to discover contradictions. She appreciates the
humorous side of the stupidly solemn. Her heart protests against
the cruel, and her brain rejects the childish, the unnatural, and
absurd. There is no misunderstanding between her head and heart.
She says what she thinks, and feels what she says.

     No human being can answer her arguments. There is no answer.
All the priests in the world cannot explain away her objections.
There is no explanation. They should remain dumb, unless they can
show that the impossible is the probable -- that slavery is better
than freedom -- that polygamy is the friend of woman -- that the
innocent can justly suffer for the guilty, and that to persecute
for opinion's sake is an act of love and worship.

     Wives who cease to learn -- who simply forget and believe,
will fill the evening of their lives with barren sighs and bitter
tears, The mind should outlast youth.

     If, when beauty fades, Thought, the deft and unseen sculptor,
hath not left his subtle lines upon the face, then all is lost. No
charm is left. The light is out. There is no flame within to
glorify the wrinkled clay.
                                        ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

     Hoffman House,
          NEW YORK, July 22, 1885.
                          ****     ****

                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               4

                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.
                               by
                         HELEN GARDENER

     IT is thought strange and particularly shocking by some
persons for a woman to question the absolute correctness of the
Bible. She is supposed to be able to go through the world with her
eyes shut, and her month open wide enough to swallow Jonah and the
Garden of Eden without making a wry face. It is usually recounted
as one of her most beautiful traits of character that she has faith
sufficient to float the Ark without inspecting the animals.

     So it is thought strange that a woman should object to any of
the teachings of the Patriarchs. I claim, however, that if she
honestly thinks there is anything wrong about them she has a right
to say so. I claim that I have a right to offer my objections to
the Bible from the standpoint of a woman. I think that it is fair,
at least, to put the case before you as it looks to me, using the
Bible itself as my chief witness. That Book I think degrades and
belittles women, and I claim the right to say why I think so. The
opposite opinion has been stated by hundreds of people, hundreds of
times, for hundreds of years, so that it is only fair that I be
allowed to bring in a minority report.

     Women have for a long time been asking for the right to an
education, for the right to live on an equal footing with their
brothers, and for the right to earn money honestly; while at the
same time they have supported a book and a religion which hold them
as the inferiors of their sons and as objects of contempt and
degradation with Jehovah. They have sustained a so-called
"revelation" which holds them as inferior and unclean things. Now
it has always seemed to me that these, women are trying to stand on
both sides of the fence at the same time -- and that neither foot
touches.

     I think they are making a mistake. I think they are making a
mistake to sustain any religion which is based upon faith. Even
though a religion claim a superhuman origin -- and I believe they
all claim that -- it must be tested by human reason, and if our
highest moral sentiments revolt at any of its dictates, its
dictates must go. For the only good thing about any religion is its
morality, and morality has nothing to do with faith. The one has to
do with right actions in this world; the other with unknown
quantities in the next. The one is a necessity of time the other a
dream of Eternity. Morality depends upon universal evolution; Faith
upon special "revelation;" and no woman can afford to accept any
"revelation" that has yet been offered to this world.

     That Moses or Confucius, Mohammed or Paul, Abraham or Brigham
Young asserts that his particular dogma came directly from God, and
that it was a personal communication to either or all of these
favored individuals, is a fact that can have no power over us
unless their teachings are in harmony with our highest thought; our
noblest purpose, and our purist conception of life. Which of them
can bear the test? Not one "revelation" known to man to-day can
look in the face of the nineteenth century and say, "I am parallel
with your richest development; I still lead your highest thought;
none of my teachings shock your sense of justice." Not one.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     it is faith in "revelation" that makes a mother tear from her
arms a tender, helpless child and throw it in the Ganges -- to
appease the gods! It is a religion of faith that teaches the
despicable principle of caste -- and that religion was invented by
those who profited by caste. It was our religion of faith that
sustained the institution of slavery -- and it had for its
originators dealers in human flesh. It is the Mormon's religion of
faith, his belief in the Bible and in the wisdom of Solomon and
David, that enables the monster of polygamy to flaunt its power and
its filth in the face of morality of the nineteenth century, which
has outgrown the Jehovah of the Jews.

     Every religion must be tried at the bar of human justice, and
stand or fall by the verdict there. It has no right to crouch
behind the theory of "inspiration" and demand immunity from
criticism; and yet that is just what every one of them does. They
all claim that we have no right to use our reason on their
inventions. But evil cannot be made good by revelation, and good
cannot be made evil by persecution.

     A "revelation" that teaches us to trample on purity, or bids
us despise beauty -- that gives power to vice or crushes the weak
-- is an evil. The dogma that leads us to ignore our humanity, that
asks us to throw away our pleasures, that tells us to be miserable
here in order that we may be happy hereafter, is a doctrine built
upon a false philosophy, cruel in its premises and false in its
promises. And the religion that teaches us that believing Vice is
holler than unbelieving Virtue is a grievous wrong. Credulity is
not a substitute for morality. Belief is not a question of right or
wrong, it is a question of mental organization. Man cannot believe
what he will, he must believe what he must. If his brain tells him
one thing and his catechism tolls him another, his brain ought to
win. You don't leave your umbrella at home during a storm, simply
because the almanac calls for a clear day.

     A religion that teaches a mother that she can be happy in
heaven, with her children in hell -- in everlasting torment --
strikes at the very roots of family affection. It makes the human
heart a stone. Love that means no more than that, is not love at
all. No heart that has ever loved can see the object of its
affection in pain and itself be happy. The thing is impossible. Any
religion that can make that possible is more to be dreaded than war
or famine or pestilence or death. It would eat out all that is
great and beautiful and good in this life. It would make life a
mockery and love a curse.

     I once knew a case myself, where an oldest son who was an
unbeliever died. He had been a kind son and a good man. He had
shielded his widowed mother from every hardship. He had tried to
lighten her pain and relieve her loneliness. He had worked early
and late to keep her comfortable and happy. When he died she was
heartbroken. It seemed to her more than she could bear. As she sat
and gazed at his dear face in a transport of grief, the door opened
and her preacher came in to bring her the comfort of religion. He
talked with her of her loss, and finally he said, "But it would not
be so hard for you to bear if he had been a Christian. If he had
accepted what was freely offered him yon would one day see him


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

again. But he chose his path, he denied his Lord, and he is lost.
And now, dear madam, place your affections on your living son, who
is, thank God, saved." That was the comfort he brought her. That
was the consolation of his religion. I am telling yon of an actual
occurrence. This is all a fact. Well, a few years later that dear
old lady died in her son's house, where she had gone on a visit. He
broke her will -- this son who was saved -- and brought in a bill
against her estate for her board and nursing while she was ill!
Which one of those boys do you think would be the best company for
her in the next world?

     It has always seemed to me that I would rather go to hell with
a good son than to heaven with a good Christian. I may be wrong,
but with my present light that is the way it looks to me; and for
the sake of humanity I am glad that it looks that way.

                       ACCIDENT INSURANCE.

     A church member said to me some time ago that even though the
Bible were not "the word of God," even though it were not necessary
to believe in the creed in order to go to heaven, it could not do
any harm to believe it; and he thought it was "best to be on the
safe side, for," said he, "suppose after all it should happen to be
true!"

     So he carries a church-membership as a sort of accident
insurance policy.

     I do not believe we have a right to work upon that basis, It
is not honest. I do not believe that any "suppose it should be"
gives us the right to teach "I know that it is." I do not believe
in the honesty and right of any cause that has to prop up its
backbone with faith, and splinter its legs with ignorance. I do not
believe in the harmlessness of any teaching that is not based upon
reason, justice, and truth. I do not believe that it is harmless to
uphold any religion that is not noble and elevating in itself. I do
not believe that it is "just as well" to spread any dogma that
stultifies reason and ignores common-sense. I do not believe that
it is ever well to compromise with dishonesty and pretence. And I
cannot admit that it "can do no harm" to teach a belief in the
goodness of a God who sends an Emerson or a Darwin to hell because
Eve was fond of fruit, and who offers a reserved seat in heaven to
Chastine Cox because a mob murdered Jesus Christ. It does not seem
to me good morals, and it is certainly poor logic.

     And speaking of logic, I heard a funny story the other day
about one of those absurdly literal little girls who, when she
heard people say they "wanted to be an angel," did not know it was
a joke. She thought it was all honor-bright. She was standing by
the window killing flies, and her mother called her and said, "Why
child, don't you know that is very wicked? Don't you know that God
made those dear little flies, and that he loves them?" (Just
imagine an infinite God in love with a blue-bottle fly!) Well, the
little girl thought that was queer taste, but she was sorry, and
said that she would not do it any more. By and by, however, a great
lazy fly was too tempting, and her plump little finger began to



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

follow him around slowly on the glass, and she said, "Oh you nice
big fly, did dod nade you? And does dod love you? And does you love
dod?" (Down came the finger.) Well, you shall see him."

     Yet we all know Christians who love God. better than anything
else -- "with all their hearts and soul and strength" -- who prefer
to postpone seeing him till the very last minute. They say it is
because they have not "fulfilled their allotted time." Why not be
honest and say it is because they like to live? They "long to put
on immortality;" but their sleep is sounder if they live next door
to a good doctor.

     People say that men are infidels because it is easier -- to
rid themselves of responsibility. But it seems to me that anyone
who advances the doctrine of "morality and works" instead of that
of "repentance and faith," on the ground that it is easier, is
laboring under a mistake. I don't see how any one could ask for an
easier way of getting rid of his sins than the plan that simply
unloads them on to another man. I fail to see anything hard about
that -- except for the man who catches the load; and I am unable to
see anything commendable about it either. But it is not always easy
for a man to be brave enough to be responsible for his own mistakes
or faults. It is not always easy for a man to say "I did it, and I
will suffer the penalty." That is not always easy, but it is always
just. No one but a coward or a knave needs to shift his personal
responsibility on to the shoulders of the dead. Honest men and
women do not need to put "Providence" up between themselves and
their own motives.

     A short time ago the wife of a very devout man apparently
died, but her body remained so lifelike and her color so natural
that her relatives decided that she could not be dead, and they
summoned a physician. The husband, however, refused to have him
administer any restoratives. He said that if the Lord had permitted
her to go into a trance and was anxious to bring her out alive he
would do it. Meanwhile he did not intend to meddle with Providence.
His maxim was, "Whatever else you do, don't interfere with
Providence. Give Providence a good chance and if it doesn't come
round all right for Betsy, I think I can bear it -- and she will
have to."

     If we take care of our motives toward each ether, "Providence"
will take care of itself.

     Did you ever know a pious man do a real mean thing -- that
succeeded -- who did not claim that Providence had a finger in it?
The smaller the trick, the bigger the finger. He is perfectly
honest in his belief too. He is the sort of man that never has a
doubt about hell -- and that most people go there. Thinks they all
deserve it. Has entire confidence that God is responsible for every
word in the Bible, and that all other Bibles and all other
religions are the direct work of the devil. Probably prays for
people who don't believe that way. He is perfectly honest in it.
That is simply his size, and he usually pities anybody who wears a
larger hat.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                         CHIEFLY WOMEN.

     But they say this is not a matter of reason. This is outside
of reason, it is all a matter of faith. But whenever a superstition
claims to be so holy that you must not use your reason about it,
there is something wrong some place. Truth is not afraid of reason,
nor reason of truth.

     I am going to say something to-night about why I do not
believe in a religion of faith. I am going to tell you some of the
reasons why I do not believe that the Bible is "inspired;" why I,
as a woman, don't want to think it is the word of God; why I think
that women, above all others, should not believe that it is. And
since women are the bulwarks of the churches to-day, it seems to me
they have, the right, and that it is a part of their duty, to ask
themselves why. Since about seven-tenths of all church-members are
women, surely the churches should not deny them the right to use
their reason (or whatever serves them in that capacity) in regard
to their own work.

     I saw some ladies begging the other day for money to pay off
the debt of a $200,000 church, on the corner-stone of which were
cut the words, "My kingdom is not of this world;" and I wondered at
the time what the property would have been like if the kingdom had
been of this world. It seemed to me that a few hundred such untaxed
houses would be a pretty fair property almost anywhere.

     One of our prominent bishops, when speaking recently of
church-membership, said, "The Church must recruit her ranks
hereafter almost entirely with children;" and he added, "the time
has passed when she can recruit her ranks with grown men." Good!
And the New York Evangelist (one of the strongest church papers)
says, "Four-fifths of the earnest young men of this country are
skeptics, distrust the clergy, and are disgusted with evangelical
Christianity." Good again.

     The Congregational Club of Boston has recently been discussing
the question how to win young men to Christianity. The Rev. R.R.
Meredith said: "The churches to-day do not get the best and
sharpest young men. They get the goody-goody ones easily enough;
but those who do the thinking are not brought into the church in
great numbers. You cannot reach them by the Bible. How many did
Moody touch in this city, during his revival days? You can count
them on your fingers. The man who wants them cannot get them with
the Bible under his arm. He must be like them, sharp. They cannot
be gathered by sentimentality. If you say to them, 'Come to Jesus,'
very likely they will reply; Go to thunder.' [In Boston!] The thing
to be done with such a man is to first get into his heart, and then
lead him into salvation before he knows it."

     I don't know how good this recipe is, but I should infer that
it is a double-back-action affair of some sort that could get into
a man's heart and lead him into salvation before he knew it, and
that if the Church can just got a patent on that she is all right;
otherwise I suspect that the goody-goody ones are likely to be
about all she will get in large numbers.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Do I need any stronger, plainer evidence than this to show
that the thought of the world is against it, and that it is time
for women to ask themselves whether a faith that can hold its own
only by its grasp upon the ignorance and credulity of children, a
faith that has made four-fifths of the earnest men skeptics, a
faith that has this deplorable effect upon Boston manners, is one
that does honor to the intellect and judgment of the women of
to-day?

     We hear women express indignation that the law classes them
with idiots and children; but from these orthodox statements it
would seem that in the Church they voluntarily accept about this
classification themselves. If only these church-people go to
heaven, what a queer kindergarten it will be, to be sure, with only
a few male voices to join in the choruses -- and most of those
tenor.

     This religion and the Bible require of woman everything, and
give her nothing. They ask her support and her love, and repay her
with contempt and oppression. No wonder that four-fifths of the
earnest men are against it, for it is not manly and it is not just;
and such men are willing to free women from the ecclesiastical
bondage that makes her responsible for all the ills of life, for
all the pains of deed and creed, while it allows her no choice in
their formation, no property in their fruition. Such men are
outgrowing the petty jealousies and musty superstitions of narrow-
minded dogmatists sufficiently to look upon the question not as one
of personal preference, but as one of human justice. They do not
ask, "Would I like to see woman do thus or thus?" but, "have I a
right to dictate the limit of her efforts or her energy?" -- not,
"Am I benefitted by her ecclesiastical bondage and credulity? Does
it give me unlimited power over her?" but, "Have I a right to keep
in ignorance, have I a right to degrade, any human intellect?" And
they have answered with equal dignity and impersonal judgment that
it is the birthright of no human being to dominate or enslave
another; that it is the just lot of no human being to be born
subject to the arbitrary will or dictates of any living soul; and
that it is, after all, as great an injustice to a man to make him
a tyrant as it is to make him a slave.

     Whenever a man rises high enough to leave his own personality
out of the question, he has gone beyond the Stage of silly
platitudes. His own dignity is too secure, his title to respect too
far beyond question, for him to need such little subterfuges to
guard his position, either as husband, as household-king, or as
public benefactor. His home life is not founded upon compulsory
obedience; but is filled with the perfume of perfect trust, the
fragrance of loving admiration and respect. It is the domestic
tyrant, the egotistic mediocre, and the superstitious Church that
are afraid for women to think, that fear to lose her as worshipper
and serf.

     You need go only a very little way back in history to learn
that the Church decided that a woman who learned the alphabet
overstepped all bounds of propriety, and that She would be wholly
lost to shame who should so far forget her modesty as to become
acquainted With the multiplication table.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     And to-day, if she offers her opinion and her logic for what
they are worth, the clergy preach doleful sermons about her losing
her beautiful home character, about her innocence being gone, about
their idea of her glorious exaltation as wife and mother being
destroyed. Then they grow florid and exclaim that "man is after all
subject to her, that he is born for the rugged path and she for the
couch of flowers!" [NOTE: "A pertinacious adversary, pushed to
extremities, may say that husbands indeed are willing to be
reasonable, and to make fair concessions to their partners without
being compelled to it, but that wives are not; that if allowed any
rights of their own they will acknowledge no rights at all in any
one else, and never will yield in anything, unless they can be
compelled, by the man's mere authority, to yield in everything.
This would have been said by many persons some generations ago,
when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever
thing to insult women for being what men made them. But it will be
said by no one now who is worth replying to. It is not the doctrine
of the present day that women are less susceptible of good feeling
and consideration for those with whom they are united by the
strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary, we are perpetually
told that women are better than men by those who are totally
opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that the
saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a
complimentary face upon an injury." -- John Stuart Mill.]

     You recognize it all, I see. You seem to have heard it
somewhere before. I recall one occasion when I heard it from a
country clergyman, who know so much about heaven and hell that he
hardly had time to know enough about this world to enable him to
keep out of the fire unless he was tied to a chair. It was in the
summer of 1876, and I remember the conversation began by his asking
a lady in the room about the Centennial display, from which she had
just returned. He asked her if she would advise him to take his
daughter. She said she thought it would be a very nice thing for
the girl, and she added, "It will be good for you. You will see so
much that is new and wonderful. It will be of use to you in your
work, I am sure." He said, "Well, I don't know about that. There
won't be anything much that is now to me. I've seen it all. I was
in Philadelphia in 1840." Then he gave us quite a talk on "woman's
sphere." He could tell you in five minutes just what it was; and
the amount of information that man possessed about the next world
was simply astonishing. He knew pretty nearly everything. I think
he could tell you, within a fraction or two, just how much material
it took to make wings for John the Baptist, and whether Paul sings
bass or tenor. His presbytery says he is a most remarkable
theologian -- and I don't doubt it, According to the law of
compensation, however, what he does not know about this world would
make a very comprehensive encyclopedia.

     But seriously, did it ever occur to you to ask any of these
divine oracles why, if all these recent compliments are true about
the superior beauty and virtue and truth and power resting with
women -- why it is that they always desire as heirs sons rather
than daughters? You would think their whole desire would be for
girls, and that, like Oliver Twist, their chief regret would be
that they hadn't "more." But the Bible (and the clergy, until quite



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

recently) pronounces it twice as great a crime to be the mother of
a girl as to be the mother of a boy. A crime to be the mother of a
little child -- a double crime if the child should be a girl.

     It is often urged that women are better off under the
Christian than under any other religion; that our Bible is more
just to her than other Bibles are. For the time we will grant this,
and respectfully inquire -- what does it prove? If it proves
anything it is this -- that all "divine revelations" are an
indignity to women, and that they had better stick to nature.
Nature may be exacting, but she is not partial. If it proves
anything, it is that all religions have been made by men for men
and through men. I do not contend for the superiority of other
Bibles, I simply protest against the wrong in ours. One wrong
cannot excuse another. That murder is worse than arson does not
make a hero of the rascal who fires our homes. If Allah were more
cruel than Jehovah, that would be no palliation of the awful crimes
of the Old Testament. That slaves have better clothes than savages
cannot make noble traffic in human blood. A choice of evils is
often necessary, but it does not make either of them a good. But
there is no book which tells of a more infamous monster than the
Old Testament, with its Jehovah of murder and cruelty and revenge,
unless it be the New Testament, which arms its God with hell, and
extends his outrages throughout all eternity!

                      WHY WOMEN SUPPORT IT.

     Another argument is that if orthodox Christianity were not
good for women they would not support and cling to it; if it did
not comfort them they would discard it. In reply to that I need
only recall to you the fact that it is the same in all religions.
Women have ever been the stanchest defenders of the faith. the most
bitter haters of an Infidel, the most certain that their form of
faith is the only truth. Yet I do not hear this fact advanced to
prove the divinity of the Koran or the book of Mormon. If it is a
valid argument in the one case it is valid in the others. The
trouble with it is it proves too much. it takes in the whole field.
It does not leave a weed from the first incantation of the first
aborigine to the last shout of the last convert to Mormonism, out
of its range; and it does, and always has done, just as good
service for any one of the other religions as it does for ours. It
is a free-for-all, go-as-you-please argument; but it is the sort of
chaff they feed theological students on -- and they sift it over
for women. It is pretty light diet when it gets to them -- but it
is filling.

     Recently I heard a clergyman give the following as his reason
for opposing medical, or scientific training of any sort, for
women: "Now her whole energy and force of action (outside of the
family) must be expended upon religion. If she were allowed other
fields of action or thought, her energy, like that of man, would be
withdrawn from and fatally cripple the Church."

     To me, however, it seems that any organization that finds it
necessary to cripple its adherents in order to keep them has a
screw loose somewhere.



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     And it also seems to me that it is time for women to try to
find out where the trouble is. They will not want for aid from the
men who think -- the men who hold self vastly inferior to principle
and justice -- the rare noblemen of nature, honorable, fair, just,
tender, and thoughtful men -- men who love to see the weakest share
with them the benefits of freedom -- men who know that they are not
the less men because they are tender, that women are not the less
women because they are strong; and no land under the sky holds so
many such as ours.

                        WHAT IT TEACHES.

     It seemed to me that the time had come when women should know
for themselves what the Bible teaches for them and what the pulpit
has upheld; so I have looked it up a little, and although I cannot
soil my lips nor your ears with much of it, there is enough, I
think, that I may use to make any self-respecting, pure woman blush
that she has sustained it by word or act.

     The Bible teaches that a father may sell his daughter for a
slave, [Ex. xxi. 7.] that he may sacrifice her purity to a mob,
[Judges xix. 24.] and that he may murder her, and still be a good
father and a holy man. It teaches that a man may have any number of
wives; that he may sell them, give them away, or change them
around, and still be a perfect gentleman, a good husband, a
righteous man, and one of God's most intimate friends; and that is
a pretty good position for a beginning. It teaches almost every
infamy under the heavens for woman, and it does not recognize her
as a self-directing, free human being. It classes her as property,
just as it does a sheep: and it forbids her to think, talk, act, or
exist, except under conditions and limits defined by some priest.

     If the Bible were strictly followed, women and negroes would
still be publicly bought and sold in America. If it were believed
in as it once was, if the Church had the power she once had, I
should never see the light of another day, and your lives would be
made a hell for sitting here to-night. The iron grasp of
superstition would hold you and your children forever over the
bottomless pit of religious persecution, and cover your fair fame
with infamous slander, because you dared to sit here and hear me
strike a blow at infinite injustice.

     Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a
Christian country has been "authorized by the Bible" and riveted
and perpetuated by the pulpit. That seems strong language, no
doubt; but I shall give you an opportunity to decide as to its
truth. I will now bring my witnesses. They are from the "inspired
word" itself, and therefore must be all that could be desired.

     I will read yon a short passage from Exodus xx. 22; xxi. 7-8:

     22 And the LORD said unto Moses, Thus thou shalt say unto the
children of Israel, Ye have seen that I talked with you from
heaven. * * *

     7. And if a man sell his daughter to be a maid-servant, she
shall not go out as the men-servants do.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     8. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to
himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a
strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt
deceitfully with her.

     The Lord doesn't object to a man selling his daughter, but if
any one thing makes him angrier than another it is to have her go
about as the men-servants do after she is sold. On a little point
like that he is absolutely fastidious. You may here notice that God
took the trouble to come down from heaven to tell the girl what not
to do after she was sold. He forgot to suggest to her father that
it might be as well not to sell her at all. He forgot that. But in
an important conversation one often overlooks little details. The
next is Joshua xv. 16-17:

     16 And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kirjath-sepher, and taketh
it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife.

     17 And Othniel the brother of Caleb [and consequently the
girl's uncle] took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.

     Please to remember that the said Caleb was one of God's
intimates -- a favorite with the Almighty. The girl was not
consulted; the father paid off his warriors in female scrip. The
next is Gen. xix. 5-8

     5 And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the
men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us that
we may know them.

     6 And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door
after him.

     7 And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

     8 Behold now, I have two daughters * * * * let me, I pray you,
bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes;
only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the
shadow of my roof.

     These men had come under the shadow of Lot's roof for
protection, it seems, and Lot felt that his honor demanded that he
should shield them even at the cost of the purity and safety of his
own daughters! Do you know I have always had a mild curiosity to
know what his daughters were under the shadow of his roof for. It
could not have been for protection, I judge, since Lot was one of
God's best friends. He was on all sorts of intimate terms with the
Deity -- knew things were going to happen before they came -- was
the only man good enough to save from a doomed city -- the only one
whose acts pleased God and this act seems to have been particularly
satisfactory. These men were "angels of God" who required this
infamy for their protection! If it takes all the honor out of a man
when he gets to be an angel, they may use my wings for a feather-
duster.

     Now here is a little property law. Num. xxvii.

     6 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     8 And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If
a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to
pass unto his daughter.

     And our law works a little that way yet; being the result of
ecclesiastical law it naturally would.

     Next we have Num. xxxvi.:

     8 And every daughter that possesseth an inheritance in any
tribe of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the
family of the tribe of her father, that the children of Israel may
enjoy every man the inheritance of his fathers.

     9 Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to
another tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of
Israel shall keep himself to his own inheritance.

     10 Even as the LORD commanded Moses, so did the daughters of
Zelophehad.

     That is all the women were for -- articles of conveyance for
property. Save the land, no matter about the girls. Now these silly
women actually believed that God told Moses whom they had to marry
just because Noses said so! I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it is
not safe to take heavenly communications at second-hand. Second-
hand articles are likely to be varnished over, and have to be taken
at a discount. And it seems to me that, if the lord is at all
particular as to whom a girl should marry she is the one for him to
discuss the matter with. Moses didn't have to live with the sons of
Zelophehad, and consequently wasn't the one to talk the matter over
with. But, you see, it won't do to question what Moses said God
told him, because upon his veracity the whole structure is built.
He had more personal interviews with the Deity than any other man
-- he and Solomon -- and hence they are the best authority.

     I have here the 31st chapter of Numbers, but it is unfit to
read. It tolls a story of shame and crime unequalled in atrocity.
It tells that God commanded Moses and Eleazar, the priest, to
produce vice and perpetrate crime on an unparalleled scale. It
tells us that they obeyed the order, and that 16,000 helpless girls
were dragged in the mire of infamy and divided amongst the
victorious soldiers. They were made dissolute by fore, and by
direct command of God!

     This one chapter stamps as false, forever, the claim of
inspiration for the Bible. That one chapter would settle it for me.
Do you believe that God told Moses that? Do you believe there is a
God who is a thief, a murderer, and a defiler of innocent girls? Do
you believe it? Yet this religion is built upon Moses' word, and
woman's position was established by him. It seems to me time for
women to retire Moses from active life. Coax him to resign on
account of his health. Return him to his constituency. He has been
on the supreme bench long enough. Don't let your children believe
in such a God. Better let them believe in annihilation. Better lot
them think that the sleep of death is the end of all! Better, much
better, let them believe that the tender kiss at parting is the


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

last of all consciousness for them, and after that eternal rest!
Don't let their hearts be seared, their lives clouded, their
intellects dwarfed by the cruel dread of the God of Moses! Better,
thrice better, let the cold earth close over the loved and loving
dust forever, than that it should enter the portals of infinite
tyranny.

     Next we will take Deut. xx. 10-16

     10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then
proclaim peace unto it. [Good scheme!]

     11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open
unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found
therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

     12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war
against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:

     13 And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thy hands,
thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:

     14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all
that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take
unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thy enemies, which
the LORD thy God hath given thee.

     15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far
off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

     16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God
doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing
that breatheth.

     The injunction to proclaim peace unto a city about to be
attacked and plundered strikes me as a particularly brilliant idea.
When you go to rob and murder a man, just tell him to keep cool and
behave like a gentleman and you won't do a thing to him but steal
all his property and cut his throat and retire in good order. God
always seemed to fight on the side of the man who would murder most
of his fellow-men and degrade the greatest number of women. He
seemed, in fact, to rather insist on this point if he was
particular about nothing else. And, by the way, if you had happened
to live in one of those cities, what opinion do you think you would
have had of Jehovah? Would he have impressed you as a loving
Father?

     Here we have 2 Samuel v. 10, 12-13:

     10 And David went on, and grew great, and the LORD God of
hosts was with him.

     12 And David perceived that the LORD had established him king
over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people
Israel's sake.




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     13 And David took him more concubines and wives out of
Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons
and daughters born to David.

     The nearer he got to God -- the more God was "with him," the
more wives he wanted.

     Next we have 2 Samuel xx. 3:

     3 And David came to his house at Jerusalem, and the king took
the ten women, his concubines, whom he had left to keep the house,
and put them in ward, and fed them  * * * * * So they were shut up
unto the day of their death, living in widowhood.

     Now what did David do that for? I don't know. It was such a
trifling little matter that it was not thought necessary to give
any reason. Perhaps he had eaten too much pie and felt cross; and
what else were those women for but to be made to stand around on
such occasions? Weren't they his property? Didn't those ten women
belong to David? Hadn't he a perfect right to shut them up and feed
them if he wanted to? Don't you think it was kind of him to feed
them? I wonder if he sang any of his psalms to them through the
key-hole. His son Absalom had just been killed, and he felt
miserable about that. He had just delivered himself of that
touching apostrophe we often hear repeated from the pulpit to-day,
to awaken sympathy for God's afflicted prophet: "O my son Absalom,
my son, my son Absalom I would God I had died for thee, O Absalom,
my son, my son!" And I haven't a doubt that there, were at least
ten women who echoed that wish most heartily. It must have been
carried in the family without a dissenting vote.

     To this God of the Bible a woman may not go unless her father
or husband consents. She can't even promise to be good without
asking permission. This God holds no communication with women
unless their male relations approve. He wants to be on the safe
side, I suppose. I'll read you about that. It is in one of the
chapters that are not commonly cited as evidence that God is no
respecter of persons, and that the Bible holds woman as man's
equal; nevertheless it is as worthy of belief as any of the rest of
it, and its "Thus saith the Lord" and "I as the Lord commanded
Moses" are "frequent and painful and free," as Mr. Bret Harte might
say. The chapter is Numbers xxx.:

     And Moses spake unto the heads of the tribes concerning the
children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the LORD hath
commanded.

     2 If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind
his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do
according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.

     3 if a woman also vow a vow unto the LORD, and bind herself by
a bond, being in her father's house in her youth;

     4 And her father hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she hath
bound, her soul, and her father shall hold his peace at her; then
all her vows shall stand, and every bond wherewith she hath bound
her soul shall stand.

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     5 But if her father disallow her in the day that he heareth;
not any of her vows, or of her bonds wherewith she hath bound her
soul, shall stand: and the LORD shall forgive her, because her
father disallowed her.

     6 And if she had at all an husband when she vowed, or uttered
aught out of her lips, wherewith she bound her soul;

     7 And her husband heard it, and held his peace at her in the
day that he heard it; then her vows shall stand, and her bonds
wherewith she bound her soul shall stand.

     8 But if her husband disallowed her on the day that he heard
it; then he shall make her vow which she vowed, and that which she
uttered with her lips, wherewith she bound her soul, of none
effect: and the LORD shall forgive her.

     9 But every vow of a widow, and of her that is divorced,
where-with they have bound their souls, shall stand against her.

     10 And if she vowed in her husband's house, or bound her soul
by a bond with an oath;

     11 And her husband heard it, and held his peace at her, and
disallowed her not; then all her vows shall stand, and every bond
wherewith she bound her soul shall stand.

     12 But if her husband hath utterly made them void on the day
he heard them; then whatsoever proceeded out of her lips concerning
her vows, or concerning the bond of her soul, shall not stand: her
husband hath made them void; and the LORD shall forgive her.

     13 Every vow, and every binding oath to afflict the soul, her
husband may establish it, or her husband may make it void.

     14 But if the husband altogether hold his peace at her from
day to day; then he establisheth all her vows, or all her bonds,
which are upon her: he confirmeth them, because he held his peace
at her in the day that he heard them.

     15 But if he shall any ways make them void after that he hath
heard them; then he shall bear her iniquity.

     16 These are the statutes, which the LORD commanded Moses,
between a man and his wife, between the father and his daughter,
being yet in her youth in her father's house.

     Between man and his God they tell us there is no one but a
Redeemer; but between woman and man's God there seems to be all her
male relations, which, I should think, would prevent any very close
intimacy. And by the time the divine commands to woman were
filtered through the entire male population, from Moses to the last
gentleman who in the confusion natural to the occasion, misquotes
"with all thy worldly goods I me endow," I should think it not
impossible that some slight errors may have crept in, and the
Church should not feel offended if I were to aid her in their
detection.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Here we have two or three passages that are said to be the
words of Jesus. I hope that is not true. But I, believing him to
have been a man, can understand how they might have been the words
of even a very good man in that age and with his surroundings; but
the words of a perfect being -- never! Of course I know that we
have no positive knowledge of any of the words of Jesus, since no
one pretends that they were ever written down until long after his
death; but I am dealing now with the theological creation upon the
theologian's own grounds. My own idea of Jesus places him far above
the myth that bears his name.

     3 And when they waited wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto
him, They have no wine.

     4 Jesus saith unto her, woman, what have I to do with thee?

                                             -- John ii, 3-4.

     I hope that Christ did not say that -- for his manhood I hope
so. I would rather believe that this is the mistake of some
"uninspired" writer than think that one who in much had so gentle
and tender a nature, was unkind and brutal to has mother. No one
would attempt, in this age, to apologize for such a reply to so
simple a remark made by a mother to her son. But they say "he was
divine." They also tell us he was a perfect example; but with this
evidence before me, I am glad our men are human. Still I cannot
pretend to say that this is not divine -- never having made any
divine acquaintances. I can only say, humanity is better.

     Then again he is reported to have said a most cruel thing to
the broken-hearted mother of a dying child, and I would rather
believe the Bible uninspired and keep my respect for Jesus, the
man. It will be better for this world to believe in Jesus, the
brave, earnest man, than in Jesus, the cruel God.

     21 Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of
Tyre and Sodom.

     22 And behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts,
and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of
David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.

     23 But he answered her not a word.

     25 Then came she and worshiped him, saying, Lord, help me.

     26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the
children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

     27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters' table.                      -- Matt.
xv.

     Do you think that was kind? Do you think it was godlike? What
would you think of a physician, if a woman came to him distressed
and said, "Doctor, come to my daughter; she is very ill. She has
lost her reason, and she is all I have!" What would you think of
the doctor who would not reply at all at first, and then, when she

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

fell at his feet and worshiped him, answered that he did not spend
his time doctoring dogs? Would you like him as a family physician?
Do you think that, even if he were to cure the child then, he would
have done a noble thing? Is it evidence of a perfect character to
accompany a service with an insult? Do you think a man who could
offer such an indignity to a sorrowing mother has a perfect
character, is an ideal God? I do not. And I hope that Jesus never
said it. I prefer to believe that that story is a libel.

     It won't do. We have either to give up the "inspiration"
theory of the Bible, and acknowledge that it is the work of men of
a crude and brutal age, and like any other book of legend and myth
of any other people; or else to give up the claim that God is any
better than the rest of us. You can take your choice.

     Whenever a theologian undertakes to explain matters so as to
keep the Bible and the divine character both intact, I am always
reminded of the story of the Irishman who was given a bed in the
second story of a lodging-house the first night he spent in New
York. In the night the fire-engines ran past with their frightful
noise. Aroused from a deep sleep and utterly terrified, Mike's
first thought was to get out of the house. He hastily jerked on the
most important part of his costume, unfortunately wrong side
before, and jumped out of the window. His friend ran to the window
and exclaimed, "Are ye kill, Mike?" Picking himself up and looking
himself over by the light of the street lamp, he replied, "No, not
kilt, Pat, but I fear I am fatally twisted."

     Next we have God's opinion (on Bible authority) as to the use
of wives. They were to be forcibly changed around as a Punishment
to their husbands and for offenses committed by the latter.

     11 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against
thee out of thy own house, and I will take thy wives before thy
eyes and give them unto thy neighbor.             -- 2 Sam. xii.

     The latter part of the verse is omitted as being unfit to
read. Don't understand that I think any of it is exactly choice
literature; but that cover has been used to silence objection long
enough. if it is fit to teach as the word and will of God. for
women, it ought to be fit to read in a theater -- but it is not.

     What do you think of a religion that upholds such morals and
such justice as that just quoted? What do you think of women
supporting the Bible in the face of that as the will of God? Of all
human beings a woman should spurn the Bible first. She, above all
others, should try to destroy its influence; and I mean to do what
little I can in that direction. The morals of the nineteenth
century have outgrown the Bible. Jehovah stands condemned before
the bar of every noble soul. What Moses and David and Samuel taught
as the word and will of God, we, who are fortunate enough to live
in the same age with Charles Darwin, know to be the expression of
a low social condition untempered by the light of science. Their
"thus saith the Lord," read in the light of to-day, is "thus saith
ignorance and fear" -- no more, no less.




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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     If you will read the 12th chapter of Leviticus, which is unfit
to read here, you will see that the Bible esteems it twice as great
a crime to be the mother of a girl as to be the mother of a boy; so
highly esteemed was woman by the priesthood; so great a favorite
was she of Jehovah.

     And do you know there is a law in the Bible which "the Lord
spake unto Moses" that says if a man is jealous of his wife,
"whether he have cause or not," he is to take her to a priest, and
take a little barley meal (if you ever want to try it, remember it
must be barley meal; I don't suppose the priest could tell whether
she was guilty or not if you were to take corn meal or hominy
grits) and put it in the wife's hands. And the priest is to take
some "holy" water and scrape up the dirt off the floor of the
Tabernacle, and put the dirt in the water and make the wife drink
it. Now just imagine an infinite God getting up a scheme like that!
Then the priest curses her and says if she is guilty she shall rot.
. . . "and she shall say Amen." That is her defence! Then the
priest takes the stuff she has in her hands -- this barley-meal
"jealousy offering" -- and "waves it before the Lord." (I suppose
you all know what that part is done for. If you don't, ask some
theological student with a number six hat-band; he'll tell you.)
And then he burns a pinch of it (that is probably for luck), and at
this point it is time to make the woman drink some more of the
filthy water (which he does with great alacrity), and "if she be
guilty the water will turn bitter within her," ... "and she shall
be accursed among her people." (You doubtless perceive that her
defence has been most elaborate throughout.) Do you think that
water would be bitter to the priest?

     But if she does not complain that the water is bitter, and if
her "Amen" is perfectly satisfactory all round, and she be
pronounced innocent, what then? Is the husband in any way reproved
for his brutality? Did the Lord "reveal" to Moses that he should
drink the rest of that holy water and dirt? No! That wasn't in
Moses' line. Neither he nor the husband drink the rest of that
water -- priest doesn't either; they don't even take a pinch of the
barley. But after she is subjected to this, and the show is over,
"if she be innocent, then shall she go free!" Oh, ye gods! what
magnificent generosity! I should have thought they would have
hanged her then for being innocent.

     "And then shall the man be guiltless of iniquity, and the
woman shall bear her iniquity."

     If she is innocent she shall bear he iniquity. You all see how
that is done I suppose. If you don't, ask your little number six
theological student, and he will tell you all about it, and he will
also prove to you, without being asked, that he and God are capable
of regulating the entire universe without the aid of General
Butler.

     But I am told that I ought to respect and love the Bible that
all women ought to take an active part in teaching it to the
heathen, to show them how good Jehovah is to his daughters. But if
he is, he has been unusually unfortunate in his choice of
executors.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Nor is it only in the Old Testament that such morals and such
justice are taught. The clergy put that part off by saying -- "Oh,
that was a different dispensation, and God, the Unchangeable, has
changed his mind." That is the sole excuse they give for all the
"holy" men, who used to talk personally with God, practicing
polygamy and all the other immoralities. They maintain that it was
God's best man who upheld polygamy then, and that it is the Devil's
best man who does it now. Odd idea isn't it? Simply a question of
time and place; and as Col. Ingersoll says, you have got to look on
a map to see whether you are dammed or not. But it does seem to me
that a God that did not always know better than that, is not a safe
chief magistrate. He might take to those views again. They say
history is likely to repeat itself. Anyhow, I would rather be on
the safe side and just fix the laws so that he couldn't. It would
be just as well.

                       FROM MOSES TO PAUL.

     But now we have come to "St." Paul and his ideas on the woman
question. He worked the whole problem by simple proportion and
found that man stands in the same relation to woman as God stands
to man. That is, man is to woman as God is to man -- and only a
slight remainder. I'm not going to misrepresent this gifted saint.
I shall let him speak for himself. He does it pretty well for a
saint, and much more plainly than they usually do.

     22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto
the Lord.

     23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is
the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body.

                                                  -- Ephesians v.

     The husband is the savior of the wife! Pretty slim hold on
heaven for most women, isn't it? And then suppose she hasn't any
husband." Her case is fatal.

     24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the
wives be to their own husbands in everything.       -- Ephesians v.

     Paul was a modest person in his requirements.

     9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest
apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair,
or gold, or pearls, or costly array.             -- I Timothy ii,

     It does seem as if anybody would know that braided hair was
wicked; and as to "gold and pearls and costly array," all you have
to do to prove the infallibility of Paul -- and what absolute faith
Christians have in it! -- is to go into any fashionable church and
observe the absence of all such sinfulness:

     10 But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good
works.

     11 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority
over the man, but to be in silence.

     13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

     14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was
in the transgression.                            -- I Timothy ii.

     According to the reasoning of verse 13 man should be subject
to all the lower animals, because they were first formed, and then
Adam. Verse 14 tells us that Adam sinned knowingly; Eve was
deceived, so she deserves punishment. Now I like that. If you
commit a crime understandingly it is all right. If you are deceived
into doing it you ought to be damned. The law says, "The
criminality of an act resides in the intent; "but more than likely
St. Paul was not up in Blackstone and did not use Coke.

     This next is St. Peter, and I believe this is one of the few
topics upon which the infallible Peter and the equally infallible
Paul did not disagree:

     Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;
that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be
won by the conversation of the wives;

     2 While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with
fear.                                        -- 1 Peter iii.

     I should think that would be a winning card. If the
conversation of a wife, coupled with a good deal of fear, would not
convert a man, he is a hopeless case.

     But here is Paul again, in all his mathematical glory, and
mortally afraid that women won't do themselves honor.

     3 But I would have you know, that the head of every man is
Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of
Christ is God.

     4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered,
dishonoreth his head.

     5 But every woman that prayeth or prophosieth with her head
uncovered, dishonoreth her head; for that is even all one as if she
were shaven.

     6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but
if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be
covered.

     7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as
he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the
man:

     8 For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man.




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     9 Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for
the man.                                            -- 1 Cor. xi.

     And that settles it, I suppose. But what on earth was man
created for? I should not think it could have been just for fun.

     34 Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not
permitted unto them to speak but they are commanded to be under
obedience, as also saith the law.

     85 And if they will learn anything, let them ask their
husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the
church.                                      -- 1 Cor. xiv.

     That is a principle that should entitle St. Paul to the
profound admiration of women. And yet, when I come to think of it,
I don't know which one gets the worst of that either. Whenever you
want to know anything, ask your husband, at home! No wonder most
husbands don't have time to stay at home much. No wonder they have
to see a man so often. It would unseat any man's reason if he lived
in constant feat that he might, any minute, be required to explain
to a woman of sense, how death could have been brought into this
world by Eve, when every one knows that long before man could have
lived upon this earth animals lived and died. It would make any man
remember that he had to "catch a car" if he were asked suddenly to
explain the doctrine of the Trinity. I would not blame the most
sturdy theologian for remembering that it was club night, if his
wife were to ask him, unexpectedly, how Nebuchadnezzar, with his
inexperience, could digest grass with only one stomach, when it
takes four for the oxen that are used to it. That may account,
however, for his hair turning to feathers.

     I don't believe St. Paul could have realized what a diabolical
position he was placing husbands in, when he told wives to ask them
every time they wanted to know anything -- unless he wanted to make
marriage unpopular. There is one thing certain, he was careful not
to try it himself, which looks much as if he had some realizing
sense of what he had cut out for husbands to do, and felt that
there were some men who would rather be drafted -- and then send a
Substitute.

     But why are his commands not followed to-day? Why are not the
words, sister, mother, daughter, wife, only names for degradation
and dishonor?

     Because men have grown more honorable than their religion, and
the strong arm of the law, supported by the stronger arm of public
sentiment, demands greater justice than St. Paul ever dreamed of.
Because men are growing grand enough to recognize the fact that
right is not masculine only, and that justice knows no sex. And
because the Church no longer makes the laws. Saints have been
retired from the legal profession. I can't recall the name of a
single one who is practicing law now. Have any of yon ever met a
saint at the bar?





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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Women are indebted to-day for their emancipation from a
position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to
Jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied
his commands. That she does not crouch to-day where Saint Paul
tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave
enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his God.

     And remember that I have not read yon the worst stories of the
Bible. The greater number of those which refer to women are wholly
unfit to read here. Are you willing to think they are the word of
God? I am not. Believe in a God if you will, but do not degrade him
by accepting an interpretation of him that would do injustice to
Mephistopheles! Have a religion if you desire, but demand that it
be free from impurity and lies, and that it be just. Exercise faith
if you must, but temper it wisely with reason. Do not allow
ministers to tell you stories that are sillier than fairy tales,
more brutal than barbaric warfare, and too unclean to be read, and
then assure you that they are the word of God. Use your reason; and
when you are told that God came down and talked to Moses behind a
bush, and told him to murder several thousand innocent people; when
you are told that he created a vast universe and filled it with
people upon all of whom he placed a never-ending curse because of
a trivial disobedience of one; give him the benefit of a reasonable
doubt and save your reputation for slander.

     Now just stop and think about it. Don't you think that if a
God had come down and talked to Moses he would have had something
more important to discuss than the arrangement of window curtains
and the cooking of a sheep? Since Moses was the leader of God's
people, their lawgiver, the guardian of their morals, don't you
think that the few minutes of conversation could have been better
spent in calling attention to some of the little moral
delinquencies of Moses himself? Don't you think it would have been
more natural for an infinite and just ruler to have mentioned the
impropriety of murdering so many men, and degrading so many young
girls to a life worse than that of the vilest quarter of any
infamous dive, than to have occupied the time in trivial details
about a trumpery jewel-box? Since God elected such a man as Moses
to guide and govern his people, does it not seem natural that he
would have given more thought to the moral worth and practices of
his representative on earth, than to the particular age at which to
kill a calf? If he were going to take the trouble to say anything,
would it not seem more natural that he should say something
important?

     In his numerous chats with Solomon, don't you think he could
have added somewhat to that gentleman's phenomenal wisdom by just
hinting to him that he had a few more wives than were absolutely
necessary? He had a thousand we are told, which leaves Brigham
Young away behind. Yet there are Christians to-day who teach their
children that Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, and that
Brigham Young was very close to the biggest fool. It is not strange
that some of these children infer that the trouble with Brigham was
that he had not wives enough, and that if he had only married the
whole state of Massachusetts he and Solomon would now occupy
adjoining seats on the other shore, and use the same jew's-harp?



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Do you believe for one moment that a God ever talked with any
man and told him to murder a whole nation of men, to steal their
property, to butcher in cold blood the mothers, and to give the
young girls to a camp of brutal soldiers -- and that he helped to
do it? Do you believe any God ever told a man to give so many of
those girls to one tribe, so many to another, and to burn so many
as an offering to himself? Do you believe it? I don't. Would you
worship him if he had? I would not.

     And yet it is true that he did help in such work, or else the
word of Moses is not worth a nickel. God did this, or else our
religion is founded upon a fraud. He did it, or orthodoxy is a
mistake. He did it, or the Bible is an imposition. If it is true,
no woman should submit to such a fiend for an hour; if it is false,
let her unclasp the clutches of the superstition which is built
upon her dishonor and nourished by her hand.

     They say it is a shame for a woman to attack the Bible. I say
she is the one who should do it. It is she who has everything to
gain by its overthrow. It is she who has everything to loose by its
support. They tell me it is the word an will of God. I do not, I
cannot, believe it! And it does seem to me that nothing but lack of
moral perception or mental capacity could enable any human being
who was honest (and not seared) to either respect or believe in
such a God.

     As a collection of ingenious stories, as a record of folly and
wickedness, as a curious and valuable old literary work, keep the
Bible in the library. But put it on the top shelf -- or just behind
it, and don't let the children see it until they are old enough to
read it with discrimination. As a mythological work it is no worse
than several others. As a divine revelation it is simply monstrous.

     Among your other tales you might tell the children some from
it. You might tell them that at one time a man got mad at another
man, and caught three hundred foxes, and set fire to their tails
(they standing still the while), and then turned them loose into
the other man's corn, and burnt it all up. If they don't know much
about foxes, and have never experimented in burning live hair, they
may think it is a pretty good story. But I would not tell them that
the man who got up that torch-light procession was a good man. I
would not tell them that he was one of God's most intimate friends;
because even if they think he had a right to burn his enemy's
crops, I don't believe that any right-minded child would think it
was fair to the foxes.

               THE FRUIT OF THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

     Some time ago I went to hear a noted minister, who preached a
sermon about the "fruit of the tree of knowledge" to a congregation
composed, as most congregations are, chiefly of women. Yet his
sermon was a monument of insult, bigotry, and dogmatic intolerance
that would have done honor to a witch-hunter several centuries ago.
That women will subject themselves to such insults week after week,
and that there are still men who will condescend to offer them, is
a sad commentary upon their self-respect as well as upon the
degrading influence of their religion.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Why will they listen to such nonsense? Perhaps woman was made
of a rib and so should be held as flesh and blood only, devoid of
intellect. But I don't know that she was; I was not there to see,
and, in fact, none of my family were; and since they tell us that
the only gentleman present upon that interesting occasion was
asleep, I don't know who could have told the story in the first
place.

     It is always a surprise to me that women will sit, year after
year, and be told that, because of a story as silly and childish as
it is unjust, she is responsible for all the ills of life; that
because, forsooth, some thousands of years ago a woman was so
horribly wicked as to eat an apple she must and should occupy a
humble and penitent position, and remain forever subject to the
dictates of ecclesiastical pretenders. It is so silly, so childish,
that for people of sense to accept it seems almost incredible.

     According to the story, she was deceived. According to the
story, she believed that she was doing a thing which would give
greater knowledge and a broader life, and she had the courage to
try for it. According to the story, she first evinced the desire to
be more and wiser than a mere brute, and incidentally gave her
husband an opportunity to invent the first human lie (a privilege
still dear to the heart), a field which up to that time had been
exclusively worked by the reptiles. But they never got a chance at
it again. From the time that Adam entered the lists, competition
was too lively for any of the lower animals to stand a ghost of a
chance at it, and that may account for the fact that, from that
time to this, nobody has ever heard a shake tell a lie or volunteer
information to a woman. The Church has had a monopoly of these
profitable perquisites ever since. The serpent never tried it
again. He turned woman over to the clergy, and from that time to
this they have been the instructors who have told her which apple
to bite, and how big a bite to take. She has never had a chance
since to change her diet. From that day to this she has had apple
pie, stewed apple, dried apple, baked apple, apple-jack, and cider;
and this clergyman that I heard, started out fresh on apple-sauce.
He seemed to think -- "anything for a change." You would have
thought to hear him, that the very worst thing that ever happened
to this world was the birth of the desire for knowledge, and that
such desire in woman had been the curse of all mankind.

     But it seems to me that if in this day of intelligence a
minister preaches or acts upon such dogmas, women should scorn him
both as a teacher and as a man. If a creed or Church upholds such
doctrines they should shun it as they would a pest-house. If all
system or any book of religion teaches such principles they should
exert every effort to utterly destroy its influence. I want to do
what I can to show woman that the mercury of self-respect must fall
several degrees at the church door, and that the light of reason
must go out.

     In this sermon that I speak of, we were warned "not to be wise
above that which is written." As if a man should bind his thoughts
and knowledge down to what was known, believed, or written in ages
past! As though a man should fear and tremble, should hesitate to
reach out after, to labor to know, all that his intellect and


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

energy can compass. As though to be good he must accept situations,
sentiments, ideas ready-made, and dwarf his intellect and bind his
mental ability by the capacity of somebody else.

     "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

     He that hath eyes to see, let him see."

     And he that hath a brain to think, let him think. What is his
intellect for! Why is his mind one vast interrogation point? Why
should not Eve have grasped with eagerness the fruit of the tree of
knowledge?

     A taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge does drive man
from the paradise of ignorance, does send him forth a laborer in
the vast fields of speculation and thought, where there is no rest,
and no possibility of the cessation of labor so long as his
energies and his love of truth remain to impel him to the conquest
of the infinite domain that lies unexplored beyond.

     But would any man sell what is gained in liberty, in strength,
in breadth, in conscious superiority, for the delights which every
brute has left him in his stagnant paradise of ignorance and rest?
What man in this nineteenth century can unblushingly say he would
not choose the labor with all its pain, the effort with all its
failure, the struggle with all its exhaustion? Why try to bind the
human mind by the silly theory that a God requires man to crush out
or subject the intellect he has given him? Whatever religion may
have gained by such a course, think what morality and progress have
lost by it!

     What has not woman lost by that silly fable which made her
responsible for transgression? Honor her for it! Honor her the more
if it was she who first dared the struggle rather than lose her
freedom or crush her reason. If she learned first that the price of
ignorance and slavery was too great to pay for the luxury of
idleness -- honor her for it. The acceptance of such contemptible
stories, as told by the clergy in all ages and in all religions as
the "word of God," has done more to enslave and injure women's
intellects, and to brutalize men, than has been done by any other
influence; and our boasted superior civilization is not the result
of the Christian religion, but has been won step by step in despite
of it. For the Church has fought progress with a vindictive
bitterness and power found in no other antagonist -- from the time,
long ago, when it crushed Galileo for daring to know more than its
"inspired" leaders could ever learn, down to yesterday, when it
raised a wild howl against Prof. Tyndall for making a simple
statement, in itself absolutely incontrovertible.

     It had to yield to Galileo as the people grew beyond its power
to blind them to his truth. It is yielding every hour to-day to
Tyndall from the same dire necessity; while its nimble devotees vie
with each other in proclaiming that they thought that way all the
time; had neglected to say so (through an oversight); but that it
was one of their very strongest holds from the beginning. They have




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

recently told us that modern scientific doctrines (evolution
included) are "plainly indicated in the Bible," and that Science
has at last worked up towards the comprehension of scriptural
truths.

     It used to be the fashion to burn the man who got up a new
theory or discovered a new law of nature that interfered with the
"revelation" theory; but the style now is to go into the mental
gymnastic business and "reconcile" the old dogma with the now
truth. The only kind of reconciling the Church ever thought of in
the days of her power, was to become reconciled to the death of the
scientist or thinker. To-day she can take evolution and revelation,
shake them up in a theological bag, and then bring them forth so
marvelously alike in appearance that their own father would not
know them apart. And the rest of us can't recognize them at all.

     To-morrow, when she has to yield her whole field to science,
she will hasten to assure us that it was only a few mistaken souls
who ever objected to Col. Ingersoll's style of theology; and that
if we would only interpret the Bible aright (and understood Hebrew)
we should at once discover that Col. Ingersoll was the "biggest
card" they had had yet.

     You may not live until that to-morrow; I may not live until
that to-morrow; but it is as sure to come as it is certain that the
old tenets have yielded one by one before the irresistible march of
an age of intelligence and freedom, in which a priest or a Church
can no longer be judge, jury, and counsel.

     Not long ago I heard two gentlemen -- one a very devout
Christian -- talking about what use the Church could make of Col.
Ingersoll's teachings. One said he was such a moral man, and always
insisted so strongly upon right action in this world, that it was
a pity he did not have more faith. He said, "What a power he would
be in the Church! What a preacher he would make! He would be a
second St. Paul -- I have been praying for years for his
conversion." "Well," said the other, "you needn't waste your time
any longer; softening of the brain doesn't run in Robert's family."

                     KNOWLEDGE NOT A CRIME.

     Let man rid himself of the pernicious idea that knowledge is
a crime, and then let only the man who is afraid to enter the world
of thought go back to his native paradise of ignorance and rest.
Let him cling to his old ideas. Humanity can do better without such
a man, and humanity will be better without him. The time is past
when his type is needed, and let us hope that it is nearly past
when it can be found. He may have been abreast of the time in 1840,
but his grave was dug, his epitaph written, in 1841. Science did
not wait for him, and the world forgot his name!

     Do you think the world has any further use for the man who can
gravely tell those stories about Samson, for instance as truth --
as the word of God? Do you think they do honor to most attenuated
intellect? Now just stop and think of it. Just think of one
thousand able-bodied men (1,000 is a good many men) quietly
standing around waiting for Samson to knock them on the head with
a bone! And how does the durability of that bone strike you?

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     If prowess with arms were estimated, I should say that was
about the most effective piece of generalship on record. If the
gentleman who conducted that neat little skirmish were living
to-day there would not be a question as to his eligibility for a
third term, unit rule or no unit rule. If we could provide our
generals with a bone like that, we might reduce the standing army
sufficiently to reassure the most timid congressman of the whole
lot. It would not take more than four or five generals and a
captain to guard the whole frontier. Then we might keep a private
to keep the peace at the polls, and that would give us sufficient
force to readily murder several thousand people any morning before
breakfast, and I don't see how you could ask for anything better
than that. Two live men and one dead mule could raise a siege in a
quarter of an hour. Now, if there is anybody who wants to start "a
brilliant foreign policy," here is his chance. He could at the same
time make a record for economy, for it would be an enormous saving
to this country in arms and ammunition alone. For durability,
cheapness, and certainty not to miss fire there is simply no
comparison at all.

     It may be objected that our soldiers are not so strong as
Samson; but I am told by those who are intimately acquainted with
mules, that they have not deteriorated. They have simply
transferred their superior strength and durability from their jaw-
bones to their heals -- and they engineer them themselves. So if
our men can stand his voice and aim him right, they won't have to
wear long hair.

     But seriously, if it is necessary to believe such stories as
that in order to go to heaven, don't you think the admission fee is
a trifle high? It is entirely beyond my means, and that is not one
of the big stories either.

     The one that comes right after it is just as absurd. It is the
second scene of the same performance, and Samson only went out
between acts for a drink, and then he playfully walked off with a
building about the size of the capitol at Washington.

     They say we must believe these tales or be damned; and that a
woman has not even a right to say, "I object." But it always did
seem to me that anybody who could believe them would not have
brains enough to know whether he was damned or not. They say we
must not laugh at such very solemn things as that. They also say
that even if we don't believe them ourselves we should show respect
for those, who do.

     That is a very good theory, but I should like to know how any
human being with a sense of humor could sit and look solemn, and
feel very respectful, with that sort of chaff rattling down his
back. It can't be done unless he is scared. Fear will convince a
man the quickest of anything on earth. Even a shadow is provocative
of solemnity if the light is dark enough and the man is
sufficiently seared.

     Ignorance and Fear made the Garden of Eden, they created
Jehovah, gave Samson his wonderful strength, and Solomon his
wisdom; they divided the Red Sea, and raised Lazarus from the dead.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

It is not strange, therefore that they have compelled women to
cling to the Church, and slaves to cling to slavery. There were
many black men in the South who voluntarily went back and offered
to remain in bondage. And that is one of the strongest arguments
against the institution of slavery -- that it can so far degrade
its victims that they lose even the ambition to be free! [NOTE: "It
was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit
to death by torture rather than betray their masters. Yet we know
how cruelly many Romans treated their slaves. But in truth these
intense individual feelings nowhere rise to such a luxuriant height
as under the most atrocious institutions. It is part of the irony
of life, that strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which
human nature seems susceptible, are called forth in human beings
toward those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly
existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power. How great a
place in most men this sentiment fills, even in religious devotion,
it would be cruel to inquire. We daily see how much their gratitude
to Heaven appears to be stimulated by the contemplation of fellow-
creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to
themselves." -- Mill.]

     The time is not far distant when a bondage of the intellect to
the Church will receive no more respectful consideration than a
bondage of the body to a master. This nineteenth century cannot
much loner be bound by the ignorance and intolerance of an age when
might was the highest law and force the only appeal. We need to
recognize that the broadest possible liberty is the greatest
possible good; and that the liberty to think is the highest good of
all. So don't let people make you afraid to think, or to laugh at
nonsense wherever you see it.

     Solomon saying it cannot make a silly thing wise, nor Moses
doing it a cruel thing kind. David cannot make brutality gentle,
nor Paul injustice just; and that the Bible sustains a wrong can
never make it right.

     Don't you know that if the leading men of the Old Testament
were living to-day, they would be known as liars, thieves, and
murderers -- some indeed as monsters to whom even these terms would
be base flattery. Despoilers of those who had not injured them;
infamous liars in the name of God; murderers of men; butchers of
children; debauchers of women; if they were living in the
nineteenth century they would be unanimously elected to the gallows
-- that is if they escaped Judge Lynch long enough. And yet they
are held up to us, who have outgrown their morals, as authorities
on the subject of God's will to man, as Prophets, Saints,
Mediators!

     Do you want your children taught to believe in the purity and
honor of such men? Do you want your children taught to worship a
God who sanctioned, commanded, and gloried (and usually
participated) in their worst crimes? Do you want them to believe
that at any time, in any age, a God was the director in the most
heinous crimes, in the vilest plots, in the most cruel, vulgar,
cowardly acts of vice that were ever recorded? Either he was or
else Moses' word is not worth a copper, and theology is the
invention of ignorance. He did these hideous things or the Bible is


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

mistaken about it. There is to-day that kind of a God somewhere in
space waiting around to pounce on anybody who doesn't admire him,
or else the Church is founded upon the ignorance and fear of its
dupes, and teaches them what is not true.

     They say it is wicked to inquire into the facts. I say it is
wrong not to. It seems to me that in a matter like this the most
important thing is to be honest all round, and that if the claims
of the Church are true no inquiry can injure them. They say, "Oh,
well, drop all the bad part, and only take the good. There is a
great deal of good in it too." But if I don't know what is good
myself I won't go to Moses and that class of men to find out. I'll
go to somebody who has got a clean record. I won't go to men who
robbed and murdered in the name of God; I won't go to men who
bought and sold their fellow-men; I won't go to men who gave their
own daughters over to the hate and lust of others, even bargaining
for them with sons and brothers. Such men cannot tell me what is
good. Such men cannot make a religion for me to live by, or a God
that I can accept.

     I am sometimes told that intelligent ministers nowadays do not
believe in the inspiration of the Bible and do not teach it. Yet
every minister who, like the Rev. R. Heber Newton, dares to suggest
mildly that even the apple story is a fable, is silenced by his
bishop or hounded down for "heresy." And still they go right on
telling little children that it is the "word of God" and the only
guide of life, For truth, better give them AEsop's Fables or the
Arabian Nights; for purity the Decameron or Don Juan; for examples
of justice the story of Blue-Beard or the life of Henry the Eighth.

     I wish you would read the Bible carefully just as you would
any other book, and see what you think of its morals. I am debarred
from touching the parts of it that are the greatest insult to
purity and the most infamous travesties of justice, I can only say
to you, read it, and if you are lover's of purity you will find
that it teaches respect for a God who taught the most degrading
impurity and defended those who forced it upon others. If you
believe in the sacredness of human life, he gave the largest
license to murder. It does not matter that Moses said he told him
to tell somebody else "Thou shalt not kill;" for the same gentleman
remarked upon several other occasions that God told him not only to
kill, but to steal, to lie, to commit arson, to break pretty much
all the other commandments -- and to be a professional tramp
besides. (I am told that he followed this latter occupation for
forty years, which I should think would give him the belt.) So you
see we have the same gentleman's word for all of it; and at times,
I must confess, it does not seem to me absolutely reliable
authority. There is one thing certain, if the returns are correct,
and that is that Moses did not take his own medicine in the little
matter of keeping the commandments. The were for his enemies and
his slaves.

     If you love liberty remember that the Bible teaches slavery in
every form, Not only the buying of slaves, but the stealing them
into bondage. How any man or woman who censured slavery in our
Southern States can permit their children to be taught that the
Bible is a book of authority, and think they are consistent, I


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

cannot understand. Ever slave-whip had for its lash the Bible.
Every slave-holder had its teachings for his guide. Every slave-
driver found his authority there. When the sword of the North
severed the thongs of the black man, it destroyed the absolute
control of the Bible in America and gave a fatal blow to Jehovah
the God of oppression. Only in the South is it that the Bible still
holds its own. Freedom has outgrown it; and the young South is
reading it, for the first time, with an eraser!

     If you respect your mother, if you wish your children to
respect theirs, you will find that the Bible teaches not only
disrespect for her, but abject slavery and the most oppressive
degradation. If you love your young sister, your beautiful pure
daughter, remember that Jehovah taught that, whenever men could do
so, they were to abuse, ruin, degrade them; and remember, further,
that his "prophets" -- The men who made our religion -- did these
things and gloried in. the work.

     It is for this reason that I say it is right and peculiarly
fitting that women should object to his teaching. After you have
read the 31st chapter of Numbers, with its "thus saith the Lord,"
think then if you want to follow such teachings. Decide then
whether or not the words, the acts, the commands, or the religion
of such men is good enough for you. Think then whether or not you
want your daughters, your sons, to believe that the Bible has one
grain of authority, or is in any sense a revelation of the divine
will."

     Don't allow ministers to palm off platitudes on you for
"revelation;" and don't let them make you believe that anything
that Moses or David or Solomon said was the command of God to
women. Neither one of those men was fit to speak of a respectable
woman. With the superior morals of our time neither one of them
would be considered fit to live outside of a brothel.

     And don't lot them toll you what "Saint" Paul said either.
What did he know about women anyway? He was a brilliant but erratic
old bachelor who fought on whichever side he happened to find
himself on. He could accommodate himself to circumstances and
accept the situation almost as gracefully as that other biblical
gentleman who quietly went to housekeeping inside of a whale, and
held the fort for three days.

                 AS MUCH INSPIRED AS ANY OF IT.

     Did it ever occur to you that those absurd tales have as much
claim to be called the "word of God" as any of the rest of it? How
can people say they believe such nonsense? And how can they think
it is evidence of goodness to believe it? They say it takes a
horribly wicked man to doubt one of those yams; and to come right
out and say honestly, "I don't believe it," will elect you, on the
first ballot, to a permanent seat in the lower house. Mr. Talmage
says four out of five Christians "try to explain away" these tales
by giving them. another meaning, and he urges them not to do it. He
says, stick to the original story in all its literal bearings. The
advice is certainly honest, but it would take a brave man to follow



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

it. And four out of five of even professed Christians is a pretty
heavy balance on the side of intellectual integrity; and even Mr.
Talmage's mammoth credulity fails to tip the scale.

     They simply can't believe these biblical stories, so they try
to explain the marvelous part entirely away. It has about come to
this, in this day of thought an intelligence, that when a thinking
man claims to believe these tales, and says it is an evidence of
righteousness to believe them, there are just two things to
examine, his intellect and his integrity. If one is all right the
other is pretty sure to be out of repair. Defective intellect or
doubtful integrity is what he suffers from. He has got one of them
sure, and he may have both.

     Now I should just like to ask you one honest question. Why
should any book bind us to sentiments that we would not tolerate if
they came from any other source? And why tolerate them coming from
it? Do you know who compiled the Bible? Do you know it was settled
by vote which manuscripts God did and which he did not write? The
ballot is a very good thing to have; but I decline to have it
extend its power into eternity, and bind my brain by the capacity
of a ballot-box hold by caste and saturated with blood.

     There can be but slow progress while we are weighted down by
the superstitions of ages past. The brain of the nineteenth century
should not be bound down to the capacity of the third, nor its
moral sentiment dwarfed to fit Jehovah.

     But so long as the theories of revelation and vicarious
atonement are taught, we shall not need to be surprised that every
murderer who is hanged to-day says that he is going, with bloody
hands, directly into companionship with the deity of revelation. He
has had ample time in prison to re-read in the Bible (what he had
previously been taught in Sunday school), of many worse crimes than
his which his spiritual adviser assures him (to the edification and
encouragement of all his kind outside) were not only forgiven, but
were actually ordered and participated in, by the God he is going
to.

     That is what orthodoxy tolls him! Just think of it! Do you
think that is a safe doctrine to teach to the criminal classes?
Aside from its being dishonest, is it safe? Does it not put a
premium on crime? I maintain that it is always a dangerous religion
where faith in a given dogma, and not continuous uprightness of
life, is the standard of excellence. It is a cruel religion where
force is king and immorality God. It is an unjust religion which
seeks to make women serfs and men tyrants. It is an unreasonable
religion where credulity usurps the place of intellect and
judgment. It is an immoral religion where vice is deified and
virtue strangled. It is a cowardly religion where an innocent man,
who was murdered 1,800 years ago, is asked to bear the burden of
your wrong acts to-day. Aside from its impossibility that is
cowardly.






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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Man should be taught that for every wrong he does, he must
himself be responsible -- not that some one else stands between him
and absolute personal responsibility -- not that Eve caused him to
sin, nor that Christ stands between him and full accountability for
his every act.

     And he should be taught that for every noble deed, for every
act of justice or mercy, he deserves the credit himself; that
Christ does not need it; that Christ cannot want it; and that
Christ does not deserve it.

     And you will not want to "wash your hands in the blood of
Christ," nor to shed that of any other innocent man, if your
motives are pure and your lives clean.

                      VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.

     IN an art collection in Boston there is a god -- a redeemer --
the best illustration I have ever seen of the vicarious atonement
theory. It is a perfect representation of the agony endured by a
helpless and innocent being in order to relieve the guilty of their
guilt. This god was captured in Central Africa before his mission
was complete, and there is still suffering-space upon his body
unused.

     It is a wooden image of some frightful beast, and it is
represented as suffering the most intense physical agony. Nails are
driven into its head, body, legs, and feet. Each wrong-doer who
wanted to relieve himself of his own guilt drove a nail, a tack, a
brad, or a spike into the flesh of his god. The god suffered the
pain; the man escaped the punishment. He cast his burdens on his
god, and went on his way rejoicing. Here is vicarious atonement in
all its pristine glory. The god is writhing and distorted with
pain; the criminal has relieved himself of further responsibility,
and his faith has made him whole. his sins are forgiven, and his
god will assume his load.

     It is carious to examine the various illustrations of human
nature as represented by the size and shape of the nails. A
sensitive man had committed a trifling offence, and he drove a
great spike into the head of the god. A thick-skinned criminal
inserted a small tack where it would do the least harm -- in the
hoof. An honest, or an egotistic penitent drove his nail in where
it stands out prominently; while the secretive devotee placed his
among a mass of others of long standing and inconspicuous location.

     One day I stood with a friend looking at this god. My friend,
who was a devout believer in the vicarious theory of justification
and punishment as explained away by the ethical divines of Boston,
was unable to see anything but the most horrible brutality and
willingness to inflict pain on the part of these African devotees,
and was equally unwilling to recognize the same principle when
applied to orthodoxy. She said, "Is it not horrible, the ignorance
and superstition of these poor people? What a vast field of labor
our missionaries have."




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     To her the idea of justification by faith in a suffering god
meant only superstition and brutality when plainly illustrated in
somebody else's religion; but the same idea, the same morality, the
same justice, she thought beautiful when applied to Christianity.

     I said, "There is the whole vicarious theory in wood and iron.
That is exactly the same as the Christian idea; and the same human
characteristics are plainly traceable in the size and location of
these nails.

     A Presbyterian or Methodist drives his nail in the most
conspicuous spot, where the flesh is tender and the suffering
plainly visible. The Episcopalian or Catholic uses a small tack,
and drives it as much out of sight as possible, covering it over
with stained glass, and distracting the attention with music; but
the bald, cruel, unjust, immoral, degrading, and dishonest
principle is there just the same.

     "Faith in blind acts of devotion; the suffering of innocence
for guilt; transferring of crime; comfort and safety purchased for
self by the infliction of pain and unmerited torture upon another;
premiums offered for ignorance and credulity; punishments
guaranteed for honest doubt and earnest protest -- all these
beautiful provisions of the vicarious theory are as essential to
our missionary's belief as to that of his African converts; and it
seems to me simply a choice between thumbs up and thumbs down."

     While we were talking my friend's pastor joined us, and she
told him what I had said, and asked him what was the difference
between the Christian and the heathen idea of a suffering god. He
said he could explain it in five minutes some morning when he had
time. He said that the one was the true and living faith, and the
other was blind superstition. He also said that he could easily
make us see which was which. Then he gracefully withdrew with the
air of one who says: "In six days God made the heavens and the
earth, and on the seventh day he and I rested." He has not called
since to explain. While he stayed, however, his manner was deeply
solemnly, awfully impressive; and of course I resigned on the spot.

     The theory of vicarious atonement is the child of cowardice
and fear. It arranges for a man to be a criminal and to escape the
consequences of his crime. It destroys personal responsibility, the
most essential element of moral character. It is contrary to every
moral principle.

     The Church never has been and never will be able to explain
why a god should be forced to resort to such injustice to rectify
a mistake of his own. To earnest questions and honest thoughts it
has always replied with threats. It has always silenced inquiry and
persecuted thought. Past authority is its god, present
investigation its devil. With it brains are below par, and
ignorance is at a premium. It has never learned that the most
valuable capital in this world is the brain of a scholar.






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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                              FEAR.

     Every earnest thought, like every earnest thinker, adds
something to the wealth of the world. Blind belief in the thought
of another produces only hopeless mediocrity. Individual effort,
not mere acceptance, marks the growth of the mind. The most fatal
blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right
of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think
is the right to express that thought without fear.

     Fear is the nearest approach to the ball and chain that this
age will permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers
of to-day that so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be
left for those who come after us. We owe physical freedom to the
intellectual giants of the lost past; let us leave mental freedom
to the intellectual children of the future.

     Fear scatters the blossoms of genius to the winds, and
superstition buries truth beneath the incrustation or inherited
mediocrity. Fear puts the fetters of religious stagnation on every
child of the brain. It covers the form of purity and truth with the
contagion of contumely and I distrust. It warps and dwarfs every
character that it touches. It is the father, mother, and nurse of
hypocrisy. It is the one great disgrace of our day, the one
incalculable curse of our time; and its nurse and hot-bed is the
Church.

     Because I, a woman, have dared to speak publicly against the
dictatorship of the Church, the Church, with its usual force and
honor, answers argument with personal abuse. One reply it gives. It
is this. If a woman did not find comfort and happiness in the
Church. she would not cling to it. If it were not good for her, she
in her purity and truth would not uphold it in the face of the
undeniable fact that the present generation of thinking men have
left it utterly.

     Yon will find, however, that in every land, under every form
of faith, in each phase of credulity it is the woman who clings
closest and longest to the religion she has been taught; yet no
Christian will maintain that this fact establishes the truth of any
other belief. [NOTE: "Exactly the same thing may be said of the
women in the harem of an Oriental. They do not complain. ... They
think our women insufferably unfeminine." -- Mill]

     They will not argue from this that women know more of and
heave a clearer insight into the divine will! If she knows more
about it, if she understands it all better than men, why does she
not occupy the pulpit? Why does she not hold the official positions
in the Churches? Why has she not received even recognition in our
system of religion? Who ever heard of a minister being surprised
that God did not reveal any of the forms of belief through a woman?
If she knows and does the will of God so much better than men, why
did he not reveal himself to her and place his earthly kingdom in
her hands?





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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     That argument won't do! As long as creed and Church held
absolute power there was no question but that woman was a curse,
that she was an inferior being, an after-thought. No Church but the
Roman Catholic has the decency to recognize even the so-called
mother of God! The Church has never offered women equality or
justice. Its test of excellence is force. The closer a Church or
creed clings to its spirit, the more surely does it assume to
dictate to and control woman and to degrade her. The more liberal
the creed the nearer does it come to offering individual justice
and liberty.

     The testimony of our own missionaries, as well as that of many
others, assures us that it is not the Turk but his wives who hold
fastest to their faith. The woman of the harem, whom we pity
because of the injustice of their religious training, are the last
to relinquish their god, the most bitter opponents of the infidel
or skeptic in their Church, the most devout and constant believers
of the faith, and the most content with its requirements. They are
the ones who cling to the form even when the substance has departed
-- and it is so with us!

     Among the "heathen" it is the women who are most shocked and
offended by the attacks made upon their superstitions by the
missionaries whom we pay to go to them and blaspheme their gods and
destroy their idols.

     Go where you will, read history as you may, and you will find
that it is the men who invented religion, and the women who
believed in it. They are the last to give it up. The physically
weak dread change. Inexperience fears the unknown. Ignorance shuns
thought or development. The dependent cannot be brave.

     We are all prepared to admit, I think, that, with but few
marked exceptions here and there the women of most countries are
physically and mentally undeveloped. They have had fear and
dependence, the dread enemies of progress and growth, constantly to
retard them. Fear of physical harm, fear of social ostracism, fear
of eternal damnation. With rare exceptions a child, with a weak
body, or any other dependent, will do as he is told; and women have
believed to order. They have done so not only in Christianity but
in Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Mormonism, and Fetichism -- in each and
all of them. Each and all of them being matter of faith, religion
was the one subject in which every Church alike claimed ignorance
as a virtue; and the women understood that the men understood it as
little as they did. It was a field where credulity and a solemn
countenance placed all on an intellectual level -- and the altitude
of the level was immaterial.

     Women have never been expected to understand anything; hence
jargon about the "testimony of the spirit," the "three in one"
absurdity, the "horns of the altar," or the widow's oil miracle was
not more empty or unmeaning to her than a conversation about Bonds
and Stocks, Political Economy, or Medical Science. She swallowed
her religion just as She did her pills, because the doctor told her
to, and said there was something wrong with her head -- and usually
there was.



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                       BEGINNING TO THINK.

     The past education of woman gave her an outlook which simply
embraced a husband or nothing at all, which was often only a choice
between two of a kind.

     There are a great many women to-day who think that orthodoxy
is as great nonsense as I do, but who are afraid to say so. They
whisper it to each other. They are afraid of the slander of the
Church.

     I want to help make it so that they will dare to speak. I want
to do what I can to make it so that a mother wont have to evade the
questions of her children about the Bible.

                             CREEDS.

     I am sometimes asked, "What do you propose to give in place of
this comforting faith? It makes people so happy. You take away all
this blessing and you give no other in its place. What is your
creed?"

     It has never seemed to me, that a creed was the staff of life.
Man cannot live by creeds alone. I should not object, however, to
one that should read something like this:

     I believe in honesty.

     I believe that a Church has no right to teach what it does not
know.

     I believe that a clean life and a tender heart are worth more
to this world than all the faith and all the gods of Time.

     I believe that this world needs all our best efforts and
earnest endeavors twenty-four hours every day.

     I believe that if our labors were needed in another world we
should be in another world; so long as we are in this one I believe
in making the best and the most of the materials we have on hand.

     I believe that fear of a god cripples men's intellects more
than any other influence. I believe that Humanity needs and should
have all our time, efforts, love, worship, and tenderness.

     I believe that one world is all we can deal with at a time.

     I believe that, if there is a future life, the best possible
preparation for it is to do the very best we can here and now.

     I believe that love for our fellow-men is infinitely nobler,
better, and more necessary than love for God.

     I believe that men, women, and children need our best
thoughts, our tenderest consideration, and our earnest sympathy.




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     I believe that God can get on just as well without any of
these as with them. If he wants anything he can get it without our
assistance. it is people with limitations, not gods without
limitations, who need and should have our aid.

     I believe that it is better to build one happy home here than
to invest in a thousand churches which deal with a hereafter.

     If a life that embraces this line of action does not fit a man
for heaven, and if faith in vicarious atonement will, then such a
heaven is not worth going to, and its god would be unworthy to make
a good man's acquaintance.

     But suppose that faith in a myth is destroyed and another
mysticism be not set up in its place, what then? If a mother takes
her child away from the fire, which it finds beautiful, and
believes to be a nice toy, is it necessary for her to give it a
kerosene lamp in its place? She destroys a pleasant delusion -- a
faith and a delightful hope and confidence -- because she knows its
danger and recognizes its false foundation. It is surely not
necessary that she should give to the child another delusion
equally dangerous and false. She gives it something she knows to be
safe; something she understands will not burn; something which,
though not so bright and attractive to the child at first, gives
pleasure without pain, occupation without disaster. Is she cruel or
only sensible? If I were to pretend to a knowledge of a divine
creed, a superhuman system, I should be guilty of the same
dishonesty, the same deception of which I complain in the Church.

     I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most
important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of
another world. I do not know anything about "a land that is fairer
than day." I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a
dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this
world are infinite, unending, constant, and immediate. They will
take all our time, our strength, our love, and our thoughts and our
work here will be only then began.

     Why not, if you believe in a God at all, give him credit for
placing you where he wanted you? Why not give him credit for giving
you brains and sympathies, as well as the courage to use them. Even
if Eve did eat that apple, why should we insist upon having the
colic?

                   SELF-CONTROL WHAT WE NEED.

     I want to see the time come when mothers won't have to explain
to their children that God has changed his mind about goodness and
right since he used to incite murder; that eighteen hundred years
ago he was a criminal with bloody hands and vile, polluted breath;
that less than three hundred years ago his greatest pleasure was
derived from witnessing the agony of pure young girls burning
alive, whose only crime was beauty of face or honesty of thought.

     I want it so that she won't allow her children to hear and
believe such a statement as Bishop Fallows made not long ago. He
said, in effect, that sins of omission are as heinous as those of


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

commission; that Saul committed two sins in his life, and that one
of them was a refusal to commit a cold-blooded murder! He spared
the life of a conquered enemy! Out of a whole nation he saved one
life -- and that was a crime, a sin! Bishop Fallows said that God
expressly commanded Saul to utterly exterminate that whole nation,
and not only the nation but its flocks; and that God took Saul's
kingdom from him because he saved the life of one fallen enemy.

     That story, I think, is a libel; and I believe that if there
is a God he was never such a fiend! And I want it so that no mother
will allow her child to hear such an infamous travesty of the
character of a Deity who is called good.

     I want it so that all the lessons of the week, all the careful
training of a wise father or a good mother, will not be antagonized
on Sunday by such a statement as the Rev. Mr. Williamson made at a
large church convention recently. Speaking of prayer, he said: "We
should offer to God, by prayer, our virtue, our purity, and our
pious aspirations" (so far I do not object, for if it means
anything I fail to grasp it), "for by not doing so we claim self-
control, which is displeasing to God!"

     I object! The lesson of self-control is precisely what we
need. And when we control ourselves and regulate our lives on
principles of right and truth, instead of allowing a Church to
regulate them through a fear of hell, we shall be a better people,
and character will have a chance to grow.

     Then this same gentleman added: "We should also give him our
vices, our worry, our temper, and our passions, so that he may
dispose of them."

     Dispose of them yourselves! Don't try to shift your
responsibilities on to somebody else. Don't drive your tack into
the brain of justice, expecting to save your own soft skull. Don't
enervate your strength to do right by accepting the fatal doctrine
of vicarious atonement. It weakens every character that it touches.

         VICARIOUS ATONEMENT NOT A CHRISTIAN INVENTION.

     The doctrine of vicarious atonement is found in some form in
most religions, and it is the body an soul of ours. The idea is not
a Christian invention. It caused the Carthaginians to put to death
their handsomest prisoners if a battle were won, the most promising
children of their own nobility if it were lost. They were offerings
to appease the gods.

     In old times there were peoples who believed that if a chief
was guilty of a misdemeanor it was just to punish or enslave any
one of his tribe. That was their idea of liberty and justice. If a
father committed a crime it could be expiated by the murder of his
son. That was the doctrine of vicarious atonement in all its
pristine glory. So they adopted that style of justice in our
religion, and condemned the whole lot of us to the eternal wrath of
God on account of that little indiscretion attributed to Eve. It
seems a very little thing for anybody to get so angry at us all



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

about and stay angry so long! It doesn't seem to me that if one of
you were to eat every apple I had in my orchard, I should want to
murder all the folks that live in Asia Minor. Do you think you
would?

     In the 11th verse of the 12th chapter of the second book of
Samuel it is claimed that God said he was going to be revenged for
the crimes of some men by a vile punishment of their wives.

     Only a short time ago a man tried that same style of justice
in one of our Western towns. He claimed that Smith had alienated
the affections of his wife, so he went over to Smith's house and
whipped Mrs. Smith! And do you know that the judge who tried that
case (not being a good Bible student) actually sent that good,
pious man to the house of correction -- that man who not only
believed in his Bible but lived by it! And just as likely as not
that judge will be elected again. Truly we have fallen on
degenerate times

     Legal minds outgrew the idea of vicarious punishment long ago.
Physical liberty came to have a new meaning, and punishment was
awarded more and more where it was due. But the religious mind
never outgrows anything. It is born as big as it ever gets.
Development is its terror. It abhors a change. It forces you to sin
by proxy. to be redeemed by proxy; and the only thing it does
permit you to receive at first hand is Hell. That is the only one
thing you can't delegate to somebody else.

     If you commit no sin, you are responsible for the sins of
other people -- dead people, too, that yon can't look after. If you
are good and true and noble -- even if you are a Christian -- you
don't get any credit for it. If there is any one thing above
another that God detests it is to have a man try to be grand and
noble and true, and then got the credit of it. "To Christ belongs
all the honor, the praise, and the glory -- world without end,
Amen."

     But when it comes to the punishment, the vicarious notion
doesn't seem to work. There is the one point where you are welcome
to your own, and no discount allowed to heavy takers. Hell is
always at par and no bail permitted. Even ignorance of the
requirements is no excuse. If you did not know any better, somebody
else did, and you've got to pay for it.

     Now if the vicarious principle is not big enough to go clear
round, I'll leave my share off at the other end. If the Church
wants to take my hell (vicariously) it is welcome to it. I will let
it go cheap.

     Awhile ago a man stayed some time at a hotel in New York, and
when the time came for him to pay his bill he hadn't the money.
Well, the proprietor felt sorry for him and said, "I tell you what
I'll do about that bill, I'll throw off half." His guest was
overwhelmed by this liberality, and with tears of gratitude said,
"I cannot permit yon to out do me in generosity; I'll throw off the
other half and we'll call it square."



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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     So if the Church desires all the credit, it is also welcome to
all the blame. I cannot permit it to outdo me in generosity. But
I'd rather be responsible for just my own sins, and then I can
regulate them better, and I can take care of my own reward when I
got it. I shall not want to deposit it with the clergy. A profit
and loss system that is chiefly loss will not pay me.

     The doctrines of vicarious atonement and original or inherited
sin are the most infamously unjust dogmas that ever clouded the
brain of man.

       TWIN MONSTERS INHERITED FROM INTELLECTUAL PYGMIES.

     They are twin monsters inherited from intellectual pygmies.

     Let me read you a little prayer based upon this idea of right.
I heard it offered as a thanksgiving tribute. "Oh, God, we do thank
thee that thou didst give thy only son to die for us! We thank thee
that the innocent has suffered for the guilty, and that through the
suffering and death of thy most holy son our sins are blotted out!"

     Monstrous! How would that work in a court of justice? What
would you think of a person who coolly thanked a judge who had
knowingly allowed the wrong man to be hung? What do you think of a
code of morals that offers as one of its beautiful provisions the
murder of the innocent instead of the punishment of the guilty?

     People ask what good I expect to come of an attack on
Christianity. They ask me if I think Christianity does any direct
harm. Yes! It makes a man unjust to believe in unjust doctrines.
Any man who honestly believes in the righteousness of a system of
vicarious rewards and punishments is ripe for any form of tyranny.
And the more honestly he believes in it the less will he be a good
man from principle.

     I want men and women to be good and true because it is right
towards each other, and not because they are afraid of Hell. Honor
towards people in this world, not fear of a fiend in the next --
that is my doctrine. That is the way to make men and women strong
and brave and noble. Stop telling them they can't be good
themselves; teach them that they must do right themselves. Make
them self-dependent. Teach them to stand alone. Honor towards
others, kindness, and love -- these are what make a man a good
husband, a noble father -- king in his household.

     Fear never made any man a gentleman. Fear never made any woman
a true wife or a good mother. Fear never covered the pitfalls of
vice with anything stronger than the gloss of hypocrisy.

     When Reason's torch burned low, Faith led her victims by
chains of ignorance into the land of hopeless superstition, and
built her temple there.







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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                     GEOGRAPHICAL RELIGION.

     A religion of faith is simply a question in geography. Keep
your locality in mind and you are all right. On the banks of the
Red Sea murder and slavery were a religious duty. On the Ganges
infanticide is a virtue. In Rome you may steal or lie; you may
deceive an innocent young girl and blast her life forever; you may
stab your friend in the dark, and you are all right: but if you eat
a piece of fried pork on Friday you are a lost man! China arranges
her prayers in a machine, and turns her obligations to Deity off
with a crank. There is usually more or less intimate relationship
between prayer and a crank. Our God loved human sacrifice in
Galilee, and rewarded Abraham for it. He abhors it in Pocasset,
America, and his followers threaten to hang the only consistent
follower of Jehovah who has come amongst them.

     If you live in Utah, or had lived in Jerusalem, your most
certain hope of salvation would have been the possession of
numerous wives. In England or New York more than one is sure
damnation.

     Lose your bearings and you are a lost man! Make a mistake in
your country and your soul is not worth a copper. A traveler is not
safe five minutes, and I doubt if an accident policy would cover
his case.

     God and the Devil have been held accountable for about every
crime that ever has been committed, and it has been very largely a
geographical question which of the two was responsible. If it was
longitude 35 degrees 14' east it was the Lord! If you shifted to
longitude 70 degrees 58' west it was the Devil.

     When locality becomes the all-important question, we do not
wonder at the old lady who felt relieved when the new survey threw
her house just across the state line into Ohio, after she had been
under the impression that she lived in Indiana. "Well," said she,
"I am glad we don't live in Indiana; I always did say it was a very
unhealthy state. Now, our doctor's bills won't be so high.

     Pocasset, Mass., is in the devil's country, and murder is not
safe; it is a crime. Abraham and Saul lived in a healthier climate
-- in God's congressional district, where murder was above par and
decency was out of fashion. Take it all in all, and the devil seems
to make the best Governor.

     Now it seems to me that Sunday-schools should teach nothing so
much as geography, so that a man may not be in doubt as to who is
his Secretary of State, and when an order comes from head-quarters
he may fairly be expected to know whether it is safe to obey --
whether obedience means glorification on earth and a home in
heaven, or a sprained neck and a bright fire. It seems now that
Pocasset is over the line and out of the Lord's clearing.







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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

                           REVELATION.

     Now this God either did or he did not believe in and command
murder and rapine in the, days when he used to sit around evenings
and chat with Abraham and Moses and the rest of them. His especial
plans and desires were "revealed" or they were not. The ideas of
justice and right were higher in those days than they are now, or
else we are wiser and better than God, or else the Bible is not his
revealed will. You can take your choice. My choice is to keep my
respect for divine justice and honor, and let the Bible bear the
burden of its own mistakes.

     If religion is a revelation, then it is not a growth, and it
would have been most perfect in design and plan when it was nearest
its birth. Now accepting the Bible theory of Jehovah, we find that
when the communications of God were immediate and personal there
could have been no mistake as to his will. To deal with it as a
growth or evolution toward better things is to abandon the whole
tenet of a revealed law of God. But to deal with it as a revelation
is to make God a being too repulsive and brutal to contemplate for
one moment with respect.

     He either did or did not tell those men those things. Which
will you accept?

     He divided men into two classes. Of one he made tyrants and
butchers; of the other, victims. He made woman weak in order that
she might be the more easily overcome by vice; helpless, in order
that she might the more easily be made the victim of brutal lust!
He made children to be the beasts of burden, the human sacrifices,
the defenseless property of criminals and fiends. He did these
things or the prophets romanced about it, or some one else romanced
about them. Which?

     If I accept the former alternative. I can have nothing but
loathing and contempt for the Deity and his followers. If the
latter, it clouds the character of no one. It simply places the
ignorance of the past on the same plane with the ignorance of the
present. It rescues the reputation of the Infinite at the trifling
expense of a few musty fables.

     I choose the latter! I prefer to believe either that a few men
were themselves deceived, or that they tried to deceive others --
it does not much matter which. I prefer to adopt this belief, and
so keep the character of even a supposititious God above reproach.

     If we accept a God at all let us accept an honest one.

                       EVIDENCE OF FAITH.

     We are asked to be as fair toward the evidence of Bible
witnesses as we are toward other evidence. We are told that we
believe a great deal that we have never seen, and that we accept it
on the word of ethers; that we have never seen a man hung, but that
we believe that men have been hung; we never saw Napoleon's great
feats of generalship, but we believe in them because history
records them. Why not believe in the Bible as well as in other


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

history? Why not, on the testimony of witnesses, believe that
Christ turned water into wine, as readily as that a man was hung?
Why not accept the miracle of the loaves and fishes on evidence, as
readily as the victories of Napoleon?

     Now that line of argument, although it is the one used by and
for theological students, is entirely illogical. It will not work
with people who think. The cases are not parallel.

     We believe the facts of history and the occurrences of to-day
not solely on the testimony of others, but because they are in
accord with common sense and experience and judgment; because they
fall within the range of possibility, and do not antagonize the
laws of nature. We know a man can be hung. We know one general may
defeat another. We are asked to believe nothing outside of
reasonable bounds. Here then the only thing to examine is the
credibility of the witnesses.

     If, however, our witnesses told us that whenever Napoleon
wanted to know the strength of an enemy he flew up over their camp
and counted their men; or that when he found too many he prayed
down fire from heaven and burned them up, we should dismiss their
testimony at once as unworthy of further notice. We should know
that they were deceived, or that they were trying to deceive us. We
should know that Napoleon's real means of estimating the strength
of his enemy were of a different nature, and that he did not resort
to the upper air and flit about at will. We should know that no
fire was prayed down, and that although soldiers might be told to
put their trust in God, the little addition -- "and keep your
powder dry" -- would be the really important part of the command.

     So when we are told that wine was made out of water, and bread
and fish out of nothing in large quantities, we know that we are
listening to statements that simply go out of the field of credible
testimony into the realm of supreme credulity. Such assertions
require you to believe not only what you have not seen, but what
all experience and reason tell you you never can see. They ask you
not only to believe in a past event, but in a past event outside of
all reason, beyond all experience, incapable of demonstration,
unsupported by nature, opposed to all natural laws -- beneath the
realm of reason, out of the light of experience, under the shadow
of superstition!

     The great electric light of the intellect is turned off at the
church. door. On one day out of every seven the human lamps enter
in utter darkness a field of superstition. During six days the
light is turned full on the world of commerce, science, art, and
literature, and these glow and grow and are examined by its rays.
When, however, the signal tolls from the steeple on the seventh
day, the light is turned off for that day and for that topic alone;
and then there is brought out once more the old tallow candle of
ignorance that hides in shadow the cobwebs of undeveloped thought!

     Use your noblest powers of thought freely in the bank; strain
and develop your ability to improve and control in the engine-room;
train and exert your judgment, in literature and art push and
brighten and sharpen your reason in science or political economy.


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     In the practical affairs of life faith will not help you. It
is childish and insecure. It will not honor your cheque; it will
not prevent the broken engine from hurling its human companion into
eternity. It will not prove the rotundity of the earth, nor
establish a sound financial basis for a nation. In all such matters
it to nothing but ignorance and disaster. In theology it is the one
element of light.

     As a test and an aid in this world, it is puerile and
trifling; but the depths of the Great Beyond it fathoms to a
nicety. It gives no grasp upon the truths of Time; but it is the
all-sufficient hold on Eternity. It leads to the discovery of no
important principle here; but it holds the keys to the secret
chambers of divinity! It is an attribute of childish development
now. It is to indicate infinite mental superiority hereafter!

     It is a strange philosophy which asserts that a faculty which
is a hindrance to superiority in this world is the one thing
needful for the soul of man!

     Give me the brain that dares to think! Give me the mind that
grasps with herculean power the rocks that crush the treasures of
intellectual growth, and tears them from their foundation! Give me
the mind that dares to step from the fallen stones, that leaps from
rock to rock past the dark rift torn in the superstitions of ages
past, and that, standing on the farthest crag, waits and witches
for the breaking light! He can trust his future whose present
scorns stagnation.

                          DID HE TALK?

     In olden times -- in the times of the Bible -- men believed
that animals sometimes used human language, and that beasts were
wiser than their masters. I'm not now going to question that
belief, but still, I don't think that nowadays one-half of us would
take the word of a horse on any important subject. You must
remember, however, that it took an ass to know an angel at first
sight in Baalim's time. Baalim never suspected that there was an
angel in his path until that ass told him! In those days, on a
little matter like that, the word of any beast seemed to be taken
as good evidence.

     But let a mule jam his rider's foot against a wall, nowadays,
and then lie down under him, and there, is not one man in ten who
would associate that fact in his mind with the presence of an
angel. I suppose, however, there wasn't as much known about mules
then as there is now; and most asses were of a more pious turn of
mind.

     I don't suppose there is one intelligent man in this city who
believes that story, and yet he is not a good Christian if he
questions it.

     Show me a locality where actual belief -- where old time
orthodoxy -- is looked upon as a requisite of good citizenship and
standing in society, and you will show me a place where
intellectual development and rapid progress have died or gone to
sleep!

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     The most ignorant and backward parts of this great country,
the localities where Congress is asking for better and more secular
schools to be established as a means of safety to the state, are
situated in the very States where orthodoxy holds absolute sway. In
those status a man is looked upon as a very dangerous character if
he questions the accuracy of that story about those, three hot-
house plants, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Yes, the people of
that pious region would be afraid of a man who was wicked enough to
laugh at that yarn; and yet do you believe there is a man in this
city who could make you believe it? And you don't look dangerous
either; and I don't think that I do.

     It seems that when they used to run ashore for big scare-
stories, they just poked up the fire and went into the blast-
furnace business -- here and hereafter. But -- seeing that a
furnace -- a real one -- heated seven times hotter than it takes to
melt iron, did not injure those three tropical innocents -- did not
even singe their eve-brows -- it does look a little as if we should
stand a pretty fair show with the spiritual fuel they now promise
us hereafter. Still I must say I don't believe I should like the
climate.

     Speaking of Bible arguments, I must tell you of a new one
heard recently. A gentleman acquaintance of mine asked a colored
woman, who had applied to him for money to help build a colored
people's church, whether she thought God was black or white. She
replied that the Bible implied that he was black -- that it said,
"And his wool shall be whiter than snow;" and that white men don't
have wool!

                       WHAT YOU MAY THINK.

     Show me a grade of society that buckles its little belt of
belief and faith around its members, and you will show me a
collection of hopeless mediocres. The thinkers move out or die out.
They object to being fossilized. They decline to go down to history
as physical members of the nineteenth century, and mental members
of the third.

     I would rather have the right to put on my monument "She was
abreast of her time," than have all the sounding texts and all the
feathered tribes chiseled upon it. I would prefer that it be said
of me, "She was a good woman because she had a pure heart," than to
have this record: "She was a Christian. She was afraid of Hell. She
cast her burdens on the Lord, and went to heaven."

     You have been told, "Blessed are they who die in the Lord."
Rather let us say, "Blessed are they who live clean lives."

     But the Church does not allow you to regulate your lives by
what you believe to be right. It always did and it always will hate
a thinker. It proposes to do the mental labor for great minds by
means of brains large enough to hold nothing but Faith. It says, "I
cannot and you shall not outgrow the past. The measure of my
capacity shall be the limit of your attainment."




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     the laws of a nation presume to regulate only what you may do.
The Church is kind enough to say what you may think. It proposes to
control the mental condition of every man and woman for time and
eternity, and its first command is that we shall not grow.

     It seems to me rather a queer admission to make, but the
Church says that a child or a fool knows quite enough for its
purpose -- and it does not seem to be my place to question that
fact. Now that may be all very well for the child and the fool, but
it is rather binding on the rest of us.

     Once in a while a minister outgrows the doctrines that were
big enough for him in his youth; but that minister, though his life
be as pure and his character as sweet as a flower, would be safer
to be cast into the sea than that this instrument of torture, this
court of injustice, should discover that he had laid aside the
outfit of his undeveloped years. His mind may have grown to be a
giant in strength, but it must be compressed into the nut-shell of
superstition -- dwarfed to the capacity of intellectual pygmies.

     Christ was a thinker, a man of progress, an infidel, a man who
outgrow the Church of his time; and the Church of his time
crucified him. Those who oppose the spirit of religious stagnation
to-day meet the same spirit in the Church that Christ met, and
receive the same treatment so far as the law will permit.

     It is a sentiment as true as it is beautiful that asks us to
reverence the great men, the thinkers of the past; but it is no
mark of respect to them to rest forever over their graves. We show
our respect and our appreciation better by a spirit of research
that reaches beyond them, than by a simple admiration which takes
their gifts and dies. The lessons they left were not alone lessons
of memory and acceptance, but examples of effort and progress.

     A pupil who stops content with his teacher's last words is no
great credit either to himself or to his master. If he has learned
only to accept, his lesson is only begun; and until he knows that
he must investigate, his education is that of a child, his
development that of a clown.

     it is no compliment to Christ, the man of progress 1800 years
ago, that his followers clip the whigs of thought. He struck for
freedom from ecclesiastical bondage. The added a now link to the
chain of intellectual growth, and his followers have riveted it
back to the immovable rock of superstition. He offered a key to
open the door of individual liberty. They have wrapped it in the
folds of ignorance and laid it in the closet of fear. He said in
effect, "When you have outgrown the Church, leave it and bless the
world." They say, "Leave it and be damned." For what is a Christian
to-day without his hell? The chief objection I hear offered to the
last arrangements made for us by the revisers is that they left out
some of the hell, and gave the part they kept a poetical name.







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                      INTELLECTUAL GAG-LAW.

     When the day comes when offenses against the intellect are
deemed as great crimes as offenses against the person, intellectual
gag-law will meet with no more respect than lynch-law does to-day,
and will be recognized as the expression of an undeveloped moral
and social condition. Choking an opinion into or out of a man's
mind is no more respectable than the same argument applied to his
body.

     Any form of faith, any religion, that has the vicarious
element in it, is an insult to the intellect. It is based upon the
idea of a God of revenge, a ruler infamously unjust. It is a system
utterly ineffectual without the wanton sacrifice of helpless
innocence under fangs of beastly cruelty -- a revenge that has no
thought of the redress of wrong by its punishment -- a revenge that
simply requires a victim -- and blood!

     Even with those two elements of the plan it is still impotent
until it has appealed to the bassist element in every human breast
-- the willingness to accept happiness that is bought by the agony
of another! It is too abjectly selfish and groveling to command the
least respect from a noble character or a great, tender soul. It
severs the ties of affection without compunction. It destroys all
loyalty. It says, "No matter what becomes of my loved ones -- those
who would die to help me -- I must save my soul." Without the use
of the microscope, however, such a soul would never know whether if
was saved or not.

     What sort of a soul would it be that could have a heaven apart
from those it loved? It would not be big enough to save, and its
heaven would not be good enough to have.

     I prefer the philosophy, the dignified loyalty and love for
the dead of the old Goth, the captive warrior whom the Christians
persuaded to be baptized. As he stood by the font he asked the
bishop, "Where are the souls of my heathen ancestors?" The bishop,
with great alacrity, replied, "In hell." The brave old warrior, the
loyal Goth, drew his skins about him and said, "I would prefer, if
you do not object, to go to my people;" and he left unbaptized.

     That was heathen philosophy; but I think I prefer it to the
Christianity of a devout man, a Sunday-school superintendent, whom
I know. He is a great light in a Christian church today. He
worships the beautiful provisions of vicarious atonement. He
refused his mother her dying wish, and on the following Sunday
atoned for the inhuman act by singing with unusual unction, "How
gentle God's commands," and reading with devout fervor, "The Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want." His mother, who had the same
shepherd, had wanted for much. She even wanted for a stone to mark
her grave, because the money she had left for that purpose her holy
son thought best to use, vicariously, upon himself.  That man
believes in the Bible absolutely. He is a good Christian, and he
abhors an infidel! He knows he is going to heaven because he has
faith in Christ, and Christ had an extra stab on his account. He is




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

willing to take his heavenly home through the blood of Christ, and
his earthly one, out of the pockets of a dead mother. The blood of
the murdered Nazarene obliterates the infamy of his acts over her
dishonored grave.

     And this is perfectly consistent! A religion of faith, a
religion that gets its good vicariously and shifts its sins and
responsibilities on to the past, is a religion that can never
elevate character; it simply makes a man more intensely what he was
before. It is all self, self, self. Think of the infinitesimal
smallness, the irredeemable worthlessness, the unutterable meanness
of a soul that could forsake those it had loved, and be happy
believing that they were suffering and eternally lost!

     Yet who does not know men who go tramping about the country,
living on the charity of their dupes, and declaring that "the Lord
is their Shepherd, they shall not want,!' whose families want for
almost every comfort of life? And this is true orthodox doctrine.
"Ye shall forsake father, mother, wife, and children," for what? --
to "follow me Think of the infamy of it!

     If that is the kind of souls that go to heaven, I shall do all
I can to keep mine amongst more respectable spirits. I will go with
the Goth. I could suffer in hell (if there were such a place) with
those I love, and keep my self-respect.

     If I believed I could be happy in heaven with my loved ones in
agony below -- if I believed it of myself -- there is no vile,
slime-covered reptile on earth that I would so loathe! Forsake
father, mother, husband, children to save my soul! Never! I will go
with my people!

            THE VICARIOUS THEORY THE CAUSE OF CRIME.

     This idea of vicarious atonement has encouraged injustice and
crime of every kind. Out of eighty-four men who have been hanged
recently, seventy-one have gone directly to heaven. They asked the
assembled spectators to be as good as they conveniently could, and
meet them on the other shore. Their spiritual advisers administered
the holy sacrament, and assured them that they were "lambs of the
fold," and that a robe and a harp awaited them at the right hand of
God.

     Just imagine a lamb in a robe, playing on a harp! A lamb with
wings, a harp, a long white robe, and golden slipper's seems to me
an object to arouse the sympathy of a demon. Poor lamb! He would
wish himself a goat every hour of the day.

     There is an implied crime in the very word vicarious. If it
means anything it means the suffering of innocence to atone for
guilt. It means that one crime is condoned by the commission of
another -- a deliberate one. It means that truth must die in order
that dishonor may live. It substitutes vengeance for justice. It
does not seek to protect society by checking villainy; it seeks the
safety of the criminal by a shifting of responsibility. If the
framers of human laws were no wiser that the revealers of divine
law, no nation could live, no family would be secure, no justice
possible.

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Not long ago the New York 'Independent' contained an article
against Sarah Bernhart, calling her "a lewd woman," and against her
play because it did not contain good morals. The same paper
contained an article against George Eliot's works, and said that
the Mormon Congressman is a disgrace to all America because he is
a polygamist. All these things by a man who swallows David and Lot
whole, and has Solomon pose as the summit of all wisdom! All this
by a man who builds his life on the word of Moses, and denies to
others the right to object to his code of morals or his version of
heavenly wisdom and divine direction!

     I should like a little consistency. The Christian who rails
against polygamy, and at the same time poses in morals with a bible
in his hand, is a man who saws his own legs from under him, and
still expects us to believe that he has legs, which we might
possibly do if only our sight were aided by faith. As long as my
eyes hold out, I'll stick to unaided vision; after that, spectacles
or faith according to circumstances.

     When goodness and virtue are measured, not by a book, but by
our own acts toward each other; when a man's character is judged by
the amount of joy he gives to his household; when a happy laugh
from his children and a bright smile from his wife, greet him as
often as he comes home; when these are taken as the evidence of a
good man, deacons will go out of fashion. Meek, tired, persecuted
-- looking wives will not listen to a canting husband and believe
that he is a holy man, when they know that he is a bad husband and
a tyrannical father.

     There is not any way that I know of to make a home happy
vicariously. No confession of faith can take pain out of a mother's
heart. No "testimony of the spirit" can make love and beauty in a
home where "the heathen" hold the first place, and foreign missions
get tangled up in the children's hair. No man accustomed to a high
intellectual temperature can keep warm by theological fires. No man
whose brain is king can ever again recognize the authority of this
mere undisciplined sentiment.

                            REVISION.

     As a system Christianity has had its day. Long ago it may have
served a good purpose, but after eighteen hundred years it is worn
threadbare and useless. If some of its milder tenets still cling to
and fit our vast mediocrity, it is equally certain that the
intellectual giants have molted it as the birds moult their plumage
in a dying year, and have taken on the bright new garments of
higher thought, the spring plumage of intellectual liberty.

     When I heard that the Bible was going to be revised I felt
very glad because I thought there was a wide field of usefulness
open to somebody right there; and I concluded to do all I could to
help it along. I understood that they wanted the substance retained
as it was, with the language made more as we use language now.

     So I began my revision in this way: "Good morning, Moses, I
hear that you have some gods in this country. Do you know anything
about it?"


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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     "Oh, yes, I'm the head god's head man."

     "You are?"

     "Yes, I had a talk with the head god -- the top one of the
three (we are down to three here now), and he told me to tell
people what a good god he is, and that they must all praise him up
for it."

     He did! Well is that all he said?

     Oh, no, he told me to tell them that he is the only God, and
is the kind father of all, and loves all alike, and that they must
all just trust in him and he will take good care of them." I
thought you said a while ago that there were three of these gods;
now this one says he is the only one. Is there trouble in the
cabinet?"

     "No, there are three, but there is one.      See?

     "Well, no, I can't say that I do. But no matter, the rest of
that about the father business was pretty good. That was the best
I ever heard. But do you know that the very last man I talked with
said that this god was partial to some folks and treated some
others pretty shabbily."

     "Oh, that is not so; my god is no respecter of persons; that's
his very strongest hold. He treats rich and poor just alike, only
if anything he leans a little toward the poor."

     "That is pretty clever. But what else did he tell you in that
talk?"

     "Well, he told me to tell the people, 'Thou shalt not kill and
afterwards, at another time, he told me to take a lot of my men,
and go over there to that town just across, and kill all the men
and boys I could find, and if they fought hard for their homes, and
I seemed to be getting the worst of it for a little while, not to
be afraid, he'd be with me, and he'd see that I came out all right.
Oh, he's the gayest old god you ever saw to help in a fight."

     "Well, yes, that was pretty clever to you; but isn't he the
god of that village too!"

     "Oh, yes; but you see one of the men that lives over there
went and worshipped another god one day, and this one didn't like
it.

     I see; but if he treats them all that way, don't you think it
is rather natural that they should go and hunt up another god to
admire?"

     Well, while I was waiting for Moses to answer this question,
I heard another man say that only a day or two previously this very
fellow had burned up their homes, and murdered a good many people
who had never injured him; and that he had dashed out the brains of
the innocent children, and had actually sold the sweet, pure young


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girls to his brutal soldiers. Since I heard that, my mind has been
so occupied with some other little matters that my revision has not
gone any farther, and somebody else has got one out; so I don't
know that I shall ever finish mine. It does not seem to be very
encouraging work any way; and I am afraid that people would find
fault with its scholarship if it should be finished. Theological
scholarship and common-sense always did disagree. A man who is well
vaccinated with either will never catch the other.

                     THE CHURCH'S MONEY-BOX.

     The Church used to keep a box about four feet long and two
feet wide which it called the sacred ark of God. It was certain
death for any man not a priest to touch that box. It is supposed
that they kept in it gold and jewels which they extorted from their
dupes, and that for fear of robbery they made superstition their
banker. Well, they had to move that jewelry-box once for some
reason, and it is not said that anything happened to the men who
put it on the cart; but as the man who drove the oxen -- in one
place it says that they were oxen, in another that they were cows
with young calves, and you will be damned if you don't believe both
-- anyhow, as the driver walked along in horrid fear lest something
should happen to that ark of God, the oxen shied, and the ark
toppled, and instinctively the driver put out his hand to steady
the sacred thing. Well, you would think that any sane man, any
reasonable being, would have commended him for it; but no! Jehovah
struck him dead for his pains. Why? Because that box was so
supremely sacred. Supreme nonsense! Suppose he had not touched it
and it had fallen? What then? Most likely Jehovah would then have
struck him dead for not touching it. It strikes me that the only
reasonable, sensible being connected with that whole story was the
driver, the man they abuse, the man the priests murdered, I suspect
because he discovered what was in that ark, and threatened to
expose the humbug.

     Whenever any man uses judgment and common-sense the Church
calls him wicked and dangerous. They say he "touches with unholy
hands holy things;" and when he dies, whether his death was
expedited or otherwise, they say God killed him.

     Now, if God did kill that man for touching the ark to save it
from falling, what do yon think of him -- as a God? I can tell you
what you would think of him as a man. Yon would think he was a
ruffian and a murderer that is what you would think of him as a
man.

     Truly gods are made of poor stuff. If I can't have a god that
is nobler and better and truer and kinder than the very best man I
ever saw, then I don't want any god at all. And candor forbids me
to state that I ever saw, heard or read of any such a god. All the
gods I ever read or heard of have fallen infinitely below a few men
I know.

     Jehovah, it seems to me, is hardly an average god, even as
gods go. He believed in polygamy. He believed in slavery. He was a
murderer -- killed 52,000 people once because somebody looked into
that four-by-two box that he thought so much of. Human life was not


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worth a copper in his neighborhood. He was always in a rage about
something, and you never knew when he would "get the drop on you"
because somebody else had ruffled his temper. "Any man was liable,"
as the Irishman said, "to wake up any morning and find him-self
burned to ashes in his bed," because one of his neighbors had been
wicked enough to lend a five-dollar green-back to one of the
Philistines, or had eaten a gum-drop in the dark of the moon, or
committed some other awful crime like that.

                      SHALL PROGRESS STOP?

     In its day the Bible was all very well, no doubt. It was the
expression of the best that the Jewish people then knew in morals.
In his time Christ was a great reformer and a brave man. His
philosophy was then an onward spring, and he detested the shams of
the Church.

     But with the knowledge we have to-day we should call that man
a lunatic who tried to bind medical science by the teachings of
that age, and maintained that when a man was sick he had a devil,
and that if he got worse he had a whole flock of them. Yet Christ
thought that. We should call the man utterly insane who insisted
that Joshua gave us the last light that is ever to be thrown on
astronomy. We should simply look with pity on one who should try to
convince us that the legal profession ought to be bound by the laws
of Moses; and we know that any nation that attempted to act under
his guidance would be soon convinced by the unerring voice of
foreign cannon that somebody had made a mistake.

     Science has grown. Philosophy has developed. International law
has sprung up. In religion alone we are asked to accept the
standard of morality and honor of ages that are dead -- to take as
the last word of wisdom the reformer's code of eighteen hundred
years ago. We may grow in all else; in this we must stand still. We
may use a text-book on Nature, Medicine, Law, or Mechanics, until
by its aid we pass beyond its knowledge to a higher; but in morals
and religion the book that was a light to the ages of ignorance and
superstition, and the production of its brain, must still be the
sole illumator of a world made wise and critical and thoughtful by
science and deep experience. The fisherman's lantern, although
useful in its day, cannot guide us while we stand in the glare of
electricity. Why stand persistently with our faces westward, and
gaze at the declining light, crying out impotently and hopelessly
as we see it grow dim and vanish?

     Our wise men have kept steadily onward, guided by the light of
the breaking dawn; and with their faces to the East their star has
never set. The fishermen's light has sunk below the horizon,
leaving behind it the glow of honest labor and earnest effort to
keep their memory bright. The scientist's star has risen, and with
no claim that it is even yet the highest light -- the final
promise, it throws its rays of knowledge, its beams of hope, far
into the future, and bids us follow, leaving the cold embers of the
dead past for the warmth and light of the living future.

     The hope of the past is the despair of the future. Stagnation
is death. In movement and thought alone is progress. The wealth of
the world is the brain of the scholar.

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     The past is dead; peace to its ashes. The future is ours to
form on new models; models deformed by past superstitions, or
models though faulty, instinct with true freedom. You are the jury,
what is the verdict?

           HISTORICAL FACTS AND THEOLOGICAL FICTIONS.

                        CHURCH FICTIONS.

     It is one of the glittering fictions of the Church that to her
civilization is due, and that it is to her benign influence and
direction alone that woman has been advanced to her present
position in the social scale; that without the Bible and the Church
the status of woman in Christian countries would be lower and her
lot harder.

     1st. To prove this claim she directs attention to the status
of woman in several non-Christian countries, and compares the
degradation and hardship she there endures to the position of woman
to-day in America, England, and France.

     2d. The Church claims the credit of originating and sustaining
the various steps of progress by which woman has been elevated. She
claims to have originated and to sustain the idea that woman is
man's equal, and to recognize her as such in the Church.

     3d. She points with pride to the superior education and
intelligence of the women of Christian countries, and contrasts
this intellectual altitude with that of women elsewhere. She says
that women owe their superior opportunities of education and
advancement to their religion.

     4th. But above all the clergy attempt to silence those who ask
questions, by calling attention to the superior legal status of
woman in Christian countries, and asserting that the Church secured
this and that it made marriage honorable and home a possibility.

     5th. The clergy claim that the Bible is woman's best friend
and staunchest defender, and that it is the originator of morality.

                        HISTORICAL FACTS.

     "The moment there is fixation, petrification and death ensue."
      Profound sincerity is the only basis of character." --
                                                       Emerson.

                          CIVILIZATION.

     We are told that our superior civilization and high moral tone
are due to Christianity. I think that this is not true. The whole,
or at least much the larger and foundation part of the question of
civilization -- where it shall grow and where only live, where it
shall drag and where scarcely exist -- seems to me to be decided
primarily by environment, the basis of which is climate and soil.





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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     Where the climate and soil are most favorable to the highest
development; where the environment is neither too hard nor too
indulgent; where man is neither enervated by heat and the absence
of necessity to labor, nor stunted by cold and hardship and the
ever-present necessity to search or labor for food and warmth;
there will be the highest types and forms of civilization.

     If the Buddhist religion had chanced to be the one that in the
process of events took root in the climate and soil where the
Hebrew Bible and the Christian belief hold sway; and if, on the
other hand, the Hebrew and Christian religions had been the ones
developed in India or China, the civilization of the various
countries would still, in the main, be what they are to-day.

     If our superior civilization were the result of our religion,
then the most civilized countries would be the most intensely
Christian countries. We all know that this is not the case. Compare
the intense Christianity of Spain or Russia, and their backward
civilization, with the easy-going religious or irreligious
condition of France, or America, and their recognition of Liberty
and Humanity, equalled nowhere else on earth.

     I admit unreservedly that a religion, by its inelasticity, may
do much to retard progress, or by its greater elasticity may permit
a more rapid development than a more nearly petrified or incoherent
system would allow; but what I hold is this, that the primary and
controlling causes of the various stages of civilization are
climate and soil.

     There are, of course, many other things which modify the
social development or civilization in any country, as its religion,
its laws, and what we may call "accidents of intellectual or civil
contest," such as the religions or other wars -- our own war in
which the blacks were freed, arbitration, and immigration. All of
these, and many others, are modifying influences; but no one of
them can claim the primary place.

     Soil, climate, and location determine the occupation of a
nation, as whether it shall be militant, commercial, or
agricultural. In turn occupation determines what the character of
a people and their laws shall be, whether they shall be warlike or
peaceful, inventive or receptive, stationary or roving; and these,
in turn, are the matters which determine the civil scale to which
a people shall rise.

     True, the religion of a people will make itself felt strongly
but whenever a nation has found it expedient or desirable to
accomplish a feat which was in opposition to its religion, it has
invariably modified the religion to fit the case, or waived it in
favor of that particular movement.

     In keeping with this fact it is found that in those countries
where the greatest changes and modifications of government and
occupation have occurred, there have the religions undergone the
greatest modification to fit the new order of things. If it were
the religion that dominated the, matter, civilization and morals
would be immovable, and legislation would revolve around the
guidance of the Church.

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     According to the very theory of Divine revelation a religion
would be most perfect at its beginning. It would be without flaw
when born. It would be incapable of improvement or growth. In a
word it would be immovable. It would possess the fixation of which
Emerson speaks. It would not have to readjust itself to the changed
and improved conditions of man, and its word would be always a
higher light on every movement of progress. It would be to the
Church and not to the State that the great principles of progress,
of liberty, and of justice would look for the highest guidance and
the last light. How far this is from the real state of things in
any country or in any religion all readers of history know.

     It is the State or Science which has proposed and made the
steps of progress, and the, Church has (often after the most bitter
fight and denunciation) readjusted her creed to the new code, and
then claimed that she had that light and knew that principle
before, although neither she nor any one else had ever suspected
it.

     This has been the case with almost every important discovery
that Science has ever made. The Church has retarded the acceptance
of the new light and has set her seal of "divine disapproval and
damnation" on the brow of the thinkers who strove to bless mankind.
It has been the rule in State reforms as well. It was so in the
struggle to separate Church and State. It is so in the effort to
sustain the belief in the "divine right of kings." The Church
fought individual liberty and representative Government, and she
still contests the question of individual conscience and individual
equality and independence. [NOTE: See reports of the last General
Conference of the Methodist Church held in Philadelphia, where,
during a heated debate, one member said that he was in favor of
using common-sense and the principle of justice in deciding
questions of right and wrong and of liberty of conscience;
whereupon a large majority voted him a dangerous man, and decided
that common-sense and justice had nothing to do with religion. One
member naively remarked that the whole career and life of a good
preacher fully disproved that any such heretical doctrines obtained
in the Church as that the use of common-sense was admissible; and
since the majority voted with him it does not seem to be my place
to question that fact.]

     In these matters the Church has invariably been on the side
that ultimately had to go to the wall, and she has become a party
to the progress only after the principle has become an established
fact.

     Now it is the efforts of Science and Law towards the elevation
of man and the betterment of his condition in this world -- the
procuring for him of greater personal advantage, dignity, and
liberty -- that have marked the progress of civilization.

     The climate and soil decided mans occupation; his occupation
determined what his higher needs should be; and his higher needs
and the gained results of his occupations enabled him to strive for
the bettering of his condition and surroundings. The man who lived
in a climate favorable to mental and physical activity, and in a



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country with a rich and varied soil, was enabled to accomplish his
ends as his less fortunate brother -- lacking such support and
stimulus and motive -- has been unable to do.

     If such a thing had been possible, thirty years ago, as that
all knowledge of our religion had been utterly wiped out of
America, and a thorough knowledge of Buddhism or Mohammedanism
instilled into every Yankee brain in its stead, the Yankee, brain
would have, simply adjusted its religion to its surroundings and
not its surroundings to its religion; and America would have gone
right on in the front rank of liberty and toleration and progress.
There would have been social and political and religious contests
over "caste" or "harems" or "Tripitaka," instead of over slavery as
a divine institution, the right of a mother to her own offspring,
or the inspiration of the Bible. The wheels of progress would have
been blocked some days by devotees who preached damnation for those
who believed in the "Trinity" instead of for those who did not.
Hell would have been as freely promised to the man who suggested
that Newton knew more than Mohammed, as it is to-day to any one who
makes the same odious comparison between Darwin and Moses. The
timid would have been terrified by sermons to prove the lost
condition of a man who touched one of lower rank, in place of the
edification our clergy often in the shape of eternal damnation for
unbaptized infants. And there would have been so little difference
between the arguments for the divinity of the Tripitaka and the
Bible, and for the miracles of each, that if any devout
Presbyterian had by accident left his barrel of sermons on the
latter subject behind him, his Buddhist brother could have utilized
them without the change of an argument. But the wheel would turn
and the devotee would either go down or change his creed, and it
would depend chiefly upon his age and consequent flexibility which
course he would adopt.

     No known religion could transfer the conditions of
civilization in China to America or England or France, and no
amount of christianizing (if such a thing were possible) could
transform China into a like condition with us, so long as her
climate, her soil, and her population remain what they are to-day.
You may make the Arab or the Jap digest the whole Westminster
catechism, but he will, he must, be an Arab or a Jap still -- if he
lives though it all. If his constitution is good, and he gets over
it, his condition and grade of civilization will continue to
conform to his environment; and the trifling difference involved,
between turning-off prayers on a wheel and counting them off on
beads will be simply the difference between tweedledee and
tweedledum.

     Notwithstanding this as a primary fact, the religion of a
country has a modifying influence on the rapidity of its progress,
and the more fixed a religion -- the more certainly it claims
perfection, the greater claim it lays to holding the final word;
and the more fully this claim is accepted by the people, the
greater influence will it have, the greater check will it be to the
development of any new thought, discovery, invention, or principle
that arises in the process of evolution toward a freer atmosphere
and a broader understanding of individual liberty and dignity and
life. William Kingdom Clifford, F.R.S., in his delightful book on
the "Scientific Basis of Morals." says:

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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

          "It is sometimes said that moral questions have been
     authoritatively settled by other methods; that we ought to
     accept this decision, and not to question it by any method of
     scientific inquiry; and that reason should give way to
     revelation on such matters.

          "I hope before I have done to show just cause why we
     should pronounce on such teaching as this no light sentence of
     moral condemnation: first, because it is our duty to form
     those beliefs which are to guide our actions by the two
     scientific modes of inference, and by these alone; and,
     secondly, because the proposed mode of settling ethical
     questions by authority is contrary to the very nature of right
     and wrong.

          "The worship of a deity who is represented as unfair or
     unfriendly to any portion of the community is a wrong thing,
     however great may be, the threats and promises by which it is
     commended. And still worse, the reference of right and wrong
     to his arbitrary will as a standard, the diversion of the
     allegiance of the moral sense from the, community to him, is
     the most insidious and, fatal of social diseases.

          "The first principle of natural ethics is the sole and
     supreme allegiance of conscience to the community.

          "Secondly, veracity to the community depends upon faith
     in man. Surely I ought to be talking platitudes when I say
     that it is not English to tell a man a lie, or to suggest a
     lie by your silence or your actions, because you are afraid
     that he is not prepared for the truth, because you don't quite
     know what he will do when he knows it, because perhaps after
     all this lie is a better thing for him than the truth would
     be, this same man being all the time an honest fellow-citizen
     whom you have every to trust. Surely I have headed that this
     craven crookedness is the object of our national detestation.
     And yet it is constantly whispered that it would be dangerous
     to divulge certain truths to the masses. 'I know the whole
     thing is untrue: but then it is so useful for the people; you
     don't know what harm you might do by shaking their faith in
     it.' Crooked ways are none the less crooked because they are
     meant to deceive great masses of people instead of
     individuals. If a thing is true, let us all believe it, rick
     and poor, men, women, and children. If a thing is untrue, let
     us all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women and children.
     Truth is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be
     whispered over rose-water after dinner when the ladies go
     away.

          "Even in those whom I would most reverence, who would
     shrink with horror from such actual deception as I have just
     mentioned, I find traces of a want of faith in man. Even that
     noble thinker, to whom we of this generation owe more than I
     can tell, seemed to say in one of his posthumous essays that
     in regard to questions of great public importance we, might
     encourage a hope in excess of the evidence (which would
     infallibly grow into a belief and defy evidence) if we found
     that life was made easier by it. As if we should not lose

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     infinitely more by nourishing a tendency to falsehood than we
     could gain by the delusion of a pleasing fancy. Life must
     first of all be made straight and true; it may get easier
     through the help this brings to the commonwealth. And lange,
     the great historian of materialism, says that the amount of
     false belief necessary to morality in a given society is a
     matter of taste. I cannot believe that any falsehood whatever
     is necessary to morality. It cannot be true of my race and
     yours that to keep ourselves from becoming scoundrels we must
     needs believe a lie, The sense of right grew up among healthy
     men and was fixed by the practice of comradeship. It has never
     had help from panthoms and falsehoods, and it never can want
     any. By faith in man and piety toward men we have taught each
     other the right hitherto; with faith in man and piety toward
     men we shall never more depart from it."

     If religion decided and produced the civilization of a people,
what sort of civilization would exist to-day among the Jews? All
Jews would be bigamists, and murder would be their pastime. No
people would be free from their rapine, no woman safe from their
lust. But fortunately they have followed their scientific and
political leaders instead of their Prophets, and the consequence is
that they are so far above and superior to their religion and their
Bible, that only in its trivial and immaterial dictates is it their
guide and law to-day.

     And we, building upon the same foundation, with an added story
to our edifice, modify, to suit legislation and a higher public
sentiment and a broader conception of justice, both the foundation
and the roof whenever a new principle is born or some great soul
floods the world with light.

     And so the world moves on, those nations in advance that
possess the climate to stimulate and the soil to support to the
best advantage their citizens -- philosophers and scientists who
grope towards perfection and stumble on the way over real and
imaginary obstacles, but still bring each generation nearer the
goal, and freer to brush aside the cobwebs of superstition and
ignorance, and to look fairly out on the light that breaks in the
East.

     There is another feature of the subject that will bear looking
at. Christians are the last to give credit to other religions for
the development and advance of civilization in the countries
possessing them. What Christian will admit that it is the religion
of the Chinese that makes them the most orderly, law-abiding, mob-
avoiding people on the globe? Will any Christian admit that it is
the inferior moral tone of Christ and his teachings which enables
the followers of Confucius and Buddha to offer this superior
showing? Is he prepared to say that Mohammedanism is superior to
Christianity because its followers outdo the Christians in honesty?
[Travelers tell us that a native can leave, an order together with
a bag of uncounted gold at the shop of a dealer, and upon the
return of the buyer his order will be exactly filled, his gold
properly and honestly divided, and all where he had left them, even
though the shop be open to the street and unattended and
unguarded.]  Is it owing to the superior blessings of the Mormon


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faith that its followers are more thrifty, and that paupers are few
or unknown among them? Is it because their religion is superior to
ours that the Lapp women are better treated, that their comparative
status is higher, and their family life purer than with ourselves"
["Though Norway with Ladies." By W. Mattieu Williams. F.R.A.S.,
F.C.S.]

     The claim that superiority of civilization is due to
Christianity, and that to it we owe the good things of the nations
where it is the prevailing religion proves too much. It will work
just as well for any other religion as for our own. Its reach is
too extended, its conclusion too comprehensive for its purpose.
Christianity could not be made its sole terminus. It reminds one of
the story of the brakeman who was persuaded to go to church. When
he came out his friend asked him how he liked the preacher. He
said, "Very well, on the main line. He had good wheels, his track
was straight and level, and he carried a good head of steam, but he
seems to lack terminal facilities."  [Horace Seaver recently wrote
the following:

                     ALL OWING TO THE BIBLE.

     It is a very common argument with Christians, that only those
nations which have had the Bible were refined, civilized, and
learned. A Christian paper, now before us, exultingly says:

     "Take the map of the world, draw a line around those,
countries that have enjoyed the highest degree of refinement, and
you will encircle just those nations that have received the Bible
as their authority in religion.'

     "From this language, the plain inference is, that those
nations have been indebted to the influence of the Bible for the
positions to which they have attained. Let us follow out a little
this line of argument and see where it will lead.

     "The ancient Egyptians stood as far in advance of their
contemporaries as do the nations of Christendom at the present day,
as the remains of Egyptian cities and temples fully attest. And if
the argument is good, they were indebted for that superiority to
their worship of cats, crocodiles, and onions!

     "The ancient Greek might have exclaimed, as he beheld the
proud position to which Greece had attained -- 'See what we owe to
a belief in our glorious mythology; we have reached the highest
point of enlightenment the world has ever witnessed; we stand
unequalled in power, wealth, the cultivation of the arts, and all
that makes a nation refined, polished, and great!'

     How immeasurably would his faith in the elevating tendency of
his religion have been increased, could he have looked with
prophetic eye into the distant ages of the future, and beheld the
enlightened and Christianized nations of the nineteenth century
adopting the remains of Grecian architecture, sculpture, painting,
oratory, music, and literature as their models!




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     "Pagan Rome, too, once mistress of the world and arbitress of
nations -- the home of philosophers and sages -- the land in which
the title, 'I am a Roman citizen,' was the proudest that a mortal
could wear -- Rome, by the above Christian argument, should have
ascribed all her honor, praise, and glory to her mythology.

     "The Turk and the Saracen, likewise, have had their day of
power and renown. Baghdad was the seat of science and learning at
a time when the nations of Europe were sunk in darkness and
superstition. The Turk and Saracen should have pointed to the Koran
as the source of their refinement.

     "Thus we see that for Christian argument we are noticing, if
it proves anything, proves too much. If the nations of Christendom
are indebted to the Bible for their enlightenment, likewise were
the Egyptians indebted to their cat and crocodile, and onion
worship, the Greeks and Romans to their mythology, and the Turks
and Saracens to their Koran."

     It is a fact that in some Christian countries the actual
status of woman is higher than it is to-day in any other country;
but it is also true that her comparative status is often lower.
[See Appendix C, 1-6]

     If we compare the actual status of woman in Russia or Spain
(the two most intensely Christian countries to-day) with that of
the Chinese or Hindoo woman, the showing may be somewhat in favor
of the former; but on the other hand, her comparative position
(when taken with that of the men of her country) does not gain but
loses by the contrast. It is a significant fact that, of all the
Christian countries, in those where the Church stands highest and
has most power women rank lowest and have fewest rights accorded
them, whether of personal liberty or proprietary interest. In the
countries named above and in other countries where the Church still
has a strong grip upon the throat of the State, woman's position is
degraded indeed; while in the three so-called Christian countries
where the Church has least power, where law is not wholly or in so
large part canonical, woman's position is more free, more
independent, and less degraded, when compared with the position of
the men of those countries.

     That tells the whole story. If it were to the Church or to her
religion that she owed her advancement, it would be in the most
strictly Christian countries that her elevation and advantages
would be greatest. Under the canon law her status would be higher
than under the common law. On the contrary, however, it is under
the least religious, freest, and most purely secular forms of
government that she has attained most full recognition and secured
the greatest advancement.

     Compare the position of woman in Christian Spain with her
position in Infidel France. Compare her condition in Russia, with
the flag of the Church and the seal of the Cross for her
protection, with that of her sister under the stars and stripes of
America, with a constitution written by the infidels Jefferson and
Paine.



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     Compare them and decide whether it is to the Church and the
Cross, with their wars and persecutions, or to Liberty and
Skepticism that women owe their loyal love and their earnest
support. Compare them and determine then whether it is to
Christianity or to Science that she should fly for protection, and
where it is that she will be most certain of justice. Compare them
and answer whether it is to the Fathers of the Church or to the
Founders of Republics that women should be most grateful. Compare
them, and be thankful, oh women of America, that the Church never
had her hand on the throat of the Constitution of the United
States, and that she is losing her grip on the Supreme Bench!  [On
the status of women there is much of interest in Mr. Herbert
Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," vol. 1. Mr. Spencer deals with
the subject, in the main, from a different point of view from the
one taken in this article; but that his position (in regard to the
causes of woman's advancement being due to the Church) is not
wholly unlike my own, will, I think, be readily seen. He places
more stress on the results of war than I have done (and in this the
corroborating evidence furnished by the Holy wars would sustain the
position of both), I having included this phase of action under the
term occupation, since I have dealt almost wholly with nations more
advanced and freer from the fortunes of the Militant type than Mr.
Spencer has done.]

     In our pride of race we forget that it is less than three
hundred short years since Christianity by both legal and spiritual
power enforced the most degrading and vile conditions upon woman,
compelling her to live solely by the sale of her virtue.  [See
Appendix D]

     Only within the past three hundred years of growing skepticism
and loss of power by the Church has either purity or dignity become
possible for women; and it is well for us to remember that for over
1500 years of Christianity when the Church had almost absolute
power, it never dreamed of elevating woman, or recognizing her as
other than an inferior being created solely to minister to the
lowest nature of man, and possessing neither a right to her own
person nor a voice in her own defence.

     I wish that every woman who upholds the Church to-day might
read the array of facts on this subject so ably presented by
Matilda Joslyn Gage in her work on "Woman, Church, and State," a
digest of which is printed in the last chapter of vol. 1. of the
"History of Woman Suffrage," of which she is one of the editors. It
is so ably written, and the facts collected are so damning, that I
need add no word of mine to such passages as I can give from it, in
the accompanying appendix to this work.  [See Appendix E.]

                        WOMEN AS PERSONS.

     Blackstone enumerates three "absolute rights of persons."
First, "The right of personal security, in the legal enjoyment of
life, limb, body, health, and reputation." Second, "The right of
personal liberty -- free powder of locomotion without legal
restraint." Third, "The right of private property -- the free use
and disposal of his own lawful acquisitions."



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     None of these three primary and essential rights of persons
were conceded to women, and Church law did not rank her as a person
deprived of these rights, but held that she was not a person at
all, but only a function; therefore she possessed no rights of
person in this world and no hope of safety in the next.

     As to the first of these "absolute rights of persons," any one
of her male relations, or her husband after she passed from one to
the other, had absolute power over her, even to the extent of
bodily injury,  [Although England was christianized in the fourth
century, it was not until the tenth that a daughter had a right to
reject a husband selected for her by her father; and it was not
until the same century that a Christian wife of a Christian husband
acquired the right of eating at the table with him. For many
hundred years the law bound out to servile labor all unmarried
women between the ages of eleven and forty." -- M.J. Gage.

     "Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the eleventh
century." [The dates are significant; let the Church respond.] --
Herbert Spencer.

     "In England, as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of
decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. Gentlemen
arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of seeing wretched
women whipped at Bridewell. It was not until 1817 that the public
whipping of women was abolished in England." -- Spencer.]  bargain
and sale of her person, and death. Nor did even this limit the
number of her masters. By both Church and Common Law the lords
temporal (barons and other peers) and the Lords spiritual
(Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots) possessed and exercised the
right to dispose of her purity, either for a money consideration or
as a bribe or present as they saw fit.  [See Appendix E.]

     Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of
revenue to the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and
destroying her sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts
in the matter of chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be
found in the vast army of women who are named only to be reviled.
In them the Church can look on her own work. The fruit is the
natural outcome of the training woman received that taught and
compelled her always to submit to the dictates of some man, no
matter what her own judgment, modesty, or desires might be. She was
not supposed to have an opinion or to know right from wrong; and
from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know anything ask your
husband at home," down to the decisions of the last General
Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must
subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the
dictates of someone else -- any one else of the opposite sex --
from first to last has been as ingenious a method as could have
been devised to fill the world with libertines and their victims.
[See Appendix F, 2.]  It is time for the followers of St. Paul to
face the results of their own work.

     Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons
"could recover damages for injury -- have legal redress for a wrong
inflicted upon them -- woman again was held as not a person.



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     If she were assaulted and beaten, or if she were subjected to
the greatest indignity that it is possible to inflict upon her, she
had no redress. She could not complain. The law gave her no
protection whatever. Her father or husband could, if he saw fit,
bring suit to recover damages for the loss of her services as a
servant, and wholly upon the ground that it was an injury to him
and to his feelings. She was no more recognized as a "person" in
the matter, nor was she more highly considered than if she were an
inmate of a zoological garden to which some mischievous visitor had
fed too many bonbons. The owner was damaged because the brute might
die or be injured in the sight of the patrons, but aside from that
view of the case no harm was done and no account taken of so
trivial a matter.

     No matter what the injury she sustained, whether it crippled
her physically or blighted her mentally and made life to her the
worst curse that could be inflicted, she had no appeal. The wounded
feelings of one of her male relations received due consideration,
and he could recover the money-value he might set upon the injury
to his lacerated mind. This is still the letter and the practice of
the law in many places, even in America.

     If she had no male relations, the injury did not count, and no
"person" being injured everything was lovely and prayers went right
on to the God who, being no respecter of persons (except they were
free, white, adult males), enjoyed the incense from altars whereon
burning "witches" writhed in agony and helpless young girls plead
for mercy under the loathed and loathsome touch of the "St."
Augustine  ["To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company
with the most degraded of womankind, is Christianity indebted for
the full development of the doctrine of Original sin." -- Gage.

     "All or at least the greater part of the fathers of the Greek
Church before Augustine, denied any real original sin." -- Emerson.

     "The doctrine had a gradual growth, and was fully developed by
Augustine." -- Waite.]  and "St." Pelayos,  ["The abbot elect of
St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171, was found on investigation
to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village. An
abbot of St. Pelayo in Spain, in 1130, was proved to have kept no
less than seventy mistresses. Henry III., Bishop of Liege, was
deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children." --
Lecky, "History of European Morals."

     "This same bishop boasted, at a public banquet, that in
twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. A license
to the clergy to keep concubines was during several centuries
levied by princes." -- Ibid.

     "It was openly attested that 100,000 women in England alone
were made dissolute by the clergy." -- Draper, "Intellectual
Development of Europe."]  whose praises are chanted and whose
divine goodness is recounted by Christendom to-day.

     Such was the "elevation" and civilization offered by the
Church to woman. These are among her debts to the Church, and the
men who fought and contended against the incorporation of such


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infamy into the common law were branded as infidels. It was said
they denied their Lord. They were pronounced most dangerous, and
the clergy held up their hands in holy horror and whispered that
such men "as much as denied the Bible, blasphemed their God, and
sold their souls to the Devil." And the women, poor dupes, believed
it.

     One method the Church took to benefit woman and show its
respect for her was this: any married man was prohibited from being
a priest. Women were so unholy, so unclean, and so inferior, that
to have one as a wife degraded a man to such an extent that he was
unfit to be a minister or to touch holy things. The Catholic Church
still prohibits either party who is so unholy as to marry from
profaning its pulpit; but the Protestant Churches divide up, giving
women the disabilities and men the offices. The unselfishness of
such a course is quite touching. It says to women you support us
and we will damn you; there is nothing mean about us."

     As to Blackstone's second count -- "the right to personal
liberty" -- I can perhaps do no better than give a few bald facts.

     Under Pagan rule the personal liberty of woman had become very
considerable, as well as her proprietary liberty; but Christianity
began her degradation at once.

     Christianity was introduced into England in the fourth
century, and the sale of women began in the fifth; and it was not
until the eleventh that a girl could refuse to marry any suitor her
father chose for her. In a word, she always had a guardian; she had
no personal liberty whatever; she could neither buy nor own
property as her brothers could; she could not marry when and whom
she preferred, live where she wished, eat, drink, or wear what she
liked, or refuse any of these provisions when they were offered by
her male relatives. If they decided that she had too many back
teeth they simply pulled them out, and she had nothing to say on
the subject. She could be sold outright by her father, or leased or
bound out as he preferred. She never got so old but that her
earnings belonged to him, and a mother never arrived at an age
sufficiently advanced to be entitled to the earnings of her
children.

     Sharswood says, "A father is entitled to the benefits of his
children's labor." "An infant [any one not of age] owes reverence
and respect to his mother; but she has no right to his services."
[Blackstone, Sharswood.]

     This is upon the theory, doubtless, that starvation is
wholesome for a widowed mother, but that it does not agree with a
father's digestion at any time.

     Sir Henry Maine. in his "Ancient Law" says, that from the
Pagan laws all this inequality and oppressiveness of guardianship
and restriction of the personal liberty of women had disappeared,
and he adds: "The consequence was that the situation of the Roman
female, whether married or unmarried, became one of great personal
and proprietary independence. But Christianity tended somewhat from
the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty. ... The great


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jurisconsult himself [Gaius] scouts the popular Christian apology
offered for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex. ... Led
by their theory of Natural Law, the Roman [Pagan] jurisconsult had
evidently at this time assumed the equality of the sexes as a
principle of their code of equity."

     Of the Christians, led by their theory of a revealed divine
law which treated women as inferior beings and useful only as prey,
Lecky says ("European Morals," vol. 1, page 358): "But in the whole
feudal [Christian and chiefly Canon] legislation women were placed
in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire. The
complete inferiority of the sex was continually maintained by the
law; and that generous public opinion which in Pagan Rome had
frequently revolted against the injustice done to girls, in
depriving them of the greater part of the inheritance of their
fathers, totally disappeared. Wherever the canon law had been the
basis of legislation, we find laws of succession sacrificing the
interest of daughters and of wives, and a state of public opinion
which has been formed and regulated by these laws; nor was any
serious attempt made to abolish them till the close of the last
century. The French revolutionists, though rejecting the proposal
of Sieyes and Condorcet [both infidels] to accord political
emancipation to women, established at least an equal succession of
sons and daughters, and thus initiated a great reformation of both
law and opinion which sooner or later must traverse the world."

     How soon or how late this will happen will depend very greatly
upon the amount of power retained by the Church. Pagans, Infidels,
and Scientists have fought for, and the Church has fought against,
the dignity, honor, and welfare of women for centuries; and because
fear, organization, wealth, selfishness, and power have been on the
side of the Church, and she has kept women too ignorant to
understand the situation, she has succeeded for many generations in
retarding the progress and shutting out the light that slowly came
in despite of her.

     "No society which preserves any tincture of Christian
institutions is ever likely to restore to married women the
personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law; but the
proprietary disabilities of married females stand on quite a
different basis from their personal incapacities, and it is by
keeping alive and consolidating the former that the canon law has
so deeply injured civilization. There are many vestiges of a
struggle between the secular and ecclesiastical principles; but the
canon law nearly everywhere prevailed."  [Maine's "Ancient Law,"
158.]

     It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as
it had sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so
long as it pretended to have, and people believed that it had,
power to mete out damnation to its appeasers; just so long were
science, justice, and thought fatally crippled.

     But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great
encyclopedist circle of France got their hands on the throat of the
Church, and dipped their pens in the fire of eloquence, wit,
ridicule, reason, and justice, then, and not till then, began to


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dawn a day of honor toward women, of humanity and justice, and
truth. They drew back the curtain, the world saw, the cloud lifted,
and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule woman had begun, as
we have seen, to receive recognition apart from sex. She was a
human being. A general law of "persons" applied to and shielded
her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to consider
her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one ground
of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to
her.  [See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."]  Her only claim to
recognition at all was a curse. She was not a person, she was only
a function.

     Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and
protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a
father, or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as
a human being, were apart from and superior to those that were
special and incidental. He received consideration always as a
person. He might be dealt with as husband or father.

     But ignoring all her mental life and denying that she had any,
and ignoring all her physical possibilities, ambitions, desires,
and capabilities as a person, the Church narrowed woman's life and
restricted her energies into a compass where its power over her
became absolute and her subjection certain. Nor has the loss been
wholly to woman, for any influence which cripples the mother's
capacity of endowment takes cruel revenge on the race.  [It is not
impossible but that a more correct understanding of the laws of
life and heredity may establish the fact that because of the
subjection of woman, the entire race has been mentally dwarfed and
physically weakened." -- Gamble.]

     From this outlook the debt of civilization to the Church is
heavy indeed. Is it a debt of gratitude?

     Under this head there is space for but one point farther, out
of the great store at hand.

     The clergy were licensed to commit crime. They got up a neat
little scheme called "benefit of clergy" by which they were secure
from the punishment meted out to other criminals. The relief
offered did sometimes reach other men, but as learning was largely
confined to the clergy they were the chief beneficiaries, as the
name implies and as was the intent of the law. Any man who could
read was allowed "benefit of clergy;" in other words, his
punishment was lightened or entirely omitted. But a woman, though
she were a perfect mine of wisdom and could read in any number of
languages, could receive no such benefit, because, she, could not
take holy orders. They first enacted that she should not take
orders, and then they denied to her the relief which only that
ability could give. So great a favorite was woman with the Church!

     The ordinary male criminal received the ordinary punishment.
the clergy received none; and in order that the requisite gross
amount of suffering for crime should be inflicted on somebody, the
clergy enacted that woman should receive their share vicariously in
addition to her own, and then to this they added such interest as
would make the twenty-per-cent-a-month men of Wall street ashamed
of their stupid financiering.

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     Thus the Church arrogated to itself the exclusive right to
commit crime with impunity, and also claimed and exercised the
right to prevent women from learning to read. If she still
persisted it could then punish her doubly, because she had no right
to learn.

     For offenses for which ordinary men were hanged, women were
burned alive, and priests were glorified. For larceny a man was
branded in the hand or imprisoned for a few months while for a
first offence of the kind a woman was kindly permitted to be hanged
or beheaded without benefit of clergy; and the clergy went scot
free.  [Blackstone, Christian.]  The Church did then as it does
now, it claimed all the, benefits of citizenship and paid none of
the penalties and bore none of the burdens.  [It still claims
exemption from taxation, thus throwing its burden on others; and it
also claims immunity from the very gambling laws which it so
rigidly enforces against other institutions.]

     The Church did then just as it does now, in principle, in
setting up certain great benefits which only priests might hope to
obtain, and then enacting that certain persons were forever
ineligible to the priesthood; and the, same or quite as good
reasons were given for denying women such relief from the penalties
of the law as was freely extended to men, as are given to-day for
refusing her the liberty, emoluments, and benefits that are freely
accorded to the most imbecile little theological student who is
educated by the needle of a sister and supported by money wrong
from the fears of shop or factory girls, to whom he paints the
terrors of hell, and freely threatens the same to those who disobey
him. Salvation comes high, but no preacher ever gets so poor that
he cannot distribute hell free of charge to the multitude without
the least diminution of his stock-in-trade.

     I should think that an orthodox pulpit would be about the last
place a self-respecting woman would wish to fill; but I am glad,
since there are some who do so wish, that the issue has again been
forced upon the Church, and that in 1884, true to her history, she
was again compelled to acknowledge herself a respecter of persons,
a degrader of women, and a clog to progress and individual liberty,
equality, and conscience.

     I am glad that women have recently forced the Methodist and
Presbyterian Churches to declare their principles of class
preference and partial legislation. I am glad that in 1884 these
Churches were compelled to say in effect to women, so that the
world could hear: "You are not and you never can be our equals. We
are holy. You are unclean. We will hold you back and down to the
ancient level we made for you just as long as the life is in us;
and if you ever receive recognition as a human being, it must be at
the hands of those who defy the Church and hate creeds that are not
big enough to go all round. Our creeds are only large enough to
give each sex half. But we won't be stingy, we only want our share.
You are entirely welcome to all the degradation here and all the
damnation hereafter; and any man who attempts to deprive you of
these blessings is a heretic and a sinner. Let us pray."




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                           EDUCATION.

     In dealing with this point the humor of the situation is too
plain to require comment, and I need only cite a few facts in order
to place the beautiful little fiction where it belongs.  [See
Appendix T.]

     As to general education it is well known that the Church has
fought investigation and persecuted science. From the third century
to Bruno, and from Bruno to Darwin and Tyndall there is an unbroken
chain of evidence as to her position in these matters and her
opposition to the diffusion of knowledge. When, however, it became
impossible for her to resist the demand of the people for
education; when she could no longer retard liberty and prevent the
recognition of individual rights; then she modestly demanded the
right to do the teaching herself and to control its extent and
scope.  [See Appendix G, 1-4.]

     With a brain stultified by faith  [See Appendix U.]  She
proposed to regulate investigations in which the habit of faith
would necessarily prove fatal to the discovery of truth.  [See
Clifford's "Scientific Basis of Morals," pp. 25-6.]  She proposed
to teach nothing but the dead languages and theology, and to
confine knowledge to these fields, and she succeeded for many
generations in so doing. Every time she found a man who had
discovered something, or who had a theory he was trying to test by
some little scientific investigations, she cried "heretic" and
suppressed that man. She stuck to the dead languages, and the only
thing she is not afraid of to-day is something dead. Any other kind
of knowledge is a dangerous acquaintance for her to make.  [See
Morley's "Diderot," p. 190.]

     If you meet a clergyman to-day who has devoted his time to the
dead languages you need not be afraid that he is a heretic; but if
he is studying the sciences, arts, literature, and history of the
living world in earnest yon can get your fagot ready. His orthodoxy
is a dead doxy. It is only a question of time and bravery when he
will swear off.  [See Ibid, p. 126.]

     In the Church schools and "universities" to-day it is quite
pathetic to hear the professors wrestle with geology and Genesis,
and cut their astronomy to fit Joshua. If in one of these
institutions for the petrifaction of the human mind there is a
teacher who is either not nimble enough to escape the conclusions
of a bright pupil or too honest to try, he is at once found to be
"incompetent as an instructor," and is dropped from the faculty. I
know one case where it took twenty years to discover that a
professor was not able to teach geology -- and it took a heresy-
hunter with a Bible to do it then.

     But it is the claim of the Church in regard to the education
of women with which I have to do here.

     Women in Greece and Rome under Pagan rule had become learned
and influential to an unparalleled degree.  [See Lecky, Milman,
Diderot, Morley, Christian, and others.]



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     The early Fathers of the Church found women thirsty for
knowledge and eager for opportunities to learn. They there-upon set
about making it disreputable for a woman to know anything,  ["In
the fourth century we find that holy men in council gravely argued
the question, and that too with abundant confidence in their
ability and power to decide the whole matter: 'Ought women to be
called human beings?' A wise and pious father in the Church, after
deliberating solemnly and long on the vexed question of women,
finally concluded: 'The female sex is not a fault in itself, but a
fact in nature for which women themselves are not to blame;' but he
graciously cherished the opinion that women will be permitted to
rise as men, at the resurrection. A few centuries later the
masculine mind underwent great agitation over the question: 'Would
it be consistent with the duties and uses of women for them to
learn the alphabet? And in America, after Bridget Gaffort had
donated the first plot of ground for a public school, girls were
still denied the advantages of such schools. The questions --
'Shall women be allowed to enter colleges?' and 'Shall they be
admitted into the professions?' have been as hotly contested as has
been the question of their humanity." -- Gamble.]  and in order to
clinch their prohibition the Church asserted that women was unable
to learn, had not the mental capacity,  ["There existed at the same
time in this celebrated city a class of women, the glory of whose
intellectual brilliancy still survives; and when Alcibiades drew
around him the first philosophers and statesmen of Greece, 'it was
a virtue to applaud Aspasia;' of whom it has been said that she
lectured publicly on rhetoric and philosophy with such ability that
Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom from her lips, and so
marked was her genius for statesmanship that Pericles afterward
married her and allowed her to govern Athens, then at the height of
its glory and power. 'Numerous examples might be cited in which
Athenian women rendered material aid to the state." -- Gamble.]
was created without mental power and for purely physical purposes.
It was maintained that her "Sphere" was clearly defined, and that
it was purely and solely an animal one; and worst of all it was
stoutly asserted that her greatest crime had always been a desire
for wisdom, and that it was this desire which brought the penalty
of labor and death into this world.  [See Morley's "Diderot," p.
76; Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy:" Lecky's "European Morals."]

     With such a belief it is hardly strange that the education of
girls was looked upon as a crime; and with such a record it is
almost incredible effrontery that enables the Church to-day to
claim credit for the education of women.  [See Appendix H, 1 to 4.]
If she were to educate every woman living, free, of charge, in
every branch of known knowledge, she could not repay woman for what
she has deprived her of in the past, or efface the indignity she
has already offered.  [Lecky, "European Morals," p. 310.]

     A prominent clergyman of the Church of England, who was
recently much honored in this country, lately said; in a sermon to
women: "There are those who think a woman can be taught logic. This
is a mistake. Men are logical, women are not." He was too modest to
give his proofs. It seemed to me strange that he, did not mention
the doctrines of the trinity and vicarious atonement, or a few of
the miracles, as the result of logic in the masculine mind. And I
could not help thinking at the time that a man whose mental


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furniture was chiefly composed of the thirty-nine articles and the
Westminster Catechism would naturally be a profound authority on
logic. An orthodox preacher talking about logic is a sight to
arouse the compassion of a demon. Next to the natural sciences,
logic can give the Church the colic quicker than any other kind of
a green apple. And so it is not strange that the clergy should be
afraid that it would disagree with the more delicate constitution
of a woman. They always did maintain that any diet that was a
trifle too heavy for them couldn't be digested by anybody else; and
they would be perfectly right in their supposition if intellectual
dyspepsia or softening of the brain were contagious.

     The "sphere" of no other creature is wholly determined and
bounded by one physical characteristic or capacity. To every other
creature is conceded without question the right to use more than
one talent.

     But the Fathers decided in holy and solemn council that it
would be "unbecoming" for a woman to learn the alphabet, and that
she could have no possible use for such information. They said that
she would be a better mother without distracting her dear little
brain with the a, b, cs, and that therefore she should not learn
them. They also decided that she who was so far lost to modesty as
to become acquainted with the multiplication table "was an unfit
associate for our wives and mothers." There was something wrong
with such a woman. She was either a "witch" or else she was
"married to the devil."

     That is the way the Church encouraged education for women.
This was done, the holy Fathers said, to "protect women from the
awful temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom
had subjected man." They had too much respect for their wives and
mothers to permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of
long division or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that
no man would be so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil
her pure mind with conic sections.

     Well, in time there were a few women brave enough, and a few
men honorable and moral enough, to set aside the letter of this
prohibition; but much of its spirit still blossoms in all its
splendor in Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and various other institutions
of learning, where women are either not permitted to enter at all
or are required to learn and accomplish unaided that which it takes
a large faculty of instructors and every known or obtainable
educational device (together with future business stimulus) to
enable the young men to do the same thing!

     The Fathers said, in effect, "It was through woman wanting to
know something that sin came into this world; therefore let her
hereafter want to know nothing." They taught that a desire for
knowledge on the part of woman was the greatest crime ever
committed on this earth, and that it so enraged God that he
punished it by death and by every curse known to man. When it was
pointed out that animals had lived and died on this earth long
before man could have lived, they said that God knew Adam was going
to live and Eve was going to sin, so he made death retroactive
because Adam would represent all animals when he should be created!


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     All this was thought and done and taught in order to agree
with the silly story of the "fall of man in the Garden of Eden,"
which every one acquainted with the simple rudiments of science or
the history of the races knows to be a childish legend of an
undeveloped people. Instead of a "fall" from perfect beginnings,
there has been and is a constant rise in the moral as well as in
the mental and physical conditions of man. The type is higher, the
race nobler and nearer perfection than it ever was before; and the
stories of our Bible are the same as those of all other Bibles,
simply the effort of ignorant or imaginative men to account for the
origin and destiny of things of which they had no accurate
knowledge.  [One of the Simplest and most interesting explanations
of this latter point will be found in "The Childhood of Religions,"
by Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., where the Christian reader may be
surprised to find that the "ten-commandment" idea (with a number of
them which apply to general morals, as "Thou shalt not kill," etc.)
is not confined to our Bible, but is found also in the Buddhist
Bible in the same form; that the "golden rule" was given by
Confucius 500 years before Christ; and that Christianity, when
taken as it should be with the other great religions and examined
in the same way, presents no problem, no claim, and no proofs which
are not found in equal strength in one or more of the other forms
of faith. In the matters of morality, miracles, and power to
attract and "comfort" multitudes of people, it ranks neither first
nor last. It is simply one of several, and in no essential matter
is it different from them.]

     St. Paul said, "If they [women] will learn anything, let them
ask their husbands at home;" and the colossal ignorance of most
women would seem to indicate that they have obeyed the command to
the letter. But fortunately for women the civilization of freedom
has outgrown St. Paul as it has the dictates of the Church, and one
by one the doors of information, and hence the doors to honest
labor, have been opened, and the possibility of living with dignity
and honor has replaced the forced degradation of the days when the
power of the Church enabled it to reduce women to the animal
existence it so long forced upon her.

     So long as the Church allowed woman but one avenue of support,
so long did it force her to use that single means of livelihood. So
long as it made her believe that she could bring to this world
nothing of value but her capacity to minister to the lower animal
wants of man, so long did it force upon her that single alternative
-- or starvation.

     So long as it is able to make multitudes of women believe
themselves of value for but one purpose, just that long will it
continue to insure the degradation of many of those women who are
helpless, or weak, or loving, or ignorant of the motives of those
in whose power they are. So long as it teaches woman that she can
repay her debt to the world in but one way, so long will it promote
commerce in vice and revenue in shame.

     Every man is taught that he can repay his debt to this world
in many ways. He has open to him many avenues of happiness, many
paths to honorable employment. If he fails in one there is still
hope. If he misses supreme happiness in marriage he has still left


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ambition, labor, study, fame; if the one failure overtakes him, no
matter how sad, he still can turn aside and find, if not joy, at
least occupation and rest.

     But the Church has always taught woman that there is but one
"sphere," one hope, one occupation, one life for her. If she fails
in that, what wonder that with broken hope comes broken virtue or
despair? Every woman who has fallen or lost her way has been
previously taught by the Church that She had and has but one
resource; that there is open to her in life but one path; that
whether that path be legally crooked or straight, she was created
for but one purpose; that man is to decide for her what that
purpose is; and that she must under no circumstances set her own
judgement up against his.

     The legitimate fruits of such an education are too horribly
apparent to need explanation. Every fallen woman is a perpetual
monument to the infamy of a religion and a social custom that
narrow her life to the possibilities of but one function, and
provide her no escape -- a system that trains her to depend wholly
on one physical characteristic of her being, and to neglect all
else.

     That system teaches her that her mind is to be of but slight
use to her; that her hands may not learn the cunning of a trade nor
her brain the bearings of a profession; that mentally she is
nothing; and that physically she is worse than nothing only in so
far as she may minister to one appetite. I hold that the most
legitimate outcome of such an education is to be found in the class
that makes merchandise of all that woman is taught that she
possesses that is of worth to herself or to this world. No system
could be more perfectly devised to accomplish this purpose.  [See
Lea's II Sacerdotal Celibacy.]

                            AS WIVES.

     We are told that women owe honorable marriage to Christianity:
[See Appendix I, 1-2.]  that the more beautiful and tender
relations of husband and wife find their root there; that
Christianity protects and elevates the mother as no other law or
religion ever has.

     Let us see.

     On this subject I find in Maine's "Ancient Law" these facts:

          "Although women had been objects of barter and sale,
     according to barbaric usages, between their male relatives,
     the later Roman [Pagan] law having assumed, on the theory of
     Natural Law, the equality of the sexes, control of the person
     of women was quite obsolete when Christianity was born. Her
     situation had become one of great personal liberty and
     proprietary independence, even when married, and the arbitrary
     power over her of her male relations, or her guardian, was
     reduced to a nullity, while the form of marriage conferred on
     the husband no superiority."



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     Thus as a daughter and as a wife had she grown to be honored
and recognized as an equal under Pagan rule.

          "But Christianity tended from the first to narrow this
     remarkable liberty. ... The latest Roman [Pagan] law, so far
     as touched by the constitutions of the Christian emperors,
     bears marks of reaction against these great liberal
     doctrines." -- Maine.

     And again began the sale of women. Christianity held her as
unclean and in all respects inferior; and. "during the era which
begins modern history the woman of dominant races are seen
everywhere under various forms of archaic guardianship, and the
husband pays a money price to her male relations for her. The
prevalent state of religious sentiment may explain why it is that
modern jurisprudence has absorbed among its rudiments much more
than usual of those rules [archaic] concerning the position of
women which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization." --
Ibid.

     Thus it will be seen that from the first, and extending down
to the present, the Church did all she could to cast woman back
into the night of the race from which in a great measure she had
been rescued through the ages when Natural Law and not "revelation"
was the guide of man. The laws which the Church found liberal and
just toward women it discarded, and it searched back in the ages of
night for such as it saw fit to re-enact for her. Of this Maine
says: "The husband now draws to himself the power which formerly
belonged to his wife's male relatives, the only difference being
that he no longer pays anything for the privilege."

     As Christians grew economical wives came cheaper than
formerly, and it became a dogma that wives were not worth much
anyhow, and then, too, it enabled persons of limited means to have
more of them. Of a somewhat later date Maine says: "At this point
heavy disabilities begin to be imposed upon wives."

     That was to make marriage honorable and attractive, no doubt,
and, says Maine: "It was very long before the subordination
entailed on women by marriage was sensibly diminished." And what
diminution it received came from men who fought against Church law.
[See Lecky, Maine, Lea, Milman, Christian, Blackstone, Morley, and
others for ample proof of this fact.]

     It was only the crumbs of liberty, honor, and justice extorted
by men who fought the Church on behalf of wives, that lightened
their most oppressive burdens. It was true then, and it is true
to-day, that women owe what justice and freedom and power they
possess to the fact that the best and clearest-headed men are more
honorable than our religion, and that they have invited Moses and
St. Paul to take a back seat. Moses has complied, and St. Paul is
half-way down the aisle.

     Some of the clergy now explain that although Paul may have
written certain things inimical to women, he did not mean them. so
it is all right. Such passages as 1 Cor. xi. 3-9; xiv. 34-35; and
Eph, v, 22-24, are now explained to be intended in a purely


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Pickwickian sense; and a Rev. Mr. Boyd, of St. Louis, has even gone
so far as to produce the doughty apostle before a woman-suffrage
society, as on their side of that argument. This second conversion
of St. Paul impresses one as even more remarkable than his first.
It took an "angel of God" to show him the error of his ways in
Ephesus, but one little Baptist preacher did it this time -- all by
himself. Truly St. Paul is getting easier to deal with than he use
to be.

     But to resume, Maine, in tracing the amalgamation of the later
Roman (pagan) law with the archaic laws of a lower civilization
(the result of which was Christian law), shows that the Church,
while it chose the Roman laws, which had arrived at so high a
state, for others, retained for women, and particularly for wives,
the least favorable of the Roman, eked out with the archaic Patria
Potestas and the more degrading provisions of the earlier
civilizations. Maine reluctantly says that the jurisconsult of the
day contended for butter laws for wives, but that the Church
prevailed in most instances, and established the more oppressive
ones.

     With certain of these laws -- the worst ones -- I cannot deal
here for obvious reasons; but a few of them I may be permitted to
give without offence to the modesty of any one.

     Blackstone says "By marriage the husband and wife are one
person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the
woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated
and consolidated into that of the husband. The husband becomes her
baron or lord -- she his servant. Upon this principle of the union
of person in husband and wife depend almost all the legal rights,
duties, and disabilities they acquire by marriage."

     That is to say the husband acquires all the rights, and the
wife all the disabilities; and the Church wishing to be fair has
made the latter as many as possible.

     "And therefore," continues Blackstone, "it is also generally
true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single,
are voided by the intermarriage." The working of this principle has
been so often illustrated as to render comment unnecessary. A wife
retains no rights which her husband is bound to respect, no matter
how solemn the compact before marriage, nor what her belief in its
strength might have been.

     Fortunately for women, happily for wives, men are more decent
than their religion; and the law of custom and public opinion has
largely outgrown this enactment of the Church, made when she had
the power to thus degrade women and brutalize men.

     "If the wife be injured in her person or her property she can
briny no action for redress without her husband's concurrence and
in his name," and on the basis of loss of her services to him as a
servant. "But in criminal prosecutions, it is true, the wife may be
indicted and punished separately."  [Blackstone.]




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     In the case of punishment the Church was entirely willing to
give the devil his due. It had no ambition to deprive women of any
indictments and punishments that were to be had. In this case,
although the husband and wife were one, she was that one. Where
privileges or property-rights were to be considered, he was the
"one." Such grand reversible doctrines were always on tap with the
clergy, and their barrel was always full. Truly, wives do owe much
to the Church.

     Some of the provisions of these laws have, of late years, been
modified by the efforts of men who were pronounced "infidels,
destroyers of the Bible, the home, and the dignity of women," aided
by women whom the orthodox deride as "strong-minded, ill-balanced,
coarse, impious," etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. A strong
mind, whether in man or woman, has always been to the clergy as a
red rag to a bull.

     "A woman may make a will, with the assent of her husband, by
way of appointment of her personal property. She cannot even with
his consent devise lands. ... Although our law in general considers
a man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances where
she is considered separately as his inferior,"  [Ibid.]  and for
that trip only.

     As I remarked before when it comes to penalties she is welcome
to the whole lot.

     "She may not make a deed."

     "A man may administer moderate correction to his wife."

     "These are the chief legal effects of marriage. Even the
disabilities of the wife," Blackstone naively remarks, "are for the
most part intended for her protection; so great a favorite is the
female sex of the laws of England!"

     I should think that if this latter point were not quite clear
to a woman, "moderate correction" might convince her that she was
quite an unreasonable favorite -- beyond her most eager desires.
Where the Pagan law recognized her as the equal of her husband, the
Church discarded that law, and based the Canon Law upon an archaic
invention.

     Where Maine speaks of the later growth of Pagan law and of
Christian influence upon it, he says: "But the chapter of law
relating to married women was for the most part read by the light,
not of Roman [or Pagan] but of Canon [or Church] Law, which in no
one particular departs so widely from the [improved] spirit of the
secular jurisprudence as in the view it takes of the relations
created by marriage. This was in part inevitable, since no society
which possesses any tincture of Christian institutions is likely to
restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by
the middle Roman law."

     Women who support the clergy with one hand, and hold out the
other for the ballot; who one day express indignation at the
refusal to them of human recognition, and the next day intone the
creeds, will have to learn that there is nothing which has so

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successfully stood, and still so powerfully stands, in the way of
the individual liberty, human rights, and dignity of wives, as the
Church which they support.

     Blackstone says: "In times of popery a great variety of
impediments to marriage were made, which impediments might,
however, be bought off with money."

     You could, for instance, bay a more distant relationship to
your future wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your
inamorata were your first cousin, you could remove her several
degrees with five hundred dollars, and make her no relation at all
for a little more. Such little sleight-of-hand performances are as
nothing to a well-trained clergyman. Slip a check into one hand,
and a request to marry your aunt into the other, let a clergyman
shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and when one comes out
gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride not even related to
her own father, and not more than third cousin to herself.

     Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was
because of the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the
more unjust and binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all
they could to create and intensify by law the incapacity with which
they asserted was imposed by God, Maine says: "But the proprietary
disabilities of married females stand on quite a different basis
from personal incapacity, and it is by the tendency of their
doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former, that the
expositors of the Canon Law have deeply injured civilization."

     He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle between
secular principles in favor of justice for wives, and
ecclesiastical principles against it, "but the Canon Law nearly
everywhere prevailed. The systems which are least indulgent to
married women are invariably those which have followed the Canon
Law exclusively. ... It enforced the complete legal subjection of
wives."

     Lecky says Fierce invectives against the sex form a
conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Fathers.
Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all
human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is
a woman. ... Women were even forbidden, in the sixth century, on
account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their
naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually
maintained. This teaching in part determined the principles of
legislation concerning the sex.  [See Appendix J.]  The Pagan laws
during the empire had been continually repealing the old
disabilities of women, and the legislative movement in their favor
continued with unabated force from Constantine to Justinian, and
appeared also in some of the early laws of the barbarians. But in
the whole feudal [Christian] legislation women were placed in a
much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire."

     And he adds that the French revolutionists (the infidel party)
established better laws for women, "and initiated a great
reformation of both law and opinion, which sooner or later must
traverse the world." And these reformations, being in Christendom


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will be calmly claimed in the future, as in the present, as due to
the beneficent influence of the Church. The Church always belongs
to the conservative party, but after a good thing is established in
spite of her, she says: "Just see what I have done! 'See what a
good boy am I!'"

     Not many years ago a few great-souled men who were, "heretics"
got a glimpse of a principle which has electrified the world. They
said that individual liberty is a universal right; they maintained
that humanity is a unit, with interests and aims indivisible, and
that liberty to use to the utmost advantage all natural abilities
cannot be denied one-half of the race without crippling both. A few
even went so far as to suggest that the assumption of the
inferiority of women, and the imposition of disabilities upon them,
under the claim of divine authority, is the greatest crime in the
great calendar of crime for which the Church has yet to render a
reckoning to humanity.

     To one who reads the history of Canon Law, it is not strange
that Christian Judges still decide that women are "incompetent to
practice law," and that they should not be allowed to study it. A
woman well versed in the history of ancient and modern law might
easily be an uncomfortable advocate for such a judge to face. He
would probably feel the need of an umbrella.

     It is not strange that Columbia College, with its corps of
clergymen, "fails to see the propriety" of opening its doors to
women. The few clergymen who have for some little time past taken
the side of fair-play in this and like matters have simply deserted
their colors and come over to the side they are worldly-wise enough
to see is to be the side of the future. When it comes to diplomacy
the Church is always on deck in time to gather in the spoils; but
she stays safely below during the engagement, and simply holds back
and anchors firm until she sees which way it is likely to end.

     The moment there is an understanding on the part of women of
what they owe to Church Law, that moment will end educational
clerical monopolists, such as the champion anchor of Columbia, be
compelled to earn an honest living in some honest business
pertaining to this world. It will be a great day for women when
they refuse to longer support these pretenders to divine knowledge,
who are willing, at so much a head, to tell what they do not know
at the expense of the pale, tired needle-woman, who is in want of
almost every comfort that money can buy in this world, together
with the surplus gold of the fashionable devotees who minister to
the vanity of the clergy, and give to the coffers of the Church
that which would save thousands of young girls from degradation and
crime, and put the roses of health on the cheek of innocence.

     Every dollar that is paid to support the Church is paid to
degrade a woman. Every collection that is made to spread
"revelation" is used to suppress enlightenment and retard
civilization. Every dollar that is invested in "another world" is
a dollar diverted from useful purposes in this. Every hour that is
spent mooning about "heaven" is that much time taken from needed
labor here.



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     If our energies were wanted in another world we should most
likely be in another world. Since we are in this one it is a pretty
strong hint that we are expected to attend to business right here.
We can't do justice to two worlds at the same time: and since we
are assured that we shall have the whole of eternity to arrange
matters in the next one, it leaves very little time by comparison
to devote to our duties in this.

     There we are to have nothing to do but sing and be happy --
twang a harp and smile.

     Here we have pain to alleviate, ignorance to dispel, innocence
to protect, disease to master, and crime to restrain and prevent.
Here we have the helpless to shield and guard and protect. Here we
have homes to make happy, the hearts of husbands and wives to make
glad, the light of love and trust to kindle in the eyes of
children. Here is old age to cheer and console. Here are orphans to
educate and protect, widows to comfort, and oppression to uproot.

     There -- nothing to do but look after yourself and manage your
harp; nobody to help -- all will be perfect; nothing to learn --
all will be wise; no hearts to cheer -- all will be happy. All that
a mother will have to do if she gets a little tired practicing on
her lyre and feels gloomy will be to just take a good look over the
wall, and photograph on her eyes the picture of her husband and
children freshly dipped in oil and put on the griddle, and she will
come back to business perfectly satisfied, take up her song where
she left off, and praise the Lamb for his infinite mercy. All
eternity to learn how to fly round in a robe and keep time with the
orchestra! Why a deaf man could learn to do that in fifty or sixty
years, and then have all the rest of the time to spare.

     We are here such a little while, there is so much to learn,
there is so much to do, there is so much to undo, that no man can
afford to waste his time on an infinite future of time, space, and
leisure. Men cannot afford to lose your best energies. "God" can
get on very well without them. Time is short, and needs are
pressing; and this thing you know -- you can keep busy doing good
right here. If there is a hereafter, could there be a better
preparation for it than that?

                       NOT WOMAN'S FRIEND.

     After all that has preceded this page I need hardly do more
with this count of the last claim of "Theological Fiction" than
simply say, if the Bible is woman's best friend, then the clergy,
without authority and in violation of the precepts of their own
guide, have been her worst enemy, either through malice or
ignorance; in either of which cases they are and have always been
unfit to dictate, to lead opinion, or to receive a following as
reliable guides for this world or the next.

     If they have been so ignorant or so malicious for nearly
nineteen hundred years as to thus systematically misconstrue their
own authority -- their own "revelation" -- to the constant
disadvantage of women (and the consequent enfeeblement of the
race), surely they can claim no respect for their opinions and no


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confidence in their divine calling.  [See Appendix K.]  In trying
to shield the Bible the clergy simply convict themselves.  [See
Appendix L.]

     But I incline to the opinion that in the main this view of the
case is unfair to the clergy, and that they have followed, in
spirit if not literally, the dictates of the Bible as a whole. It
is undoubtedly true that the Bible throughout holds woman as an
inferior in both mental and moral characteristics; and upon this
understanding of it the Fathers built the Church and crystallized
the laws.

     The Fathers of the Church were as a rule a bad lot themselves.
All contemporaneous history and all internal evidence prove this
fact: and when we remember that the "Prophets" were almost to a man
polygamists; that their belief and practices in this regard were of
the order and type of Mormondom to-day, and for the same reasons;
that they were slave-holders and slave-stealers; that they believed
in a God of infinite cruelty and revenge -- of arbitrary will and
reasonless barbarity; and that they were licentious and brutal
beyond description;  [See Appendix M.]  it will be easy to
understand the position which such men -- with these beliefs,
practices, mentality, and moral degradation -- would accord to
women. Every Bible of every people every history of every race
showing like civilization, will show you like results.

     In the New Testament we find an effort to readjust old clothes
to a new body, some of whose members had grown bettor and some
worse in dogma and belief. Where women are especially dealt with we
find them commanded to "be under obedience," and always to subject
their wills to the ways and wills of men; while the general tone
and treatment are always based upon the assumption that she is an
inferior, a secondary creation, and a subject class.  [See Appendix
N.]

     That this is the understanding of the Bible always recognized
by the Church (and to-day questioned by only a very small minority
who are shrewd enough to see the necessity of revamping it to fit
the new public morality and civilization), all history attests; but
the vehemence with which the doctrine has been asserted the
foregoing pages can only faintly indicate.  [See Appendix O.]

     But certainly, if for thousands of years the clergy have, as
a body, misconstrued or misunderstood the spirit of their own book
(to which they have always claims to possess the only key), they
should not blame those who to-day take issue with them upon their
information, their dictates, their bases of morality, or their
interpretations of the rights of humanity.

     If, as they claim to-day, the Bible is the friend of women and
no respecter of persons, a conclusion which it took them hundreds
of years to reach, it has taken them too long to discover the fact
for their guidance to be either a desirable or a safe one for
humanity; and the millions of women they have degraded and
oppressed in the past are certainly not an argument in favor of
their infallibility now.  [See Appendix P.]



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     Let them give way to men who, claiming no right to divine
authority or superhuman wisdom, speak in the interest of all
humanity the best they know (always acknowledged to be subject to
revision for the better); who are not bound back and retarded by
the outgrown toggery of the Jewish civilization of David and his
time or the Christian dictatorship of Paul. [See Appendix Q.]
Acknowledging themselves as false and oppressive interpreters of
divine law for centuries past is but a poor recommendation of their
ability or integrity for the future.

     Whichever horn of the dilemma they accept, there is but one
horrible course for the clergy to pursue, and that is to resign in
favor of those who have all along been on the right track, without
a pretence of divine guidance; who in despite of faith and fagot
have made progress possible.

                             MORALS.

     After my lecture on Men, Women, and Gods, in Chicago, I was
asked how it would be possible to train children to be good without
a belief in the divinity of the Bible; how they could be made to
know it is wrong to lie and steal and kill.

     The belief that the Bible is the originator of these and like
moral ideas, or that Christ was their first teacher, is far from
the truth; and it is only another evidence of the duplicity or
ignorance of the Church that such a belief obtains or that such a
falsehood is systematically taught.

     It is too easily forgotten that morals are universal, that
Christianity is local, Practical moral ideas grow up very early,
and develop with the development of a race. They are the response
to the needs of a people, and when formulated have in several cases
taken the shape of "commandments" from some unseen power. These
necessary practical laws are by degrees attached to those of
imaginary value, and all alike are held in esteem as of equal moral
worth. By this means a fictitious standard of right and wrong
becomes established, and a weakening of confidence in the valueless
part results in damage to that portion which was originally the
result of wise and necessary legislation.  ["Durable morality had
been associated with a transitory religious faith. The faith fell
into intellectual discredit, and sexual morality shared its decline
for a short season. This must always be the natural consequence of
building sound ethics on the shifting sands and rotting foundations
of theology. It is one of those enormous drawbacks that people
seldom take into account when they are enumerating the blessings of
superstition." -- Morley's "Diderot," p. 71.]

     When children (of whatever age) do this or that "because God
said so," the precepts taught on this basis, even though they are
good, will have no hold upon the man who discovers that their
origin was purely human. It is a dangerous experiment and depends
wholly upon ignorance for its success. A firm basis of reason in
this world is the only solid foundation of moral training.





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     My Chicago questioner proceeded upon the hypothesis that what
of valuable morals are contained in the Bible were a "revelation"
to one people, and that their value was dependent upon this origin.
For the benefit of those who have been similarly imposed upon, I
will cite a few facts in as short space as possible.

     Brahmanism, with its two hundred millions of believers, and
its Rig-Veda (Bible) composed two thousand four hundred years
before Christ, has its rigid code of morals; its theory of
creation; its teachings about sin its revelations its belief in the
ability of the gods to forgive;  [Professor Max Muller says that
"the consciousness of sin is a leading feature in the religion of
the Veda, so is likewise the belief that the gods are able to take
away from man the heavy burden of his sins."  its belief that its
bible came from God; and its devotees who believe that an infinite
God is pleased with the toys of worship, praise, and adulation of
man. It has its prayers and hymns, its offerings and sacrifices.
Corresponding with our "Trinity" idea the Brahmin has his three
great gods; and in place of our "angels" he has his infinite number
of little ones.  [See Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., "Childhood of
Religions."]

     Next, Zoroastrianism, certainly twelve hundred years older
than Christ, its legends (quite as authentic as our own) of
miracles performed by its founder and his followers; its Zend-
Avesta (Bible); its "Supreme Spirit;" its belief in gods and demons
who interfere with affairs in this world and who are ever at war
with each other; its sacred fires; its Lord; its praise; and its
pretence to direct communication in the past with spirits and with
gods who gave their Prophet "Commandments."  ["In the Gathas or
oldest part of the Zend-Avesta, which contains the leading
doctrines of Zoroaster, he asks Ormuzd [God] for truth and
guidance, and desires to know what he shall do. He is told to be
pure in thought, word and deed; to be temperate, chaste, and
truthful; to offer prayer to Ormuzd and the powers that fight with
him; to destroy all hurtful things; and to do all that will
increase the well-being of mankind. Men were not to cringe before
the powers of darkness as slaves crouch before a tyrant, they were
to meet them upstanding, and confound them by unending opposition
and the power of a holy life. 'Oh men if you cling to these
commandments which Mazda has given, which are a torment to the
wicked and a blessing to the righteous, then there will be victory
through them.'" -- Max Muller.]  It lacks none of the paraphernalia
of a "divine institution" ready for business, and we are unable to
discount it in either loaves or fishes. It also has its heaven and
hell;  ["In this old faith there was a belief in two abodes for the
departed: heaven, the 'house of the abgels' hymns,' and hell, where
the wicked were sent. Between the two there was a bridge." --
Ibid.]  its Messiah or Prophet; its arch fiend or devil; its rites
and ceremonies.

     Professor Max Muller remarks: "There were periods in the
history of the world when the worship of Ormuzd threatened to rise
triumphant on the ruins of the temples of all other gods. If the
battles of Marathon and Salamis had been lost and Greece had
succumbed to Persia, the state religion of the empire of Cyrus,
which was the worship of Ormuzd, might have become the religion of
the whole civilized world."

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     in which case my Chicago friend would have asked, "If you
destroy a belief in Ormuzd, and that he gave the only supernatural
moral law to Zoroaster, how will children ever be taught what is
right and what is wrong, and how can they ever know that it is not
right to lie and kill and steal?"

     "Their creed is of the simplest kind; it is to fear God, to
live a life of pure thoughts, pure words, pure deeds, and to die in
the hope of a world to come. It is the creed of those who have
lived nearest to God and served him faithfullest in every age, and
wherever they dwell who accept it and practice it, they bear
witness to that which makes them children of God and brethren of
the prophets, among whom Zoroaster was not the least. The Jews were
carried away as captives to Babylon some 600 years before Christ,
and during the seventy years of their exile there, they came into
contact with the Persian religion and derived from it ideas about
the immortality of the soul, which their own religion did not
contain. They also borrowed from it their belief in a multitude of
angels, and in Satan as the ruler over evil spirals." [So you see
that even our devil is a borrowed one, and it now seems to be about
time to return him with thanks.] "The case with which man believes
in unearthly powers working for his hurt prepares a people to admit
into its creed the doctrine of evil spirits, and although it is
certain that the Jews had no belief in such spirits before their
captivity in Babylon, they spoke of Satan (which means an
adversary) as a messenger sent from God to watch the deeds of man
and accuse them to Him for their wrong-doing. Satan thus becoming
by degrees an object of dread, upon whom all the evil which befell
man was charged, the maids of the Jews were ripe for accepting the
Persian doctrine of Ahriman with his legions of devils. Ahriman
became the Jewish Satan, a belief in whom formed part of early
Christian doctrine, and is now but slowly dying out. What fearful
ills it has caused, history has many a page to tell. The doctrine
that Satan, once an angel of light, had been cast from heaven for
rebellion against God, and had ever since played havoc among
mankind, gave rise to the belief that he and his demons could
possess the souls of men and animals at pleasure. Hence grew the
belief in wizards and witches, under which millions of creatures,
both young and old, were cruelly tortured and put to death. We turn
over the smeared pages of this history in haste, thankful that from
such a nightmare the world has wakened."  [Clodd, F.R.A.S.]

     The world has awakened, but the Church still snores on,
confident and happy in the belief that she has a devil all her own,
and that he is attending strictly to business.

     Next we have Buddhism, which numbers more followers than any
other faith. It is five hundred years older than Christianity. It
has its prophet or Messiah who was exposed to a tempter,
["Afterward the tempter sent his three daughters, one a winning
girl, one a blooming virgin, and one a middle-aged beauty, to
allure him, but they could not. Buddha was proof against all the
demon's arts, and his only trouble was whether it were well or not
to preach his doctrines to men. Feeling how hard to gain was that
which he had gained, and how enslaved men were by their passions so
that they might neither listen to him nor understand him, he had
well-nigh resolved to be silent, but, at the last, deep compassion


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for all beings made him resolve to tell his secret to mankind, that
they too might be free, and he thus became the founder of the most
popular religion of ancient or modern times. The spot where Buddha
obtained his knowledge became one of the most sacred places in
India." -- Clodd.]  and overcame all evil; its fastings and
prayers; its miracles and its visions. Of Buddha's teachings Prof.
Max Muller tells us that he used to say, "Nothing on earth is
stable, nothing is real. Life is as transitory as a spark of fire,
or the sound of a lyre. There must be some supreme intelligence
where we could find rest. If I attained it I could bring light to
men. If I were free myself I could deliver the world."

     Buddha, like Christ, wrote nothing, and the doctrines of the
new religion were fixed and written by his disciples after his
death. Councils were held afterwards to correct errors and send out
missionaries. You will see, therefore, that even "revisions" are
not a product of Christianity, and that "revelations" have always
been subject to reform to fit the times.  ["Two other councils were
afterward held for the correction of errors that had crept into the
faith, and for sending missionaries into other lands. The last of
these councils is said to have been held 251 years before Christ,
so that long before Christianity was founded we have this great
religion with its sacred traditions of Buddha's words, its councils
and its missions, besides, as we shall presently see, many things
strangely like the rites of the Roman Catholic Church." -- Clodd.]

     I will here give a few of the wise or kind or moral commands
of Buddha. If the first were followed in Christian countries we
should be a more moral and a less superstitious people than we are
to-day.

          "Buddha said: 'The succoring of mother and father, the
     cherishing of child and wife, and the following of a lawful
     calling, this is the greatest blessing.'

          " 'The giving alms, a religious life, aid rendered to
     relations, blameless acts, this, is the greatest blessing.'

          " 'The abstaining from sins and the avoiding them, the
     eschewing of intoxicating drink, diligence in good deeds,
     reverence and humility, contentment and gratefulness, this is
     the greatest blessing.'

          " 'Those who having done these things, become invincible
     on all sides, attain happiness on all sides. This is the
     greatest blessing.'

          " 'He who lives a hundred years, vicious and
     unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous
     and reflecting.'

          " 'Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart,
     it will not come near unto me. Even by the falling of water-
     drops a water-pot is filled; the fool becomes full of evil if
     he gathers it little by little.'




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                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

          " 'Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one's
     mind, that is the teaching of the Awakened.' (This is one of
     the most solemn verses among the Buddhists).

          " 'Lot us live happily then, not hating those who hate us
     Let us dwell free from hatred among men who hate!'

          "After these doctrines there follow ten commandments, of
     which the first five apply to all people, and the rest chiefly
     to such as set themselves apart for a religious life. They
     are: not to kill; not to steal; not to commit adultery; not to
     lie; not to get drunk; to abstain from late meals; from public
     amusements; from expensive dress; from large beds; and to
     accept neither gold nor silver."  [Clodd.]

          Keep in mind that Buddhism lived more than 500 years
before Christ.

     "The success of Buddhism was in this: It was a protest against
the powers of the priests; it to a large degree broke down caste by
declaring that all men are equal, and by allowing any one desiring
to live a holy life to become a priest. It abolished sacrifices;
made it the duty of all men to honor their parents and care for
their children, to be kind to the sick and poor and sorrowing, and
to forgive their enemies and return good for evil; it spread a
spirit of charity abroad which encompassed the lowest life as well
as the highest."  [Ibid.]

     With these before him will a Christian suppose that morals are
dependent upon our Bible?

     Of Confucianism, believed by millions to be essential to their
salvation, and one of the three state religions of China, Clodd
says: "On the soil of this great country there is crowded nearly
half the human race, the most orderly people on the globe. This man
Confucius), who was reviled in life, but whose influence sways the
hundreds of millions of China, was born 551 years before Christ.
His nature was so beautifully simple and sincere that he would not
pretend to knowledge of that which he felt was beyond human reach
and thought,"

     What an earthquake there would be if our clergymen where only
to become inoculated with that sort of simple sincerity! His
disciples and followers did that for him as has been done in most
other cases.

     "The sacred books of China are called the Kings, and are five
in number, containing treatises on morals, books of rites, poems,
and history. They are of great age, perhaps as old as the earliest
hymns of the Rig-Veda, and are free from any impure thoughts.
[Which is much more than can be said of our own sacred books, which
are not so old.] In the Book of Poetry are three hundred pieces,
but the design of them all may be embraced in that one sentence,
'Have no depraved thoughts.'





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     "At the time when Confucius lived, China was divided into a
number of petty kingdoms whose rulers were ever quarrelling, and
although he became engaged in various public situations of trust,
the disorder of the State at last caused him to resign them, and he
retired to another part of the country. He then continued the life
of a public teacher, instructing men in the simple moral truths by
which he sought to govern his own life. The purity of that life,
and the example of veneration for the old laws which he set,
gathered round him many grave and thoughtful men, who worked with
him for the common good."

     Confucius said among other wise and moral things: "Coarse rice
for food, water to drink, the bended arm for a pillow -- happiness
may be enjoyed even with these; but without virtue, both riches and
honor seem to me like the passing cloud. ... Our passions shut up
the door of our souls against God."

     What we are pleased to call "the golden rule," and to look
upon as purely Christian, he gave in these words 500 years before
Christ was born: "Tsze-kung said, 'What I do not wish men to do to
me, I also wish not to do to men.' The Master said, 'Yon have not
attained to that.'

     "Such is the power of words, that those uttered by this
intensely earnest man, whose work was ended only by death, have
kept alive throughout the vast empire of China a reverence for the
past and a sense of duty to the present which have made the Chinese
the most orderly and moral people in the world."

     So much for the great religions that are older than our own
and could not have borrowed from us. So much for the moral
sentiments of the peoples who developed them, and who live and die
happy with them today. It leaves only a small part of this globe
and a comparatively small number of its inhabitants who believe in
and are guided by the Bible, or by the morality which has grown
side-by-side with it.

     But there is one other great religion which is of interest to
us:  [See Appendix R.]

     "And the value of Islam, the youngest of the great religions,
is that we are able to see how its first simple form became
overlaid with legend and foolish superstition, and thus learn how,
in like manner, myth and fable have grown around more ancient
religions (and around our own),

     "For example although Mohammed came into the world like other
children, wonderful things are said to have taken place at his
birth.

     "He never claimed to be a perfect man; he did not pretend to
foretell events or to work miracles.

     "In spite of all this, his followers said of him, while he was
yet living, that he worked wonders, and they believed the golden
vision, hinted at in Koran, to have been a real event, although
Mohammed said over and over again that it was but a dream.


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     "This religion is the guide in life and the support in death
of one hundred and fifty millions of our fellow creatures; like
Christianity, it has its missionaries scattered over the globe, and
offers itself as a faith needed by all men.

     "The, success of Islam was great. Not one hundred years after
the death of the prophet, it had converted half the then known
world, and its green flag waved from China to Spain. Christianity
gave way before it, and has never regained some of the ground then
lost, while at this day we see Islam making marked progress in
Africa and elsewhere. Travelers tell us that the gain is great when
a tribe casts away its idols and embraces Islam. Filth and
drunkenness flee away, and the state of the people is bettered in
a high degree."

     "Muslims have not treated Christ as we have treated Mohammed,
for the devout among them never utter his name without adding the
touching words, 'on whom be peace.'"

     "Mohammed counseled men to live a good life, and to strive
after the mercy of God by fasting, charity, and prayer, which he
called 'the, key of paradise.'"

     He abolished the frightful practice of killing female
children, and made the family tie more respected."

     He said: "A man's true wealth hereafter is the good he has
done in this world to his fellow-men. When he dies, people will
ask, What property has he left behind him? But the angels will ask,
What good deeds has he sent before him?" [Which is a doctrine
wholesome and just, so for as it applies to this world, and
inculcates the right sort of morals.]

     "Mohammed commanded his followers to make no image of any
living thing, to show mercy to the weak and orphaned, and kindness
to brutes; to abstain from gambling, and the use of strong drink.

     "The great truth which he strove to make real to them was that
God is one, that, as the Koran says, 'they surely are infidels who
say that God is the third of three, for there is no God but one
God.'"

     He was the great original Unitarian.

     "I should add that the wars of Islam did not leave waste and
ruin in their path, but that the Arabs, when they came to Europe,
alone held aloft the light of learning, and in the once famous
schools of Spain, taught 'philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and the
golden art of song.'"

     We cannot speak so well of the "holy wars" of Christianity.

     In speaking of the men who wrote our Bible, Clodd says:

     "Nor is it easy to find in what they have said truths which in
one form or another, have not been stated by the writers of some of
the sacred books into which we have dipped."


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     I have quoted more fully than had been my intention simply to
show the egotistic ignorance of the Christian's claim to possess a
religion or a Bible which differs, in any material regard, from
several others which are older, and to indicate that moral ideas,
precepts, and practices are the property of no special people but
are the inevitable result of continued life itself, and the
evolution of civilizations however different in outward form and
expression. They are the necessary results of human companionship
and necessities, and not the fruits of any religion or the
"revelation" from on high to any people. As William Kingdom
Clifford, F.R.S., in his work on the "Scientific Basis of Morales,"
very justly says:

     "There is more than one moral sense, and what I feel to be
right another man may feel to be wrong.

     In just the same way our question about the best conscience
will resolve itself into a question about the purpose or function
of the conscience -- why we have got it, and what it is good for.

     "Now to my mind the simplest and clearest and most profound
philosophy that was ever written upon this subject is to be found
in the 2d and 3d chapters of Mr. Darwin's 'Descent of Man.' In
these chapters it appears that just as most physical
characteristics of organisms have been evolved and preserved
because they were useful to the individual in the struggle for
existence against other individuals and other species, so this
particular feeling has been evolved and preserved because it is
useful to the tribe or Community in the struggle for existence
against other tribes, and against the environment as a whole. The
function of conscience is the preservation of the tribe as a tribe.
And we shall rightly train our consciences if we learn to approve
these actions which tend to the advantage of the community.

     The virtue of purity, for example, attains in this way a
fairly exact definition: purity in a man is that course of conduct
which makes him to be a good husband and father, in a woman that
which makes her to be a good wife and mother, or which helps other
people so to prepare and keep themselves. It is easy to see how
many false ideas and pernicious precepts are swept away by even so
simple a definition as that.

     In urging the necessity of a more substantial basis of morals
than one built upon a theory of arbitrary dictation, he says: "The
worship of a deity who is represented as unfair or unfriendly to
any portion of the community is a wrong thing, however great may be
the threats and promises by which it is commended. And still worse,
the reference of right and wrong to his arbitrary will as a
standard, the diversion of the allegiance of the moral sense from
the community to him, is the most insidious and fatal of social
diseases. ... If I let myself believe anything on insufficient
evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it
may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it
in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong toward
man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not




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merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great
enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of
testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back
into savagery.

     "The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined
to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent
support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I
believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of
what is told to me. Men speak the truth to one another when each
reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other's mind; but how
shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am
careless about it, when I believe things because I want to believe
them, and because they are comforting and pleasant? Will he not
learn to cry, 'Peace,' to me, when there is no peace? By such a
course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood
and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to the me,
in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and daring lies; but it
matters much to Man that I have made my neighbors ready to deceive.
The credulous man is father to the liar. ...

     "We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and
support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they
lead to; and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is
great and wide. But a greater and wider evil arises when the
credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of
believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent. ...

     "The fact that believers have found joy and peace in believing
gives us the right to say that the doctrine is a comfortable
doctrine, and pleasant to the soul; but it does not give us the
right to say that it is true. ...

     "And the question which our conscience is always asking about
that which we are tempted to believe is not, 'is it comfortable and
pleasant?' but, 'Is it true?'"

     The sooner moral actions and the necessity of clean, helpful,
and charitable living are put upon a basis more solid and permanent
than theology the better will it be for civilization; and if this
chapter shall, by its light style, attract the attention of those
who are too busy, or are disinclined for any reason whatsoever, to
collect from more profound works the facts here given, I shall be
satisfied with the result, because I shall have done something
toward the triumph of fact over fiction.

     We cannot repeat too often nor emphasize too strongly this one
simple fact, that we need all our energy and time to make this
world fit to live in; to make homes where mothers are happy and
children are glad -- homes where fathers hasten when their work is
done, and are welcomed with a shout of joy.

          The toilers who wend up the hillside,
               The toilers below in the mill
          Alike are the victims of priestcraft,
               They "do but the Master's will."



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          The Master's will! ah the cunning,
               The bitterly cruel device,
          To wring from the lowly and burdened
               Submission at any price!

          Submission to tyrants in Russia --
               Submission to tyrants in Rome;
          The throne and the altar have ever
               Combined to despoil the home.

          But the home is the heaven to live for,
               And Love is the God sublime
          who paints in tints of glory,
               Upon the wings of Time

          This legend, grand and simple,
               And true as eternal Right --
          No Justice e'er came, from Jury,
               Whose verdict was based on might!

          As high above earth as is heaven;
               As high as the stars above
          The Church, the chapel, the altar;
               Is the home whose God is Love.

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX A.

     1.   "For a species increases or decreases in numbers, widens
or contracts its habitat, migrates or remains stationary, continues
an old mode of life or falls into a new one, under the combined
influence of its intrinsic nature and the environing actions,
inorganic and organic.

     "Beginning with the extrinsic factors, we see that from the
outset several kinds of them are variously operative. They need but
barely enumerating. We have climate, hot, cold, or temperate, moist
or dry, constant or variable. We have surface, much or little of
which is available, and the available part of which is fertile in
greater or less degree; and we have configuration of surface, as
uniform or multiform. ... On these sets of conditions, inorganic
and organic, characterizing the environment, primarily depends the
possibility of social evolution." -- Spencer, "Principles of
Sociology," Vol. 1, p. 10.

     2.   "These considerations clearly prove that of the two
Primary causes of civilization, the fertility of the soil is the
one which in the ancient world exercised most influence. But in
European civilization, the other great cause, that is to say,
climate, has been the most powerful.

     "Owing to circumstances which I shall presently state, the
only progress which is really effective depends, not upon the
bounty of nature, but upon the energy of man. Therefore it is, that
the civilization of Europe, which in its earliest stage, was
governed by climate, has shown a capacity of development unknown to
those civilizations which were originated by soil." -- Buckle,

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"History of Civilization,"' vol. 1, p. 36-37.  [I wish to state
here that I had never read the above from Buckle, nor had I seen
anywhere a statement so like my own, at the time mine was written.
I read this for the first time while reading the proofs of this
chapter, So much for what may appear plagiarism. -- H.H.G.]

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX B.

     1. "Napoleon himself was indifferent to Christianity, but he
saw that the clergy were friends of despotism." -- Buckle.

     2. "Thus it is that a careful survey of history will prove
that the Reformation made the first progress not in those countries
where the people were most enlightened, but in those countries
where, from political causes, the clergy were least able to
withstand the people." -- Buckle.

     3. "Christian civilization in the twentieth century of its
existence, degrades its women to labor fit only for beasts of the
field; harnessing them with dogs to do the most menial labors; it
drags them below even this, holding their womanhood up to sale,
putting both Church and State sanction upon their moral death;
which, in some places, as in the city of Berlin, so far recognizes
the sale of woman's bodies for the vilest purposes as part of the
Christian religion, that license for this life is refused until
they have partaken of the Sacrament; and demands of the '10,000
licensed women of the town' of the city of Hamburg, certificates
showing that they regularly attend church and also partake of the
sacrament." -- Gage.

     Even a lower depth than this is reached in England, France,
Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and nearly every country of
Europe, says the same writer, "a system of morality which declares
'the necessity' of woman's degradation, and annually sends tens of
thousands down to a death from which society grants no
resurrection." -- Gage.

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX C.

     1. "Sappho flourished B.C. 600, and a little later; and so
highly did Plato value, her intellectual, as well as her
imaginative endowments, that he assigned her the honors of sage as
well as poet; and familiarly entitled her the 'tenth muse.'" --
Buckle.

     2. "Wilkinson says among no ancient people had women such
influence and liberty as among the ancient Egyptians." Buckle.

     3. "The Americans have in the treatment of women fallen below,
not only their own democratic principles, but the practice of some
parts of the Old World." -- Harriet Martineau.

     4. "Mr. F. Newman denies that Christianity has improved the
position of women; and he observes that, 'with Paul, the sole

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reason for marriage is, that a man may, without sin, vent his
sensual desires. He teaches that, but for this object, it would be
better not to marry;' and he takes no notice of the social
pleasures of marriage. Newman says: 'In short, only in countries
where Germanic sentiment has taken root do we see marks of any
elevation of the female sex superior to that of Pagan antiquity.'"
-- Buckle.

     5. "Female voices are never heard in the Russian churches;
their place is supplied by boys; women do not yet stand high enough
in the estimation of the churches. ... to be permitted to sing the
praises of God in the presence of men." -- Kohl.

     6. "Christianity diminished the influence of women." --
Neander, "Hist. of the Church."

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX D.

     Within the reign of the present sovereign Mrs. Gage tells us
of a young girl being ordered by the Petty Sessions Bench back to
the "service" of a landlord, from whom she had run away because
such service meant the sacrifice of her honor. She refused to go
and was put in jail.

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX E.

     1. "Women were taught by the Church and State alike, that the
Feudal Lord or Seigneur had a right to them, not only against
themselves, but as against any claim of husband or father. The law
known as Marchetta, or Marquette, compelled newly-married women to
a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful
prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their
marriage, and from this custom, the oldest son of the serf was held
as the son of the lord, 'as perchance it was he who begat him' From
this nefarious degradation of woman, the custom of Borough-English
arose, in which the youngest son became the heir. ... France,
Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland, and all Christian countries
where feudalism existed, held to the enforcement of Marquette. The
lord deemed this right as fully his as he did the claim to half the
crops of the land, or to half the wool of the sheep. More than one
reign of terror arose in France from the enforcement of this law,
and the uprisings of the peasantry over Europe during the twelfth
century, and the fierce Jacquerie, or Peasant Wars, of the
fourteenth century in France owed their origin, among other causes,
to the enforcement of these claims by the lords upon the newly-
married wife. The edicts of Marly transplanted that claim to
America when Canada was under the control of France. To persons not
conversant with the history of feudalism, and of the Church for the
first fifteen hundred years of its existence, it will seem
impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of
Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been trained to
consider the worst forms of heathendom could have exist in
Christian Europe, upheld by both Church and State for more than a


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thousand five hundred years, will strike most people with
incredulity. Such, however, is the truth; we can but admit well-
attested facts of history, how severe a blow they strike our
preconceived beliefs.

     "Marquette was claimed by the Lords Spiritual,  ["In days to
come people will be slow to believe that the law among Christian
nations went beyond anything decreed concerning the olden slavery;
that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous outrage
that could ever wound man's heart. The Lords Spiritual (clergy) had
this right no less than the Lords Temporal. The parson, being a
lord, expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride, but was
willing to sell his right to the husband. The Courts of Berne
openly maintain that this right grew up naturally." -- Michelet,
"La Sorcerie," p. 62.]  as well as by the Lords Temporal. The
Church, indeed, was the bulwark of this base feudal claim. With the
power of penance and excommunication in its grasp, this demand
could neither have originated nor been sustained unless sanctioned
by the Church. ... These customs of feudalism were the customs of
Christianity during many centuries. (One of the Earls of Crawford,
known as the 'Earl Brant,' in the sixteenth century, was probably
among the last who openly claimed by right the literal translation
of droit de Jambage.) These infamous outrages upon woman were
enforced under Christian law by both Church and State.

     "The degradation of the husband at this infringement of the
lord spiritual and temporal upon his marital right, has been
pictured by many writers, but history has been quite silent upon
the despair and shame of the wife. No hope appeared for woman
anywhere. The Church. ... dragged her to the lowest depths, through
the vileness of its priestly customs. ... We who talk of the
burning of wives upon the funeral pyres of husbands in India, may
well turn our eyes to the records of Christian countries." --
Matilda Joslyn Gage in "Woman, Church, and State."

     2. From this point Mrs. Gage calls attention to the various
efforts to throw off this degrading custom. The women held meetings
at night, and among other things travestied the celebration of Mass
and other Church customs; but the end and aim of these meetings
being a protest and rebellion against Marquette, the clergy called
those who took part in them "witches;"  ["There are few
superstitions which have been so universal as a belief in
witchcraft. The severe theology of paganism despised the wretched
superstition, which has been greedily believed by millions of
Christians." -- Buckle.]  and then and there began the persecution
which the Church carried on against women under this disguise
(under Catholic and Protestant rule alike), which extended down to
the latter part of the last century, with its list of horrors and
indignities extending over all Christian countries and blossoming
in all their vigor in our own eastern States, upheld by Luther,
John Wesley, and Baxter, who unfortunately had not at that time
entered into the everlasting rest of the Saints. And, true to these
noble and wise leaders, the Churches which they founded are to-day
expressing the same sentiments (in principle) in regard to the
honor and dignity and position of woman. The arguments of the Rev.
Dr. Craven, the prosecutor in the famous Presbyterian trial of
1876, which are given by Mrs. Gage, together with numerous other


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similar ones, fully establish the fact that woman is to the Church
what she always was -- so far as secular law will permit. And
numerous instances (such as the Buckley exhibition at the last
Methodist Conference, in which he was sustained by the Conference)
prove that they have learned nothing since 1876.

     3. I wish I might copy here the sermon to women which the Rev.
Knox-Little, the well-known High-Church clergyman of England,
preached when in this country in 1880, in which he said, "There is
no crime which a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving
him. It is her duty to subject herself to him always, and no crime
that he can commit can justify her lack of obedience." Although a
little balder in statement than are most utterances of orthodox
clergymen in this age, yet in sentiment and in the reason given for
it the echo of "Amen" comes from every pulpit where a believer in
original sin, vicarious atonement, or the inspiration of the Bible
has a representative and a voice. If self-respect or honor is ever
to be the lot of woman, it will not be until her foot is on the
neck of orthodoxy, and when the Bible ranks where it belongs in the
field of literature.

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX F.

     1. "The French government, about the middle of the eighteenth
century, seems to have reached the maturity of its wickedness,
allowing if not instigating religious persecutions of so infamous
a nature that they would not be believed if they were not attested
by documents of the courts in which the sentences were passed." --
Buckle.

     2. Of Louis XV., the eminently Christian king of France,
Buckle says:  "His harem cost more than 100,000,000 francs, and was
composed of little girls. He was constantly drunk," and "turned out
his own illegitimate children to prostitute themselves."

     3. "It will hardly be believed that, when sulfuric ether was
first used to lessen the pains of childbirth, it was objected to as
'a profane attempt to abrogate the primeval curse pronounced upon
woman. ... The injury which the theological principle has done to
the world is immense. It has prevented men from studying the laws
of nature." -- Buckle.

                          ****     ****

                           APPENDIX G.

     1.The narrow range of their sympathies [the clergy's], and the
intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them peculiarly
unfitted for the office of educating the young, which they so
persistently claim, and which, to the great misfortune of the
world, they were long permitted to monopolize. ... The almost
complete omission from female education of those studies which most
discipline and strengthen the intellect, increases the difference,
while at the same time it has been usually made a main object to
imbue them with a passionate faith in traditional opinions, and to


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preserve them from all contact with opposing views. But contracted
knowledge and imperfect sympathy are not the sole fruits of this
education. It has always been the peculiarity of a certain kind of
theological teaching, that it inverts all the normal principles of
judgment and absolutely destroys intellectual diffidence. On other
subjects we find, if not a respect for honest conviction, at least
some sense of the amount of knowledge that is requisite to entitle
men to express an opinion on grate controversies. A complete
ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute restrains the
confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is aware that,
by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has himself no
knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected opinions
which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least if he is
a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compassionating the
benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on
theological questions this has never been so.

     "Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and
all doubt being usually stigmatized as criminal or damnable, a
state of mind is formed to which we find no parallel in other
fields. Many men and most women, though completely ignorant of the
very rudiments of biblical criticism, historical research, or
scientific discoveries, though they have never read a single page,
or understood a single proposition of the writings of those whom
they condemn, and have absolutely no rational knowledge either of
the arguments by which their faith is defended, or of those by
which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate with the
utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce, hate,
pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they
have been taught, assume, as a matter beyond the faintest
possibility of doubt, that the opinions they have received without
inquiry must be true, and that the opinions which others have
arrived at by inquiry must be false, and make it a main object of
their lives to assail what they call heresy in every way in their
power, except by examining the grounds on which it rests. It is
possible that the great majority of voices that swell the clamor
against every book which is regarded as heretical, are the voices
of those who would deem it criminal even to open that book, or to
enter into any real, searching, and impartial investigation of the
subject to which it relates. Innumerable pulpits support this tone
of thought, and represent, with a fervid rhetoric well fitted to
excite the nerves and imaginations of women, the deplorable
condition of all who deviate from a certain type of opinions or
emotions; a blind propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates
into countless households, poisoning the peace of families,
chilling the mental confidence of husband and wife, adding
immeasurably to the difficulties which every searcher into truth
has to encounter, and diffusing far and wide intellectual timidity,
disingenuousness, and hypocrisy." -- Lecky.

     2. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all
modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of
knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a
certain instinct, seem always to have perceived." -- Buckle.





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     3. "In the fourth century there arose monarchism, and in the
sixth century the Christians succeeded in cutting off the last ray
of knowledge, and shutting up the schools of Greece. Then followed
a long period of theology, ignorance, and vice." -- Buckle.

     4. Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features
of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of
philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that
confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all
religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was ever odious
to it, and was ever regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a
dangerous enemy to the success of miracles; and there is no
religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow some physical
absurdities. The triumph of Christianity was thus the final signal
of the entire decline both of the sciences an of philosophy." --
"Progress of the Human Mind," Condorcet.

     "Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity,
though unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in
splendor after the invention of printing, was at this period
sufficiently powerful to accomplish their ruin." -- Ibid.

     "In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall
see the human mind rapidly descending from the height to which it
had raised itself. ... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and
perfidy. ... Theological reveries, superstitions, delusions, are
become the sole genius of man, religious intolerance his only
morality; and Europe, crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and
military despotism, awaits in blood and in tears the moment when
the revival of light shall restore it to liberty, to humanity, and
to virtue. ... The priests held human learning in contempt. ...
Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces. Executioners, under the
guidance of legates and priests, put to death those whom the
soldiers had spared. A tribunal of monks was established, with
power of condemning to the stake whoever should be suspected of
making use of his reason. ... All sects, all governments, every
species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in every
point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the
exercise of reason. ... Meanwhile education, being everywhere
subjected [to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general
understanding, by clogging the reason of children with the weight
of the religious prejudices of their country. ... In the eighth
century an ignorant pope had persecuted a deacon for contending
that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the
rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another
pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of
the inquisition, accused of having proved the diurnal and annual
motion of the earth. The greatest genius that modern Italy has
given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and infirmities, was
obliged to purchase his release from punishment and from prison, by
asking pardon of God for having taught men better to understand his
works." -- Ibid.

                          ****     ****





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                           APPENDIX H.

     1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the
seventeenth century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by
women. -- See Hallam's. "Lit. of Europe."

     2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the
little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their
education." -- Buckle.

     3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason
prevail's amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many
Christians think it almost a matter of duty to decry the human
faculties as poor, mean, and almost worthless; and thus seek to
exalt piety at the expense of intelligence." -- Morell's "Hist. of
Speculative Phil."

     4. "That woman are more deductive than men, because they think
quicker than men, is a proposition which some people will not
relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed
nothing could prevent its being universally admitted except the
fact that the remarkable rapidity with which women think is
obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous
system, called their education, in which valuable things are
carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully taught to
them, until their fine and nimble minds are too often irretrievably
injured." -- Buckle.

                           APPENDIX I.

     1.   "The Roman [Pagan] religion was essentially domestic, and
it was a main object of the legislator to surround marriage with
every circumstance of dignity and solemnity. Monogamy was from the
earliest times, strictly enjoined, and it was one of the great
benefits that have resulted from the expansion of Roman power, that
it made this type dominant in Europe. In the legends of early Rome
we have ample evidence both of the high moral estimate of women,
and of their prominence in Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia
and of Virginia display a delicacy of honor, a sense of the supreme
excellence of unsullied purity which no Christian nation could
surpass." -- Lecky, "European Morals," Vol. I., p. 316.

     2.   "Marriage [under Christian rule] was viewed in its
coarsest and most degraded form. The notion of its impurity took
many forms, and exercised for some centuries an extremely wide
influence over the Church. -- Ibid,, p. 343.

                           APPENDIX J.

     1.   "We are continually told that civilization and
Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile
the wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband; no less so, as
far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She
vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it
all through her life by law. Casuists may say that the obligation
of obedience stops short of participation in crime, but it
certainly extends to everything else. She can do no act whatever
but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property

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but for him; the instant it becomes hers even if by inheritance, it
becomes ipso facto his. In this respect the wife's position under
the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws
of many countries; by the Roman law, for example, a slave might
have peculium, which, to a certain extent, the law guaranteed him
for his exclusive use." -- Mill.

     2.   Speaking of self-worship which leads to brutality toward
others, Mill says "Christianity will never practically teach it"
(the equality of human beings) "While it sanctions institutions
grounded on an arbitrary preference for one human being over
another."

     "The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to
submit to power; that of the ages next following, on the right of
the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much
longer is one form of society and life to content itself with the
morality made for another? We have had the morality of submission,
and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come
for the morality of justice." -- Ibid.

     "Institutions, books, education, society all go on training
human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more
when it is only coming." -- Ibid.

     There have been abundance of people, in all ages of
Christianity, who tried ... to convert us into a Sort of Christian
Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all
improvement; and great has been their power, and many have had to
sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been
resisted, and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet
make us what we are to be." -- Ibid.

                           APPENDIX K.

     In this tendency [to depreciate extremely the character and
position of woman] we may detect in part the influence of the
earlier Jewish writings, in which it is probable that most
impartial observers will detect evident traces of the common
oriental depreciation of women. The custom of money-purchase to the
father of the, bride was admitted. Polygamy was authorized, and
practiced by the wisest men on an enormous scale. A woman was
regarded as the origin of human ills. A period of purification was
appointed after the birth of every child; but, by a very
significant provision, it was twice as long in the case of a female
as of a male child (Levit. xii. 1-5). The badness of men, a Jewish
writer emphatically declared, is better than the goodness of women
Ecclesiastics xlii. 14). The types of female excellence exhibited
in the early period of Jewish history are in general of a low
order, and certainly far inferior to those of Roman history or
Greek poetry; and the warmest eulogy of a woman in the Old
Testament is probably that which was bestowed upon her who, with
circumstances of the most exaggerated treachery, had murdered the
sleeping fugitive who had taken refuge under her roof." -- Lecky,
"European Morals," vol. 1, p. 357.




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                           APPENDIX L.

     1.   "Mr. F. Newman, who looks on toleration as the result
intellectual progress, says Nevertheless, not only does the Old
Testament justify bloody persecution, but the New teaches that God
will visit men with fiery vengeance for holding an erroneous
creed." -- Buckle.

     2.   "The first great consequence of the decline of priestly
influence was the rise of toleration. ... I suspect that the
impolicy of persecution was perceived before its wickedness." --
Ibid.

     3.   "While a multitude of scientific discoveries, critical
and historical researches, and educational reforms have brought
thinking men face to face with religious problems of extreme
importance, women have been almost absolutely excluded from their
influence." -- Lecky.

     4.   "The domestic unhappiness arising from difference of
belief was probably almost or altogether unknown in the world
before the introduction of Christianity. ... The deep and widening
chasm between the religious opinions of most highly educated men,
and of the immense majority of women is painfully apparent.
Whenever any strong religious fervor fell upon a husband or a wife,
its first effect was to make a happy union impossible." -- Ibid.

     5.   "The combined influence of the Jewish writings [Old
Testament) and of that ascetic feeling which treated woman as the
chief source of temptation to man, caused her degradation. ... In
the writings of the Fathers, woman was represented as the door of
hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the
very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual
penance, on account of the curse she has brought into the world.
She should be ashamed of her dress and especially ashamed of her
beauty." -- Ibid.

                           APPENDIX M.


     1.   "The writers of the Middle Ages are full of accounts of
nunneries that were like brothels. ... The inveterate prevalence of
incest among the clergy rendered it necessary again and again to
issue the most stringent enactments that priests should not be
permitted to live with their mothers or sisters. ... An Italian
bishop of the tenth century epigrammatically described the morals
of his tame, when he declared, that if he were to enforce the
canons against unchaste people administering ecclesiastical rites,
no one would be left in the Church except the boys." -- Lecky.

     2.   In the middle of the sixteenth century "the majority of
the clergy were nearly illiterate, and many of them addicted to
drunkenness and low vices. -- Hallam, "Const. Hist. of Eng."

     3.   "The clergy have ruined Italy." -- Brougham, "Pol. Phil."




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     4.   It was a significant prudence of many of the lay
Catholics, who were accustomed to insist that their priests should
take a concubine for the protection of the families of the
parishioners. ... It can hardly be questioned that the extreme
frequency of illicit connections among the clergy tended during
many centuries most actively to lower the moral tine of laity. ...
An impure chastity was fostered, which continually looked upon
marriage in its coarsest light. ... Another injurious consequence
resulting, in a great measure, from asceticism, was a tendency to
depreciate extremely the character and the position of woman." --
Lecky.

                           APPENDIX N.

     The great and main duty which a wife, as a wife, ought to
learn, and so learn as to practice it, is to be subject to her own
husband. ... There is not any husband to whom this honor of
submission is not due; no personal infirmity, frowardness of
nature; no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of
it." -- Fergusson on "the Epistles."

     2. "The sum of a wife's duty unto her husband is subjection."
-- Abernethy.

     3. "We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty
of obedience [upon wives]; as every established fact which is too
bad to admit of any other defense, is always presented to us as an
injunction of religion. The Church, it is true, enjoins it in her
formularies." -- Mill.

     "The principle of the modern movement in morals and in
polities, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect:
that not what men are, but what they do constitutes their claim to
deference; that, above all, merit and not birth is the only
rightful claim to power and authority." -- Ibid.

     "Taking the care of people's lives out of their own hands and
relieving them from the consequences of their own acts, saps the
very foundation of the self-respect and self-control which are the
essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social
virtue." -- Ibid.

     "Inferior classes of men always, at heart, feel disrespect
toward those who are subject to their power. -- Ibid.

     4. "Among those causes of human improvement that are of most
importance to the general welfare, must be included the total
annihilation of the prejudices which have established between the
sexes an inequality of right, fatal even to the party which it
favors. In vain might we seek for motives to justify the principle,
in difference of physical organization, of intellect, or of moral
sensibility. It had at first no other origin but abuse of strength,
and all the attempts which have since been made to support it are
idle sophisms" -- "Progress of the Human Mind," Condorcet.

     5. Notwithstanding the work of such men is the Encyclopedists
of France and other liberal thinkers for the proper recognition of
women, the Church had held her grip so tight that upon the passage

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of the bill, as late as 1848. giving to married women the right to
own their own property, the most doleful prophesies went up as to
the just retribution that would fall upon women for their wicked
insubordination, and upon the men who had defied divine commands so
far is to pass such a law. A recent writer tells us that Wm. A.
Stokes, in talking to a lady whom he blamed for its passage, said:
"We hold you responsible for that law, and I tell you now you will
live to rue the day when you opened such a Pandora's box in your
native State, and cast such an apple of discord into every family
of the State."

     And the sermons that were preached against it -- the
prophecies of deacon and preacher -- were so numerous, so
denunciatory, and so violent that they form a queer and interesting
chapter in the history of the attitude of the Church toward women,
and illustrate, in our own time, how persistent it has been in its
efforts to prevent woman from sharing in the benefits of the higher
civilization of the nineteenth century.

     But fortunately for women, Infidels are more numerous than
they ever were before, and the power of the Church is dying of dry
rot, or as Col. Ingersoll wittily says, of the combined influence
of softening of the brain and ossification of the heart.

                           APPENDIX O.

"St. Gregory the Great describes the virtue of a priest, who
through motives of piety had discarded his wife. ... Their wives,
in immense numbers, were driven forth with hatred and with scorn.
... Pope Urban II. gave license to the nobles to reduce to slavery
the wives of priests who refused to abandon them." -- Lecky.
                             ______

                           APPENDIX P.

     1. "Hallam denies that respect for women is due to
Christianity." -- Buckle.

     2. "In England, wives are still occasionally led to the market
by a halter around the neck to be sold by the husband to the
highest bidder." -- Ibid.

     "The sale of a wife with a halter around her neck is still a
legal transaction in England. The sale must be made in the cattle
market, as if she were a mare, all women being considered as mares
by old English law, and indeed called 'mares' in certain counties
where genuine old English law is still preserved." -- Borrow.

     3. "Contempt for woman, the result of clerical teaching, is
shown in myriad forms." -- Gage.

     4. "The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in
itself, and is now one of the chief hinderance to human
improvement." -- John Stuart Mill.





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     5. "I have no relish for a community of goods resting on the
doctrine, that what is mine is yours, but what is yours is not
mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
with anyone, though I were myself the person to profit by it." --
Ibid.

     It will take a long time for that sort of morality to filter
into the skull of the Church, and when it does the skull will
burst.

     6. "Certain beliefs have been inculcated, certain crimes
invented, in order to intimidate the masses. Hence the Church made
free thought the worst of sins, and the spirit of inquiry the worst
of blasphemies. ... As late as the time of Bunyan the chief
doctrine inculcated from the pulpit was obedience to the temporal
power. ... All these influences fell with crushing weight on
woman." -- Matilda Joslyn Gage in "Hist. Woman Suffrage."

     7. "Taught that education for her was indelicate and
irreligious, she has been kept in such gross ignorance as to fall
a prey to superstition, and to glory in her degradation. ... Such
was the prejudice against a liberal education for women, that the
first public examination of a girl in geometry (1829) created as
bitter a storm of ridicule as has since assailed women who have
entered the law, the pulpit, or the medical profession." -- Ibid,

                           APPENDIX Q.

     1. "The five writers to whose genius we owe the first attempt
at comprehensive views of history were Bolingbroke, Montesquieu,
Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. Of these the second was but a cold
believer in Christianity, if, indeed, he believed in it at all; and
the other four were avowed and notorious infidels." -- Buckle.

     2 "Here, then, we have the starting-point of progress --
skepticism. ... All, therefore, that men want is no hindrance from
their political and religious rulers. ... Until common minds doubt
respecting religion they can never receive any new scientific
conclusion at variance with it -- as Joshua and Copernicus." --
Ibid.

     3. "The immortal work of Gibbon, of which the sagacity is, if
possible, equal to the learning, did find readers, but the
illustrious author was so cruelly reviled by men who called
themselves Christians, that it seemed doubtful if, after such an
example, subsequent writers would hazard their comfort and
happiness by attempting to write philosophic history. Middleton
wrote in 1750. ... As long as the theological spirit was alive
nothing could be effected." -- Ibid.

     4. "The questions which presented themselves to the acuter
minds of a hundred years ago were present to the acuter minds who
lived hundreds of years before that. ... But the Church had known
how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the
twelfth century down to Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They
were isolated, and for the most part submissive; and if they were
not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp mortal. ...


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They [the thinkers] could have taught Europe earlier than the
Church allowed it to learn, that the sun does not go round the
earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun. ... After
the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity
was marked in one of its most important phases by a new, and most
significant, feature. ... It was an advance both in knowledge and
in moral motive. ... The philosophical movement was represented by
"Diderot" [leading the Encyclopaedist circle.] ... Broadly stated
the great central moral of it was this: that human nature is good,
that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place.
and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and
bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as
a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a
wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. ... into
what fresh and unwelcome sunlight it brought the articles of the
old theology. ... Every social improvement since has been the
outcome of that new doctrine in one form or another. ... The
teaching of the Church paints men as fallen and depraved. The
deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the new fabric rising was
very natural. ... The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand
points, alike in letter and spirit, with the old sacred lore. ...
A hundred years ago this perception was vague and indefinite, but
there was an unmistakable apprehension that the Catholic ideal of
womanhood was no more adequate to the facts of life, than Catholic
views about science, or popery, or labor, or political order and
authority." -- Morley.

     And it took the rising infidels to discover the fact. See
Morley, "Diderot," p. 76.

     "The greatest fact in the intellectual history of the
eighteenth century is the decisive revolution that overtook the
sustaining conviction of the Church. The central conception, that
the universe was called into existence only to further its
Creator's purpose toward man, became incredible [by the light of
the new thought]. What seems to careless observers a mere
metaphysical dispute was in truth. and still is, the decisive
quarter of the great battle between theology and a philosophy
reconcilable with science." -- Morley.

     "The man who ventured to use his mind [Diderot] was thrown
into the dungeon at Vincennes." -- Ibid.

     5. "Those thinkers [Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot] taught
men to reason; reasoning well leads to acting well; justness in the
mind becomes justice in the heart. Those toilers for progress
labored usefully. ... The French Revolution was their soul. It was
their radiant manifestation. It came from them; we find them
everywhere in that blest and superb catastrophe, which formed the
conclusion of the past and the opening of the future. ... The new
society, the desire for equality and concession, and that beginning
of fraternity which called itself tolerance, reciprocal good-will
the just accord of men and rights, reason recognized as the supreme
law, the annihilation of prejudices and fixed opinions, the
serenity of souls, the spirit of indulgence and of pardon, harmony,
peace -- behold what has come from them!" -- Victor Hugo, "Oration
on Voltaire."

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                           APPENDIX R.

     "He [Mohammed] promulgated a mass of fables, which he
pretended to have received from heaven. ... After enjoying for
twenty years a power without bounds, and of which there exists no
other example, he announced publicly, that, if he had committed any
act of injustice, be was ready to make reparation. All were silent.
... He died; and the enthusiasm which he communicated to his people
will be seen to change the face of three-quarters of the globe. ...
I shall add that the religion of Mohammed is the most simple in its
dogmas, the least absurd in its practices, above all others
tolerant in its principles." --Condorcet.

                           APPENDIX S.

     The claim is so often and so boldly made that Infidelity
produces crime, and that Christianity, or belief, or faith, makes
people good, that the following statistics usually produce a rather
chilly sensation in the believer when presented in the midst of an
argument based upon the above mentioned claim. I have used it with
effect. The person upon whom it is used will never offer that
argument to you again. The following statistics were taken from the
British Parliamentary reports, made on the instance of Sir John
Trelawney, in 1873:

                       ENGLAND AND WALES.

     Criminals in England and Wales in 1873 ............ 146,146

          SECTARIAN AND INFIDEL POPULATION OF THE SAME.

Church of England ..................................... 6,933,935
Dissenters ............................................ 7,235.158
Catholics ............................................ 1,500,000
Jews ..................................................... 57,000
Infidels .............................................. 7,000,000

         RELIGIOUS PERSUASIONS OF CRIMINALS OF THE SAME.

Church of England ......................................... 96,097
Catholics ................................................. 35,581
Dissenters ................................................ 10,648
Jews ......................................................... 256
Infidels ..................................................... 296

                CRIMINALS TO 100,000 POPULATION.

Catholics .................................................. 2,500
Church of England .......................................... 1,400
Dissenters ................................................... 150
Infidels ....................................................... 5

     These statistics are taken from the report of the British
Parliament, which, for learning and intelligence, as a deliberative
body, has not its superior, if it has its equal, in the world, and
it is surely a sufficiently Christian body to be accepted as



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authority in this matter, since a large number of its members are
clergymen. These statistics hardly sustain the allegation that
"Infidelity is coupled with impurity."

     We are willing to stand upon our record. But, lest it be
claimed that this is a British peculiarity, allow me to defer to
the patriotic sentiment of my readers by one other little set of
tables which, while not complete, is equally as suggestive.

     "In sixty-six different prisons, jails, reformatories,
refuges, penitentiaries, and lock-ups there for the years given in
reports, 41,335 men and boys, women and girls, of the following
religious sects:

     Catholics ......................................... 16,431
     Church of England .................................. 9,975
     Eighteen other Protestant denominations ........... 14,811
     Universalists .......................................... 5
     Jews, Chinese, and Mormons ........................... 110
     Infidels (two so-called, one avowed) ................... 3

     These included the prisons of Iowa, Michigan, Tennessee, New
York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, and Canada."

     Present these two tables to those who assure you that crime
follows in the wake of Infidelity, and you will have time to take
a comfortable nap before your Christian friend returns to the
attack or braces up after the shock sustained by his sentiments and
inflicted by these two small but truly suggestive tables.

     One cold fact like this will inoculate one of the faithful
with more modesty than an hour of usual argument based upon the
assumptions of the clergy and the ignorance of his hearers.

     Infidels are not perfect. Many of them need reconstruction
sadly, but the above data seem to indicate that they compare rather
favorably with their fellow-men in the matter of good citizenship.

                           APPENDIX T.

     "Moreover, as Goethe has already shown, the celebrated Mosaic
moral precepts, the so-called Ten Commandments, were not upon the
tables upon which Moses wrote the laws of the covenant which God
made with his people.

     "Even the extraordinary diversity of the many religions
diffused over the surface of the earth suffices to show that they
can stand in no necessary connection with morals, as it is well
known that wherever tolerably well-ordered political and social
conditions exist, the moral precepts in their essential principles
are the same, whilst when such conditions are wanting, a wild and
irregular confusion, or even an entire deficiency of moral notions
is met with. ["In China, where people are, as is well-known, very
indifferent or tolerant in religions matters, this fine proverb is
current: Religions are various, but reason is one, and we are all
brothers."] History also shows incontrovertibly that religion and
morality have by no means gone hand in hand in strength and
development, but that even contrariwise the most religious times

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and countries have produced the greatest number of crimes and sins
against the laws of morality, and indeed, as daily experience
teaches, still produce them. The history of nearly all religions is
filled with such horrible abominations, massacres, and boundless
wickedness of every kind that at the mere recollection of them the
heart of a philanthropist seems to stand still, and we turn with
disgust and horror from a mental aberration which could produce
such deeds. If it is urged in vindication of religion that it has
advanced and elevated human civilization, even this merit appears
very doubtful in presence of the facts of history, and at least as
very rarely or isolatedly the case. In general, however, it cannot
be denied that most systems of religion have proved rather inimical
than friendly to civilization. For religion, as already stated,
tolerates no doubt, no discussion, no contradiction, no
investigations, by those eternal pioneers of the future of science
and intellect! Even the simple circumstance that our present state
of culture has already long since left far behind it all and even
the highest intellectual ideals established and elaborated by
former religions may show how little intellectual progress is
influenced by religion. Mankind is perpetually being thrown to and
fro between science, and religion, but it advances more
intellectually, morally and physically in proportion as it turns
away from religion and to science.

     It is therefore clear that for our present age and for the
future a foundation must be sought and found for culture and
morality, different from that which can be furnished to us by
religion. It is not the fear of God that acts amelioratingly or
ennoblingly upon manners, of which the middle ages furnish us with
a striking proof; but the ennobling of the conception of the world
in general which goes hand in hand with the advance of
civilization. Let us then give up making a show of the profession
of hypocritical words of faith, the only purpose of which seems to
be that they may be continually shown to be lies by the actions and
deeds of their professors! The man of the future will feel far more
happy and contented when he has not to contend at every step of his
intellectual forward development with those tormenting
contradictions between knowledge and faith which plague his youth,
and occupy his mature age unnecessarily with the slow renunciation
of the notions which he imbibed in his youth. What we sacrifice to
God, we take away from mankind, and absorb a great part of his best
intellectual powers in the pursuit of an unattainable goal. At any
rate, the least that we can expect in this respect from the state
and society of the future is a complete separation between
ecclesiastical and worldly affairs, or an absolute emancipation of
the state and the school from every ecclesiastical influence.
Education must be founded upon knowledge, not upon faith; and
religion itself should be taught in the public schools only as
religious history and as an objective or scientific exposition of
the different religious systems prevailing among mankind. Any one
who, after such an education, still experiences the need of a
definite law or rule of faith may then attach himself to any
religious sect that may seem good to him, but cannot claim that the
community should bear the cost of this special fancy!





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     "As regards Christianity, or the Paulinism which is falsely
called Christianity, it stands, by its dogmatic portion or
contents, in such striking and irreconcilable, nay absolutely
absurd contradiction with all the acquisitions and principles of
modern science that its future tragical fate can only be a question
of time. But even its ethical contents or its moral principles are
in no way essentially distinguished above those of other peoples,
and were equally well and in part better known to mankind even
before its appearance. Not only in this respect, but also in its
supposed character as the world-religion, it is excelled by the
much older and probably most widely diffused religious system in
the world, the celebrated Buddhism, which recognizes neither the
idea of a personal God, nor that of a personal duration, and
nevertheless teaches an extremely pure, amiable, and even ascetic
morality. The doctrine of Zoroaster or Zarathrustra also, 1800
years B.C., taught the principles of humanity and toleration for
those of different modes of thinking in a manner and purity which
were unknown to the Semitic religions and especially to
Christianity. Christianity originated and spread, as is well-known,
at a time of general decline of manners, and of very great moral
and national corruption; and its extraordinary success must be
partly explained by the prevalence of a sort of intellectual and
moral disease, which had overpowered the spirits of men after the
fall of the ancient civilization and under the demoralizing
influence of the gradual collapse of the great Roman empire. But
even at that time those who stood intellectually high and looked
deeply to things recognized the whole danger of this new turn of
mind, and it is very remarkable that the best and most benevolent
of the Roman emperors, such as Marcus Aurelius, Julian, etc., were
the most zealous persecutors of Christianity, whilst it was
tolerated by the bad ones, such as Commodus, Heliogabalus, etc.
When it had gradually attained the superiority, one of its first
sins against intellectual progress consisted in the destruction by
Christian fanaticism of the calibrated Library of Alexandria, which
contained all the intellectual treasures of antiquity -- an
incalculable loss to science, which can never be replaced. It is
usually asserted in praise of Christianity that in the middle ages
the Christian monasteries were the preservers of science and
literature, but even this is correct only in a very limited sense,
since boundless ignorance and rudeness generally prevailed in the
monasteries, and innumerable ecclesiastes could not even read.
Valuable literary treasures on parchment contained in the libraries
of the monasteries were destroyed, the monks when they wanted money
selling the books as parchment, or tearing out the leaves and
writing psalms upon them. Frequently they entirely effaced the
ancient classics, to make room for their foolish legends and
homilies; nay, the reading of the classics, such as Aristotle for
example, was directly forbidden by papal decrees.

     "In New Spain Christian fanaticism immediately destroyed
whatever of arts and civilization existed among the natives, and
that this was not inconsiderable is shown by the numerous monuments
now in ruins which place beyond a doubt the former existence of a
tolerably high degree of culture. But in the place of this not a
trace of Christian civilization is now to be observed among the
existing Indians, and the resident Catholic clergy keep the Indians
purposely in a state of the greatest ignorance and stupidity (see,
Richthofen, Die Zustande der Republic Mexico, Berlin, 1854).

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     "Thus Christianity has always acted consistently in accordance
with the principles of one of the fathers of the Church,
Tertullian, who says: 'Desire of knowledge is no longer necessary
since Jesus Christ, nor is investigation necessary since the
Gospel.' If the civilization of the European and especially of
Christian Nations has notwithstanding made such enormous progress
in the course of centuries, an unprejudiced consideration of
history can only tell us that this has taken place not by means of
Christianity, but in spite of it. And this is a sufficient
indication to what an extent this civilization must still be
capable of development when once it shall be completely freed from
the narrow bounds of old superstitious and religious
embarrassments!"

     "We must therefore endeavor to form convictions which are not
to stand once and for all, as philosophers and theologians usually
do, but such as may change and become improved with. the advance of
knowledge. Whoever does not recognize this and gives himself up
once for all to a belief which he regards as final truth, whether
it be of a theological or philosophical kind, is of course
incapable of accepting a conviction supported upon scientific
grounds. Unfortunately our whole education is founded upon an early
systematic curbing and fettering of the intellect in the direction
of dogmatic (philosophical or theological) doctrines of faith, and
only a comparatively small number of strong minds succeed in after
years in freeing themselves by their own powers from these fetters,
whilst the majority remain captive in the accustomed bonds and form
their judgment in accordance with the celebrated saying of Bishop
Berkeley: 'Few men think; but all will have opinions.'" -- Buchner,
Man in the Past, Present, and Future."

                           APPENDIX U.

     "And here it may be remarked, once for all, that no man who
has subscribed to creeds and formulas, whether in theology or
philosophy, can be an unbiased investigator of the truth or an
unprejudiced judge of the opinions of others. His sworn
preconceptions warping his discernment, adherence to his sect or
party engenders intolerance to the honest convictions of other
inquirers. Beliefs we may and must have, but a belief to be changed
with new and advancing knowledge impedes no progress, while a creed
subscribed to as ultimate truth, and sworn to be defended, not only
puts a bar to further research, but as a consequence throws the
odium of distrust on all that may seem to oppose it.

     "Even when such odium cannot deter, it annoys and irritates;
hence the frequent unwillingness of men of science to come
prominently forward with the avowal of their beliefs.

     "It is time this delicacy were thrown aside, and such
theologians plainly told that the skepticism and Infidelity -- if
skepticism and Infidelity there be -- lies all on their own side.

     "There is no skepticism so offensive as that which doubts the
facts of honest and careful observation: no Infidelity so gross as
that which disbelieves the deductions of competent and unbiased
judgments." -- David Page, "Man," etc., Edinburgh, 1867.


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                           APPENDIX V.

     Since I have recorded this incident of my lecture in Chicago,
it is peculiarly fitting and pleasant to be able to give the
following extract from the review of the first edition of this book
printed in the Chicago Times. No great daily paper would have dared
to print such a comment a few years ago. To-day it is stated as a
matter quite beyond controversy:

     "She takes considerable pains to show what one would think
need scarcely be insisted upon in our day, that the morals of
civilization -- morals in general, indeed -- are not at all based
in or dependent upon religion, certainly not on Christianity, since
the so-called 'golden rule,' the highest principle of morality,
antedates Christianity a thousand years."

                ADDRESS TO THE CLERGY AND OTHERS.

     Up to the present time I have tried to reply personally to
each one who has favored me with a letter of thanks, criticism, or
praise of the little book, Men, Women, and Gods, and Other
Lectures," just published, but I find that if I continue, to do
this I shall have but little time for anything else.

     The very unexpected welcome which the book has received
prompts me to take this plan and means of replying to many who have
honored me by writing me personal letters. First, permit me to
thank those, who have written letters of praise and gratitude, and
to say that, although I may be unable to reply in a private letter,
I am not indifferent to these evidences of your interest, and am
greatly helped in my work by your sympathy and encouragement. I
have also received most courteous letters from various clergymen
who, disagreeing with me, desire to convert me either by mail or
personal (private) interviews.

     It is wholly impossible for me to grant these requests, since
my time and strength are demanded in other work, but I wish to say
here what I have written to several of my clerical correspondents,
and desire to say to them all.

     Although I cannot enter into private correspondence with, nor
grant personal interviews to, such a number of our body, I am
entirely willing to respond in a public way to any replies to my
arguments which come under the following conditions:

     1. On page fourteen of the introduction to my book Col.
Ingersoll says: "No human being can answer her arguments. There is
no answer. All the priests in the world cannot explain away her
objections. There is no explanation. They should remain dumb unless
they can show that the impossible is the probable, that slavery is
better than freedom, that polygamy is the friend of woman, that the
innocent can justly suffer for the guilty, that to persecute for
opinion's sake is an act of love and worship."

     Now, whenever any one of these gentlemen who wish to convert
me will show that the Colonel is wrong in this brief paragraph;
whenever they will, in print or in public, refute the arguments to
which he refers, and to which they object, I shall not be slow to
respond.
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     2. It must be argument, not personal abuse, and it must be
conducted in a courteous manner and tone.

     3. It must proceed upon the basis that I am as honest, as
earnest, and as virtuous in my motives and intentions as they are
in theirs.

     Now, surely these gentlemen cannot object to these simple
requirements; and since some of them are men whose names are
proceeded by a title and followed by several capital letters from
D.D. to O.S.F. -- (which last I, in my ignorance, guess at as
meaning Order of St. Francis, but shall like to be corrected if I
am wrong) they must believe that to answer the arguments themselves
is both simple and easy.

     If they do not so believe they surely have no right to occupy
the positions which they do occupy. If they do so believe it will
do much more good to answer them publicly, since they have been
made publicly, and are already in the hands of several thousand
people, who could not be reached by any amount of eloquence poured
out on my devoted head in the privacy of ny own parlor (or writing-
desk).

     Therefore, gentlemen, permit me to say to you all that which
I have already written to several of you personally -- that Col.
Ingersoll's paragraph, quoted above, expresses my own views and
those of a great many other people, and will continue so to do so
long as your efforts to show that he is wrong are only whispered to
me behind a fun, or in the strict seclusion of a letter marked
"private and personal."

     The arguments I have given against the prevailing Christian
dogmas and usages, which you uphold, are neither private nor
personal, nor shall I allow them to take that phase. Life is too
short for me to spend hours day after day in sustaining, in
private, a public argument which has never been (and, in my
opinion, never will be) refuted. And it would do no good to the
thousands whom you are pleased to say you fear will be led astray
by my position. You have a magnificent opportunity to lead them
back again by honest public letters, or lectures, or sermons, not
by an afternoon's chat with me.

     And, while I recognize the courtesy of your pressing requests
(made, without exception, in the most gentlemanly terms) to permit
you to meet me personally and refute my arguments, I feel compelled
to say that, unless you are willing to show the courage of your
convictions, and the quality of your defense, to the public, I fear
they would have no weight with me, and I should have wasted your
precious time as well as my own, which I should feel I had no right
to do, nor to allow you to do, without this frank statement of the
case.

     Now, do not suppose that I have the slightest objection to
meeting the clergy personally and socially. Upon the contrary, many
of my friends are clergymen -- even bishops -- but candor compels
me, to state that up to the present time not one of them has



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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               112

                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

(either privately or otherwise) been able to answer either of the
first two lectures in that little book, and as to the third one, no
one of them, in my opinion, will ever try to answer it.

     Time will show whether I am right in this.

     In the mean time accept my thanks for your interest, and
believe me,

                              Sincerely,

                                        HELEN H. GARDENER.

                          ****     ****

               LETTER TO THE CLEVELAND CONGRESS OF
                  FREETHINKERS, OCTOBER, 1885.

     I send my greetings to the Congress of Freethinkers assembled
at Cleveland, and regret, more than I can express that I am unable
to be there and hear the all the good things you will hear, and see
all the earnest workers you will see.

     The Freethinkers of America ought to be a very proud and
enthusiastic body, when they have in their presidential chair the
ablest orator of modern times, and the broadest, bravest, and most
comprehensive intellect that has ever been called "Mr. President"
in this land of bravery and presidents. Washington was a patriot of
whom we are all justly proud. He was liberal in his religion and
progressive in his views of personal rights. And yet he had his
limitations. To him liberty and personal rights were modified by
the words, "free white, adult, males." He got no farther. He who
fought for freedom upheld slavery! And yet we are all proud and
glad to pay honor and respect to the memory of Washington.

     Abraham Lincoln we place still higher on the roll of honor;
for, added to his still more liberal religious views, in his
conceptions of freedom and justice he had at least two fewer
limitations than had the patriot of 1776. He, struck both "free"
and "white" from his mental black list, and gave once more an
impulse to the human race.

     But what shall we say of our president -- Ingersoll? A man who
in ten short years has carried mental liberty into every household
in America -- who is without limitations in religion, and modifies
justice with no prefix. A man who, with unequaled oratory,
champions Freedom -- not the, "free white, adult, male freedom of
Washington. A man who has breasted a whirlwind of destruction and
abuse for Justice -- not the "male, adult" justice of Lincoln, but
the freedom and justice, without limitation, for man, woman, and
child."

     With such a leader, what should not be achieved? With such a
champion, what cause could fail? If the people ever place such a
man in the White House, the nations of this earth will know, for
the first time, the real meaning of a free government under secular
administration.


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               113

                      MEN, WOMEN, AND GODS.

     "A government of the people, for the people, by the people,"
will be more than simply a high-sounding phrase, which, read by the
light of the past, was only a bitter mockery to a race in chains;
and, read by the light of the present, is a choice bit of grim
humor to half of a nation in petticoats. But so long as the taste
of the voter is such that he prefers to place in the executive
chair a type of man so eminently fitted for private life that when
you want to find him you have to shake the chair to see if he is in
it, just so long will there be no danger that the lightning will
strike so as to deprive the Freethinkers of one man in America who
could fill the national executive chair full, and strain the back
and sides a little getting in.

     Once more I send greetings to the Convention, with the hope
that you may have as grand a time as you ought to have, and that
Freethought will receive a new impulse from the harmony and
enthusiasm of this meeting.

                         Sincerely,

                                        HELEN H. GARDENER.







                          ****     ****

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   The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
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that America can again become what its Founders intended --

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and information for today. If you have such books, magazines,
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                          ****     ****








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