Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)Foote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
What the clergy have done in the concrete with Darwin they have done in
the abstract with his predecessors in the great struggle between light
and darkness. What are all the lying stories about Infidel Death-Beds
but conversions of corpses? Great heretics, whose scepticism was
unshaken in their lifetime by all the parson-power of the age, were
easily converted in their tombs. What the clergy said about them was
true, or why didn't they get up and contradict? All the world over
silence gives consent, and if the dead man did not enter a _caveat_, who
could complain if the men of God declared that he finished up in their
faith?
Recently the clergy have been converting another corpse, but this time
it has been able to protest by proxy, and the swindle has been exposed
all along the line. Paul Bert, the great French Freethinker, died at
Tonquin. The nation voted him a state funeral, and his body was
shipped to France. The voyage was a long one, and it gave the pious
an opportunity of leisurely converting the corpse, especially as Paul
Bert's family were all on board the steamer. Accordingly a report, which
we printed and commented on at the time, appeared in all the papers that
the atheistic Resident General had sent for a Catholic bishop on his
death-bed and taken the sacrament. Thousands of Christians believed the
story at once, the wish being father to the thought. They never stopped
to inquire whether the report was true. Why indeed should they? They
took the whole of their religion on trust, and of course they could
easily dispense with proof in so small a matter as an infidel's
conversion. Some of them were quite hilarious. "Ha," they exclaimed,
"what do you Freethinkers say now?" And with the childish simplicity of
their kind, when they were told that the story was in all probability
false, they replied, "Why, isn't it in print?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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