Col. Ingersoll next gave his views of the Puritans, declared they left Holland to escape persecution and came came here to persecute others. He referred to the persecutions heaped upon those of other religious belief by the Puritans, paid the Catholics the compliment to say that Maryland, which they ruled, was the first colony to enact a law tolerating religious views not held by themselves, and went on to explain that God was never mentioned in the constitution of the United States because each colony had a different religious belief, and each sect preferred to have God not mentioned at all than to having another religious belief than their own recognized. "In 1876," said the speaker, "our forefathers retired God from politics. They said all power comes from the people. They kept God out of the constitution and allowed each state to settle the question for itself." The present laws of different states were neatly reviewed, so far as they relate to the prevention of infidels giving testimony and to religious intolerance in any way, and these features were all branded and discussed as a gigantic evil. The lecture was attentively listened to by the immense audience from beginning to the end, and the speaker's most blasphemous fights were the most loudly applauded. Ingersoll's Lecture on Hereafter My Friends: I tell you tonight, as I have probably told many of you dozens of times, that the orthodox doctrine of eternal punishment in the hereafter is an infamous one! I have no respect for the man who preaches it, or pretends to you he believes it. Neither have I any respect for the man who will pollute the imagination of innocent childhood with that infamous lie! And I have no respect for the man who will deliberately add to the sorrows of this world with this terrible dogma; no respect for the man who endeavors to put that infinite cloud and shadow over the heart of humanity. I will be frank with you and say, I hate the doctrine; I despise it, I defy it; I loathe it--and what man of sense does not. The idea of a hell was born of revenge and brutality on the one side, and arrant cowardice on the other. In my judgment the American people are too brave, too generous, too magnanimous, too humane to believe in that outrageous doctrine of eternal damnation. For a great many years the learned intellects of Christendom have been examining into the religions of other countries and other ages, in the world--the religions of the myriads who have passed away. They examined into the religions of Egypt, the religion of Greece, that of Rome and the Scandinavian countries. In the presence of the ruins of those religions, the learned men of Christendom insisted that those religions were baseless, false and fraudulent. But they have all passed away.