Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - LatestIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
Religion of the supernatural kind will fade from this world, and in its
place we will have reason. In the place of the worship of something we
know not of, will be the religion of mutual love and assistance--the
great religion of reciprocity. Superstition must go. Science will
remain. The church, however, dies a little hard. The brain of the
world is not yet developed. There are intellectual diseases the same
as diseases of the body. Intellectual mumps and measles still afflict
mankind. Whenever the new comes, the old protests, and the old fights
for its place as long as it has a particle of power. And we are now
having the same warfare between superstition and science that there was
between the stagecoach and the locomotive. But the stage-coach had to
go. It had its day of glory and power, but it is gone. It went West.
In a little while it will be driven into the Pacific, with the last
Indian aboard. So we find that there is the same conflict between the
different sects and the different schools, not only of philosophy, but
of medicine. Recollect that everything except the demonstrated truth
is liable to die. That is the order of nature. Words die. Every
language has a cemetery. Every now and then a word dies and a
tombstone is erected, and across it is written the word "obsolete."
New words are continually being born. There is a cradle in which a
word is rocked. A thought is molded to a sound, and the child-word is
born. And then comes a time when the word gets old, and wrinkled, and
expressionless, and is carried mournfully to the grave, and that is the
end of it. So in the schools of medicine. You can remember, so can I,
when the old alopathists reigned supreme. If there was anything the
matter with a man, they let out his blood. Called to the bedside, they
took him to the edge of eternity with medicine, and then practiced all
their art to bring him back to life. One can hardly imagine how
perfect a constitution it took a few years ago to stand the assault of
a doctor. And long after it was found to be a mistake, hundreds and
thousands of the old physicians clung to it, carried around with them,
in one pocket, a bottle of jalap, and in the other a rusty lancet,
sorry that they couldn't find some patient idiotic enough to allow the
experiment to be made again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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