Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
and the termination of the reign of George III. there were added 156
new crimes punishable with death, making in all 223 crimes in England
punishable with death. There is no lawyer in this State who can think
of that many crimes in a week. Now, during all those years the
government was becoming more and more cruel; more and more barbarous;
and we do not find, and we have not found, that the Church of England,
with its 15,000 or 20,000 Ministers, with its more than a score of
bishops in the House of Lords, has ever raised its voice or perfected
any organization in favor of a more merciful code, or in condemnation
of the enormous cruelty which the laws were continually inflicting.
And was not Voltaire justified in saying that "The English were a
people who murdered by law?" Now, that is an extract from a speech
made by John Bright in May, 1883. That shows what the Church of
England did. Two hundred and twenty-three offenses in England
punishable with death, and no minister, no bishop, no church
organization raising his or its voice, against the monstrous cruelty.
And why? Even then it was better than the law of Jehovah.
And the Protestants were as bad as the Catholics. You remember the time
of Henry IV. in France, when the edict of Nantes was issued simply to
give the Protestants the right to worship God according to the dictates
of their conscience. Just as soon as that edict was issued the
Protestants themselves, in the cities where they had the power,
prevented the Catholics from worshiping their God according to the
dictates of their conscience, and it was on account of the refusal of
those Protestants to allow the Catholics to worship God as they desired
that there was a civil war lasting for seven years in France.
Richelieu came into authority about the second or third year of that
war. He made no difference between Protestants and Catholics; and it
was owing to Richelieu that the Thirty Years' War terminated. It was
owing to Richelieu that the peace of Westphalia was made in 1643,
although I believe he had been dead a year before that time; but it was
owing to him, and it was the first peace ever made between nations on a
secular basis, with everything religious left out, and it was the last
great religious war.
You may ask me what I want. Well, in the first place I want to get
theology out of government. It has no business there. Man gets his
authority from man, and is responsible only to man. I want to get
theology out of politics. Our ancestors in 1776 retired God from
politics, because of the jealousies among the churches, and the result
has been splendid for mankind. I want to get theology out of
education. Teach the children what somebody knows, not what somebody
guesses. I want to get theology out of morality, and out of charity.
Don't give for God's sake, but for man's sake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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