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
being born continually--that every language has its cemetery and its
cradle, its bud and blossom, and withered leaf? Man has loved, enjoyed
and suffered, and language is simply the expression he gives those
experiences.
Then the world began to divide, and the Jewish nation was started. Now
I want to say that at one time your ancestors, like mine, were
barbarians. If the Jewish people had to write these books now they
would be civilized books, and I do not hold them responsible for what
their ancestors did. We find the Jewish people first in Canaan, and
there were seventy of them, counting Joseph and his children already in
Egypt. They lived two hundred and fifteen years, and they then went
down into Egypt and stayed there two hundred and fifteen years they
were four hundred and thirty years in Canaan and Egypt. How many did
they have when they went to Egypt? Seventy. How many were they at the
end of two hundred and fifteen years? Three millions. That is a good
many. We had at the time of the Revolution in this country three
millions of people. Since that time there have been four doubles, until
we have forty-eight millions today. How many would the Jews number at
the same ratio in two hundred and fifteen years? Call it eight doubles
and we have forty thousand. But instead of forty thousand they had
three millions. How do I know they had three millions? Because they
had six hundred thousand men of war. For every honest voter in the
State of Illinois there will be five other people, and there are always
more voters than men of war. They must have had at the lowest possible
estimate three millions of people. Is that true? Is there a minister
in the city of Chicago that will testify to his own idiocy by claiming
that they could have increased to three millions by that time? If
there is, let him say so. Do not let him talk about the civilizing
influence of a lie.
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