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
In 1839 there was a division in this Church, and they had a lawsuit to
see which was the Church of God. And they tried it by a judge and
jury, and the jury decided that the new school was the Church of God,
and then they got a new trial, and the next jury decided that the old
school was the Church of God, and that settled it. That Church teaches
that infinite innocence was sacrificed for me! I don't want it! I
don't wish to go to heaven unless I can settle by the books, and go
there because I ought to go there. I have said, and I say again, I
don't want to be a charity angel. I have no ambition to become a
winged pauper of the skies.
The other day a young gentleman, a Presbyterian, who had just been
converted, came to me and gave me a tract and he told me he was
perfectly happy. Ugh! Says I: "Do you think a great many people are
going to hell?" "Oh, yes." "And you are perfectly happy?" "Well, he
didn't know as he was quite." "Wouldn't you be happier if they were all
going to heaven?" "O, yes." "Well, then you are not perfectly
happy?" "No, he didn't think he was." Says I: "When you get to heaven,
then you would be perfectly happy?" "Oh, yes." "Now, when we are only
going to hell, you are not quite happy; but when we are in hell, and
you in heaven, then you will be perfectly happy?" You won't be as
decent when you get to be an angel as you are now, will you? "Well,"
he said, "that was not exactly it." Said I: "Suppose your mother were
in hell, would you be happy in heaven then?" "Well," he says, "I
suppose God would know the best place for mother." And I thought to
myself, then, if I was a woman, I would like to have five or six boys
like that.
It will not do. Heaven is where are those we love, and those who love
us. And I wish to go to no world unless I can be accompanied by those
who love me here. Talk about the consolations of this infamous
doctrine. The consolations of a doctrine that makes a father say, "I
can be happy with my daughter in hell"; that makes a mother say, "I can
be happy with my generous, brave boy in hell"; that makes a boy say, "I
can enjoy the glory of heaven with the woman who bore me, the woman who
would have died for me, in eternal agony." And they call that tidings
of great joy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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