_Answer._ I do not know the gentleman, personally. Outside of the political reason I have intimated, I do not know why he attacked me. I once delivered a lecture entitled "What must we do to be Saved?" in the city of Wilmington, and in that lecture I proceeded to show, or at least tried to show, that Matthew, Mark and Luke knew nothing about Christianity, as it is understood in Delaware; and I also endeavored to show that all men have an equal right to think, and that a man is only under obligations to be honest with himself, and with all men, and that he is not accountable for the amount of mind that he has been endowed with--otherwise it might be Judge Comegys himself would be damned--but that he is only accountable for the use he makes of what little mind he has received. I held that the safest thing for every man was to be absolutely honest, and to express his honest thought. After the delivery of this lecture various ministers in Wilmington began replying, and after the preaching of twenty or thirty sermons, not one of which, considered as a reply, was a success, I presume it occurred to these ministers that the shortest and easiest way would be to have me indicted and imprisoned. In this I entirely agree with them. It is the old and time-honored way. I believe it is, as it always has been, easier to kill two infidels than to answer one; and if Christianity expects to stem the tide that is now slowly rising over the intellectual world, it must be done by brute force, and by brute force alone. And it must be done pretty soon, or they will not have the brute force. It is doubtful if they have a majority of the civilized world on their side to-day. No heretic ever would have been burned if he could have been answered. No theologian ever called for the help of the law until his logic gave out. I suppose Judge Comegys to be a Presbyterian. Where did he get his right to be a Presbyterian? Where did he get his right to decide which creed is the correct one? How did he dare to pit his little brain against the word of God? He may say that his father was a Presbyterian. But what was his grandfather? If he will only go back far enough he will, in all probability, find that his ancestors were Catholics, and if he will go back a little farther still, that they were barbarians; that at one time they were naked, and had snakes tattooed on their bodies. What right had they to change? Does he not perceive that had the savages passed the same kind of laws that now exist in Delaware, they could have prevented any change in belief? They would have had a whipping-post, too, and they would have said: "Any gentleman found without snakes tattooed upon his body shall be held guilty of blasphemy;" and all the ancestors of this Judge, and of these ministers, would have said, Amen!