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Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll--Latest




Contents

   Thomas Paine
   Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
   Orthodoxy
   Blasphemy
   Some Reasons Why
   Intellectual Development
   Human Rights
   Talmagian Theology (Second Lecture)
   Talmagian Theology (Third Lecture)
   Religious Intolerance
   Hereafter
   Review of His Reviewers
   How the Gods Grow
   The Religion of our Day
   Heretics And Heresies
   The Bible
   Voltaire
   Myth and Miracle
   Ingersoll's Letter, on The Chinese God
   Ingersoll's Letter, Is Suicide a Sin?
   Ingersoll's Letter, The Right To One's Life




Ingersoll's Lecture on Thomas Paine--Delivered in Central Music Hall,
Chicago, January 29, 1880 (From the Chicago Times, Verbatim Report)


Ladies and Gentlemen:--It so happened that the first speech--the very
first public speech I ever made--took occasion to defend the memory of
Thomas Paine.

I did it because I had read a little something of the history of my
country.  I did it because I felt indebted to him for the liberty I
then enjoyed--and whatever religion may be true, ingratitude is the
blackest of crimes.  And whether there is any God or not, in every star
that shines, gratitude is a virtue.

The man who will tell the truth about the dead is a good man, and for
one, about this man, I intend to tell just as near the truth as I can.

Most history consists in giving the details of things that never
happened--most biography is usually the lie coming from the mouth of
flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice, and whoever
attacks the religion of a country will, in his turn, be attacked.
Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by
all the meanness of ingenuity.  Whoever attacks a superstition will
find that there is still one weapon left in the arsenal of
Jehovah--slander.

I was reading, yesterday, a poem called the "Light of Asia," and I read
in that how a Boodh seeing a tigress perishing of thirst, with her
mouth upon the dry stone of a stream, with her two cubs sucking at her
dry and empty dugs, this Boodh took pity upon this wild and famishing
beast, and, throwing from himself the Yellowrobe of his order, and
stepping naked before this tigress, said:  "Here is meat for you and
your cubs." In one moment the crooked daggers of her claws ran riot in
his flesh, and in another he was devoured.  Such, during nearly all the
history of this world, has been the history of every man who has stood
in front of superstition.

Thomas Paine, as has been so eloquently said by the gentleman who
introduced me, was a friend of man, and whoever is a friend of man is
also a friend of God--if there is one.  But God has had many friends
who were the enemies of their fellow-men.  There is but one test by
which to measure any man who has lived.  Did he leave this world better
than he found it?  Did he leave in this world more liberty?  Did he
leave in this world more goodness, more humanity, than when he was
born?  That is the test.  And whatever may have been the faults of
Thomas Paine, no American who appreciates liberty, no American who
believes in true democracy and pure republicanism, should ever breathe
one word against his name.  Every American, with the divine mantle of
charity, should cover all his faults, and with a never-tiring tongue
should recount his virtues.

He was a common man.  He did not belong to the aristocracy.  Upon the
head of his father God had never poured the divine petroleum of
authority.  He had not the misfortune to belong to the upper classes.
He had the fortune to be born among the poor and to feel against his
great heart the throb of the toiling and suffering masses.  Neither was
it his misfortune to have been educated at Oxford.  What little sense
he had was not squeezed out at Westminster.  He got his education from
books.  He got his education from contact with fellow-men, and he
thought, and a man is worth just what nature impresses upon him.  A man
standing by the sea, or in a forest, or looking at a flower, or hearing
a poem, or looking in the eyes of the woman he loves, receives all that
he is capable of receiving--and if he is a great man the impression is
great, and he uses it for the purpose of benefiting his fellow-man.

Thomas Paine was not rich, he was poor, and his father before him was
poor, and he was raised a sailmaker, a very lowly profession, and yet
that man became one of the mainstays of liberty in this world.  At one
time he was an excise man, like Burns.  Burns was once--speak it
softly--a gauger--and yet he wrote poems that will wet the cheek of
humanity with tears as long as the world travels in its orb around the
sun.

Poverty was his brother, necessity his master.  He had more brains than
books; more courage than politeness; more strength than polish.  He had
no veneration for old mistakes, no admiration for ancient lies.  He
loved the truth for truth's sake and for man's sake.  He saw oppression
on every hand, injustice everywhere, hypocrisy at the altar, venality
on the bench, tyranny on the throne, and with a splendid courage he
espoused the cause of the weak against the strong, of the enslaved many
against the titled few.

In England he was nothing.  He belonged to the lower classes--that is,
the useful people.  England depended for her prosperity upon her
mechanics and her thinkers, her sailors and her workers, and they are
the only men in Europe who are not gentlemen.  The only obstacles in
the way of progress in Europe were the nobility and the priests, and
they are the only gentlemen.

This, and his native genius, constituted his entire capital, and he
needed no more.  He found the colonies clamoring for justice; whining
about their grievances; upon their knees at the foot of the throne,
imploring that mixture of idiocy and insanity, George III., by the
grace of God, for a restoration of their ancient privileges.  They were
not endeavoring to become free men, but were trying to soften the heart
of their master.  They were perfectly willing to make brick if Pharaoh
would furnish the straw.  The colonists wished for, hoped for, and
prayed for reconciliation.  They did not dream of independence.

Paine gave to the world his "Common Sense."  It was the first argument
for separation; the first assault upon the British form of government;
the first blow for a republic, and it aroused our fathers like a
trumpet's blast.  He was the first to perceive the destiny of the new
world.  No other pamphlet ever accomplished such wonderful results.  It
was filled with arguments, reasons, persuasions, and unanswerable
logic. It opened a new world.  It filled the present with hope and the
future with honor. Everywhere the people responded, and in a few months
the Continental Congress declared the colonies free and independent
states. A new nation was born.

It is simple justice to say that Paine did more to cause the
Declaration of Independence than any other man.  Neither should it be
forgotten that his attacks upon Great Britain were also attacks upon
monarchy, and while he convinced the people that the colonies ought to
separate from the mother country, he also proved to them that a free
government is the best that can be instituted among men.

In my judgment Thomas Paine was the best political writer that ever
lived.  "What he wrote was pure nature, and his soul and his pen ever
went together."  Ceremony, pageantry, and all the paraphernalia of
power had no effect upon him.  He examined into the why and wherefore
of things.  He was perfectly radical in his mode of thought.  Nothing
short of the bed-rock satisfied him. His enthusiasm for what he
believed to be right knew no bounds. During all the dark scenes of the
revolution never for a moment did he despair.  Year after year his
brave words were ringing through the land, and by the bivouac fires the
weary soldiers read the inspiring words of "Common Sense," filled with
ideas sharper than their swords, and consecrated themselves anew to the
cause of freedom.

Paine was not content with having aroused the spirit of independence,
but he gave every energy of his soul to keep that spirit alive.  He was
with the army.  He shared its defeats, its dangers, and its glory.
When the situation became desperate, when gloom settled upon all, he
gave them the "Crisis."    It was a cloud by day and a pillar of fire
by night, leading the way to freedom, honor, and glory.  He shouted to
them "These are the times that try men's souls."  The summer soldier
and the sunshine patriot, will, in this crisis, shrink from the service
of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks
of man and woman.

To those who wished to put the war off to some future day, with a lofty
and touching spirit of self-sacrifice, he said:  "Every generous parent
should say: 'If there must be war, let it be in my day, that my child
may have peace'."  To the cry that Americans were rebels, he replied:
"He that rebels against reason is a real rebel; but he that in defense
of reason rebels against tyranny, has a better title to 'Defender of
the Faith' than George III."

Some said it was to the interest of the colonies to be free. Paine
answered this by saying:  "To know whether it be the interest of the
continent to be independent, we need ask only this simple, easy
question:  'Is it the interest of man to be a boy all his life?"'  He
found many who would listen to nothing, and to them he said:  "That to
argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine
to the dead."  This sentiment ought to adorn the walls of every
orthodox church.

There is a world of political wisdom in this: "England lost her liberty
in a long chain of right reasoning from wrong principles;"  and there
is real discrimination in saying:  "The Greeks and Romans were strongly
possessed of the spirit of liberty, but not the principles, for at the
time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed
their power to enslave the rest of mankind."

In his letter to the British people, in which he tried to convince them
that war was not to their interest, occurs the following passage
brimful of common sense:  "War never can be the interest of a trading
nation any more than quarreling can be profitable to a man in business.
But to make war with those who trade with us is like setting a bull-dog
upon a customer at the shop door."

The Writings of Paine fairly glitter with simple, compact, logical
statements that carry conviction to the dullest and most prejudicial.
He had the happiest possible way of putting the case, in asking
questions in such a way that they answer themselves, and in stating his
premises so clearly that the deduction could not be avoided.

Day and night he labored for America.  Month after month, year after
year, he gave himself to the great cause, until there was "a government
of the people and for the people," and until the banner of the stars
floated over a continent redeemed and consecrated to the happiness of
mankind.

At the close of the Revolution no one stood higher in America than
Thomas Paine.  The best, the wisest, the most patriotic were his
friends and admirers; and had he been thinking only of his own good he
might have rested from his toils and spent the remainder of his life in
comfort and in ease.  He could have been what the world is pleased to
call "respectable."  He would have died surrounded by clergymen,
warriors, and statesmen, and at his death there would have been an
imposing funeral, miles of carriages, civic societies, salvos of
artillery, a Nation in mourning, and, above all, a splendid monument
covered with lies. He choose rather to benefit mankind.  At that time
the seeds sown by the great infidels were beginning to bear fruit in
France. The eighteenth century was crowning its gray hairs with the
wreath of progress.

On every hand science was bearing testimony against the church.
Voltaire had filled Europe with light.  D'Holbach was giving to the
elite of Paris the principles contained in his "System of Nature."  The
encyclopaedists had attacked superstition with information for the
masses.  The foundation of things began to be examined.  A few had the
courage to keep their shoes on and let the bush burn.  Miracles began
to get scarce.  Everywhere the people began to inquire.  America had
set an example to the world.  The word liberty was in the mouths of
men, and they began to wipe the dust from their superstitious knees.
The dawn of a new day had appeared.   Thomas Paine went to France.
Into the new movement he threw all his energies.  His fame had gone
before him, and he was welcomed as a friend of the human race and as a
champion of free government.

He had never relinquished his intention of pointing out to his
countrymen the defects, absurdities, and abuse of the English
government.  For this purpose; he composed and published his greatest
political work. "The Rights of Man."  This work should be read by every
man and woman.  It is concise, accurate, rational, convincing, and
unanswerable.  It shows great thought, an intimate knowledge of the
various forms of government, deep insight into the very springs of
human action, and a courage that compels respect and admiration.  The
most difficult political problems are solved in a few sentences.  The
venerable arguments in favor of wrong are refuted with a
question--answered with a word.  For forcible illustration, apt
comparison, accuracy and clearness of statement, and absolute
thoroughness, it has never been excelled.

The fears of the administration were aroused, and Paine was prosecuted
for libel, and found guilty; and yet there is not a sentiment in the
entire work that will not challenge the admiration of every civilized
man.  It is a magazine of political wisdom, an arsenal of ideas, and an
honor not only to Thomas Paine, but to nature itself.  It could have
been written only by the man who had the generosity, the exalted
patriotism, the goodness to say:  "The world is my country, and to do
good my religion."

There is in all the utterances of the world no grander, no sublimer
sentiment.  There is no creed that can be compared with it for a
moment. It should be wrought in gold, adorned with jewels, and
impressed upon every human heart:  "The world is my country, and to do
good my religion."

In 1792, Paine was elected by the department of Calais as their
representative in the National Assembly.  So great was his popularity
in France, that he was selected about the same time by the people of no
less than four departments.

Upon taking his place in the assembly, he was appointed as one of a
committee to draft a constitution for France.  Had the French people
taken the advice of Thomas Paine, there would have been no "reign of
terror."  The streets of Paris would not have been filled with blood in
that reign of terror.  There were killed in the City of Paris not less,
I think, than seventeen thousand people--and on one night, in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, there were killed, by assassination, over
sixty thousand souls--men, women, and children.  The revolution would
have been the grandest success of the world.  The truth is that Paine
was too conservative to suit the leaders of the French revolution.
They, to a great extent, were carried away by hatred and a desire to
destroy. They had suffered so long, they had borne so much, that it was
impossible for them to be moderate in the hour of victory.

Besides all this, the French people had been so robbed by the
government, so degraded by the church, that they were not fit material
with which to construct a republic.  Many of the leaders longed to
establish a beneficent and just government, but the people asked for
revenge.  Paine was filled with a real love for mankind.  His
philanthropy was boundless.  He wished to destroy monarchy--not the
monarch.  He voted for the destruction of tyranny, and against the
death of the tyrant.  He wished to establish a government on a new
basis--one that would forget the past; one that would give privileges
to none, and protection to all.

In the assembly, where all were demanding the execution of the
king,--where to differ with the majority was to be suspected, and where
to be suspected was almost certain death--Thomas Paine had the courage,
the goodness, and the justice to vote against death. To vote against
the execution of the king was a vote against his own life.  This was
the sublimity of devotion to principle.  For this he was arrested,
imprisoned, and doomed to death.  There is not a theologian who has
ever maligned Thomas Paine that has the courage to do this thing.  When
Louis Capet was on trial for his life before the French convention,
Thomas Paine had the courage to speak and vote against the sentence of
death. In his speech I find the following splendid sentiments:


"My contempt and hatred for monarchical governments are sufficiently
well known, and my compassion for the unfortunate, friends or enemies,
is equally profound.

I have voted to put Louis Capet upon trial, because it