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VIEWS
OF
RELIGION
COLLECTED BY
RUFUS K. NOYES, M. D.
PUBLISHED BY
L. K. WASHBURN
BOSTON, MASS. I906
Copyright, 1906, by RUFUS K. NOYES, M. D.
Borton, Mass., 17716. A.
/ 7£~ a
PREFACE
This book contains the views on religion of many great, good, learned and wise persons. Among these are citizens, statesmen, presi- dents, kings, queens, emperors, philosophers, poets, physicians, lawyers, judges, theologians, ministers, authors, musicians and others. Many of these men and women have lived and died, or are still living, without religion, in any sense, or in its usual sense; and they are known to mankind, and their names and memories live, through their energy, character, views, deeds, morals and personal worth.
The object of this book is to show that some of the best and most honorable men and women, as well as those most highly esteemed in public life, are on record as being either extremely liberal anti-relig- ious, or skeptical on religion.
It will also show that goodness, rightness, truth and justice are things to be desired and attained for their own sake; that happiness and success in life do not depend upon having religion or upon going to church; that right conduct does not depend upon religion; that ethics have no natural relation to theology; that Bibles and so-called inspired books are not ethical guides; that morality, therefore, has only a scientific basis; that ministers, priests and pious individuals are not the sole custodians of goodness; and that religionists are not necessarily the ones to be followed, as to ways of thinking, modes of living or theories of dying.
The emblem on the title-page represents the benign and malign elements of Nature; the germ of life is beset by the bacteria of dis- ease and death.
R. K. NO YES.
Oct 24, 1906.
Boston, Mass.
Lowell
Whatever we have dared to think, That dare we also say.
Hooker
Independence of mind, freedom from a slavish respect to the taste and opinion of others, next to goodness of heart, will best ensure our happiness in the conduct of life.
Carlyle
A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses : let him communicate this if he is to communicate anything.
Higginson
Above all thought rises the freedom to think : above all utterance ranks the liberty to utter.
Euripides Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.
HEATHEN TRUTH.
BURNS.
Here's a health to him that would read,
Here's a health to him that would write;
There is none ever feared that the truth should be heard
But him whom the truth would indict.
Antisthenes.
The most needful piece of learning for the uses of Life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Buddha. The Truth is not a matter of opinion, but can be investigated.
Sir Isaac Newton.
There cannot be better service done to Truth than to purge it of all things spurious.
Montaigne.
It is not so much things that torment man as the opinion he has of things.
Lucian. Never profess to believe what we know we do not believe.
Goethe. Why is it that men are nettled on being shown the truth ?
Shelley. Let us see the Truth whatever that may be.
Bulwer. One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth.
Benjamin Rush, M.D. Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.
HEATHEN TRUTH.
BUNDERLIN.
Our only duty towards those who differ from us is to teach them gently.
Michael Faraday.
The philosopher should be a man willing to hear every suggestion, but determined to judge for himself.
St. Jerome.
If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than the truth be concealed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. I do not fear skepticism for any good soul. A just thinker will allow full sway to his skepticism.
Cuvier.
The good that we do men, however great it may be, is but transitory; the truths we bequeath them are eternal.
Theodore Roosevelt, Pres. U.S.A.
In the long run the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.
Cicero.
Before all things, man is distinguished by his pursuit, and investi- gation of truth.
Milton.
Let truth and falsehood grapple. Whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter ?
Herbert.
Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie; a fault which needs it most grows two thereby.
HEATHEN TRUTH.
VOLTAIRE.
I believe it because I have said it, is the motto of mankind. They repeat an absurdity, and by dint of repeating it, come to be persuaded of it.
Plato.
If I appear to say anything true, assent to it, but if not, oppose me, that in my zeal I may not deceive both you and myself and, like a bee, leaving only my sting behind.
George Eliot. It is possible to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.
Richard Hooker, D.D.
Being persuaded of nothing more than this, that whether it be in matters of speculation or of practice, no untruth can possibly avail the patron and defender long, and that things most truly are likewise most behoovefully spoken. . j
Richard Steele.
When one has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. From Diognetus I learned to endure freedom of speech.
Sir William Drummond.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
Buckle. No man is true to himself who fears to express his opinion.
Lowell.
And for success, I ask no more than this, — to bear unflinching witness to the truth.
8 HEATHEN TRUTH.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D. Rough work, Iconoclasm, but the only way to get at Truth.
Prof. Edward Clodd.
As if any reform was ever instituted or abuse swept away without wounding some ignorant or bigoted person's susceptibilities!
Esdras.
As for truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and con- quereth forever more.
Helvetius.
If we would be sure of the truth of our opinions, we should make them public.
views of religion. 9
John Stuart Mill.
The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion -of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular •estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres., U.S.A.
The clergy live by the zeal they can kindle and the schisms they -can create.
William Pitt, Esq., Earl. The only true divinity is humanity.
Jeremy Bentham. Maximize morals; minimize religion.
Prof. Goldwin Smith, D.C.L., LL.D.
If mistrust of the Bible is infidelity, I must allow myself to be called an infidel.
Harriet Martineau.
Christianity has not christianized the world, nor has it the slightest prospect of doing so.
Seneca.
As if nature and God were not both of them one and the same power.
Xenophanes. Nature is one, eternal and without limit.
Thomas Paine.
Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.
Erasmus Darwin, M.D., F.R.S. Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the wreck, unchanging but in form.
io views of religion.
John Meslier. Theology is a continual insult to human reason.
Confucius. Religions are various, but reason is one, and we are all brothers.
GOPAL VlNAYAK JOSHEE.
Perhaps the Christian's forgiveness is as inconceivable as is their god, Jehovah.
Hon. Peter Cooper.
In their ignorance and fear, men built altars. Religion became a trade. The preachers ate roast beef, and the people starved. This is religious history.
Lucretius.
All religions are alike sublime to the vulgar, useful to the politician t. ridiculous to the philosopher.
John Adams, Pres., U.S.A. This would be a pretty good world if there were no religion in it.
D'Alembert.
It seems to me that we could inscribe upon the tombstone of this curate: Here lies an honest priest, who, in dying, asks God's pardon for having been a Christian.
Lucretius.
Not they who reject the gods are profane, but those who accept them.
Dean Farrar.
The church of Christ has lost its hold on multitudes of men in our great cities, and many are persuaded that Christianity is a hostile and organized hypocrisy.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. II
Desiderius Erasmus.
The Bible is like a nose of wax, which can be twisted in any direc- tion.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Our death and our birth are equally the mysterious work of nature.
John Stewart.
Nature is the great integer of being, or matter and motion, without beginning and without end.
Prof. Louis Agassiz.
I confess that I was not prepared to see the Darwinian theory re- ceived as it has been by the best intellects of our time.
Elihu Palmer.
The child of God and the child of the devil are often involved in the same calamity.
James Anthony Froude.
Moral philosophy needs no God or voice of God in the conscience to explain its principles.
Shakespeare.
In religion what damned error, but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness with fair ornament f
Justice Stephen.
The great difficulty in the way of all religions is that mankind do not like them and do not want them.
Robert Owen.
Finding that no religion is based upon facts, and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect upon what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe these errors.
12 views of religion.
Alexander Pope. What can we reason but from what we know ?
Richard Carlile.
Not one single idea can be connected with those fictitious things called spirits.
Justinian.
To live honestly, to hurt no one and to give everyone his dues, ♦embraces all the maxims of the law.
Lord Byron.
There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms As rum and true religion.
E. L. Merbill.
Some dogs are moral without fear of hell or hope of heaven; and all people ought to be as good as the best dogs.
E. L. Merbill. The most ignorant people have the strongest faith in Jesus.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. There is no God; infinity within, infinity without, belie creation.
C. Southwell. The Church and Throne are twin vampires.
Elmina Drake Slenker.
We should strike out the words God, religion, heaven, hell and devil from our language.
M. Guizot. Belief in the supernatural is the special difficulty of our times.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 1$
W. A. Pryke.
Christianity thrived on ignorance; and that to-day is its principal food. More ignorance, more Jesus, and vice versa.
Minnie M. Brown.
Was ever a more untrue statement made or a baser lie printed than this : "Ask and it shall be given unto you."
George Jacob Holyoake.
Looking unto providence for protection against famine and epi- demics still leaves a good deal for physicians and for Poor Law Guardians to do.
Buckle.
A country which remains in its old ignorance will always remaini in its old religion.
James Anthony Froude. Society in its actual life has long been atheistic.
Robert Buchanan.
So far as our daily life and character are concerned, Christianity- is an extinct creed.
Louis Levine.
How the Orthodox who avow they have the truth, fear science, the truth-teller.
Duke of Argyle.
Nothing, however wonderful, which happens according to natural laws, would be considered by anyone as supernatural.
J. Symes.
Damnation is a New-Testament doctrine. It has been held by all sects of Christianity. To repudiate it is to repudiate Christi- anity.
1 6 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
E. C. Walker.
The priest, as the mouthpiece of asserted divine wisdom, ever has been, is now and always will be, the enemy of mankind.
Eliza Burt Gamble.
Christianity has had a trial of more than 1800 years, but criminals, paupers, maniacs and outcast women testify to its failure.
Rev. Octavius B. Frothingham. Christ is inaccessible to scientific research.
A. Beyle. God's excuse is, that he does not exist.
Huxley.
The only question which a wise man can ask himself is whether a doctrine is true or false. Consequences will take care of themselves.
Lord Byron.
The menace of hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villians.
Ernest Mendum. While poverty exists it is criminal to build churches.
Rev. M. Balliet.
The effort to apprehend religion intellectually results in dogmatic theology.
McClintock-Strong.
In the conflict between Christianity and reason, puritan theology holds Christ to be the very center of the system. That all lies in the question whether such a person, historically, be necessary.
views of religion. 1 7
Lord Byron. It is unwise to tell me not to reason, but to believe.
J. M. Wheeler.
In Spain it is a crime to read books unauthorized by the priest, damnation to marry without his blessing and to bring up children without his baptism.
J. Spencer Ellis.
Religion has ceased to have any moral effect and stands in the way of progress.
Robert G. Ingersoll. One blade of grass rightly understood destroys the orthodox creed.
Ernest Renan.
I was brought up by women and priests and therein lies the whole explanation of my good qualities and of my defects.
Emtle Reich.
The Greek and Roman of Pre-Christian times was a citizen par excellence; the best part of his self was identified with his city-state.
William Cobbett.
Next to the devil, professional religionists dread men of under- standing.
Ferdinand C. Baur.
The Epistles to the Colossians and to the Philippians, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, are spurious and were written by the Catho- lic school near the end of the second century.
Tao-Kwang.
All religions are nonsense; but the silly people have always believed in ghosts and in after life.
l8 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Giordano Bruno.
Nothing appears to be really durable, eternal and worthy of the name of principle, save matter alone.
B. F. Underwood. The clergy put the Christian label on everything which has received the approval of mankind.
Mrs. M. C. Coomer.
The churches are the estate of the priesthood, The laity maintain the heirarchy and the heirarchy teaches the laity.
Thomas Carlyle.
We must get rid of this Christ! We must get rid of this Christ ! !
Dupin. The word triad or trinity was borrowed from the pagans.
Harriet Marttneau.
There is no theory of a God, of an author of nature, of an origin of the universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties.
Moliere.
Hypocrisy has become fashionable vice and every fashionable vice passes for a virtue.
Herbert Spencer.
The idea of disembodied spirits is wholly unsupported by evidence and I cannot accept it.
Prof. John Fiske.
One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins every- where.
views op religion. 19
St. Paul. We are fools for Christ's sake.
William Denton.
The temporary nature of Christianity is plainly indicated by its endorsement of the Old Testament.
Lawrence Oliphant.
The only monopoly any church has a right to claim is a monop- oly of the errors peculiar to it.
J. C. Morrison.
Christianity must disappear from among the more advanced popu- lation of the Globe, for it is no longer tenable by educated people.
Rev. Theodore Parker.
Atheists are persons who aim to be faithful to their nature, and their whole nature.
Prof. Tyndall.
If I wished to find men who are scrupulous in their adherence to engagements, whose words are their bond ; if I wanted a loving father, a faithful husband, an honorable neighbor and a just citizen, I should seek him in the band of atheists.
Bishop of Carlile.
I maintain that science is atheism ; that all physical science, prop- erly so-called, is compelled by its very nature, to take no account of the being of God.
James W. Sttllman.
Diseases flourish in filth and in poverty; religion flourishes in ignorance.
Schiller. Man paints himself in the gods.
20 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
M. D. Conway.
The ideas of justice on which our laws rest are opposed to those of the Bible.
Buddha.
If they revile me, I will make no reply; if they strike me, I will not resent the injury; and if they kill me, death is no evil, but eternal rest.
Mosheim.
It was an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by that means the interests of religion might be promoted.
P. J. Proudhon.
The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to con- tinually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience.
P. W. Baldwin.
What a divine bigot Christ must have been to damn people for unbelief.
Martin Luther.
God is a blank tablet, on which there is nothing save that which thou thyself hast written.
Naguet.
Wherever knowledge takes a step forward God recedes a step backwards.
Canon Farrar.
It was necessary for the sacred writers to speak of God as if he had a human body.
King Angati.
If you have come from the other world, lend me one hundred gold pieces and when I go to that world I will give you a thousand.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 21
Andre Lefevre.
Anthropomorphism was from the first, and still remains, the in- herent vice of thought.
J. Wagner. So far as I am concerned the only God whom I know is Nature.
Mrs. Browning. Science was thrust into Europe on the point of a Moorish lance.
Diderot. Is there a sincere Christian ?
Angelus Selesius.
God is a thing intangible, that has no connection with times or space. The more thou graspest at him, the more he escapes thee.
Queen Isabella.
In the love of Christ and his maiden mother, I have caused great misery.
De Lauture. It is a remarkable error to suppose that all nations believe in a God.
Sir John Lubbock.
Those who hold that the lowest savages believe in a supernatural being are maintaining a theory which is in almost complete conflict with fact.
Charles Darwin.
There is ample evidence that numerous races have existed, and still exist, which have no idea of one God or more gods.
Arthur Schopenhauer. The Chinese language has no words for God and creation.
22 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Burrows.
The highly moral Japanese believe neither in God nor in immor- tality; they are a nation of atheists.
Lucretius.
Nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.
Ludwig Feuerbach.
A God existing independent of and above man is nothing more than the external Ego considered subjectively by the subjective human mind.
Xenophanes.
It appears to mortals that the gods are like them in form, apparel and language. The negroes serve black gods, with flat noses; the Thracians gods with blue eyes and red hair. If the oxen and the lions had hands to fashion images, they would give the gods a bovine or leonine shape.
Czolbe.
Have we got one step more ahead in the knowledge of the still excepted ideas of things supernatural than we were thousands of years ago ?
Prof. Ludwig Buchner.
The Pantheistic or universal God is not one hair's breadth better than the personal God of the theist.
N. Scott.
It is five hundred to one but that everyone is damned, because everyone damns all but itself and itself is damned by four hundred and ninety-nine.
Rev. T. Finch.
With few exceptions religious sects manifest an ample portion of a savage spirit and endeavor to vilify and destroy one another.
views of religion. 23
Lord Alfred Tennyson.
Nature, red in tooth and claw, with raving shrieked against the creed.
John Meslier. Every one makes his own God in his own way.
Prof. Tyndall.
Atheists are men to whom moral shiftiness of any kind is sub- jectively unknown.
Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is in the history of Rome rather than in the Bible that we find our models of precepts of political duty, and especially of the duty of patriotism.
Charles Watts.
Fortunately, as Secularists, we have a moral force which depends upon no God.
Rev. Dr. Stalker.
We have a hundred who can deliver the gospel to the barbarian and the unwise, to one who can win for it the attention of the great and the wise.
Bishop of Herford.
The principles of morality are founded in our nature, independ- ently of any religious belief, and are, in fact, obligatory even upon the atheist.
John Milton. New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.
Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose.
Whatever good the deist would do out of fear of punishment, or hope of reward, here or hereafter, the atheist would do simply be- cause it is good.
24 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Dr. E. B. Tylor.
Animism is the ground work of the philosophy of religion. Spirit- ism is but a survival of old savage animism.
Ernest Mendum. If religion is necessary to all men, it should be intelligible to all men.
Beall.
If anything whatever can be eternally self-existent, surely living matter can be. We have thus no need of a creator.
John Wesley, D.D. The giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
Ministers put a monster in the sky and they warm their hands at the imaginary fires of hell. I show them that hell does not exist and they denounce me for destroying their consolation.
Lord Alfred Tennyson.
No sacrifice to heaven, no help from heaven ; that runs through all the faiths of the world.
Grotius.
He who reads ecclesiastical history reads nothing but the roguery and folly of bishops and churchmen.
Buckle.
The religion of mankind is the effects of their improvements and not the cause of it.
John Stuart Mill.
It is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 25
Dr. Ferguson.
Theology, as embodied in the Christian church, was the first to estinguish the light of reason.
Paul Carus.
After a most careful examination, I came,
against my inclination, to the conclusion that there is no God and no soul.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D.
How can God bear it, this ball of anguish forever spinning around before him and the misery going up to his ears!
Hobbes. Theology is the kingdom of darkness.
Voltaire. To say that they change a piece of dough into a God!
Francis William Newman.
My prevalent belief is that our best state morally is simple un- certainity concerning the future life. When I see farther I will go farther.
Rev. W. W. Evarts, D.D. Rationalism is destroying religion.
Chrysologus.
No man ought to employ human reason to discuss a heavenly mystery, nor weigh the word of God in the scales of common reason.
Amianus Marcellinus.
No wild beasts are such enemies to man as the greater part of Christians are deadly to one another.
28 „ VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Men talk of "mere morality" which is much as if one should say, "Poor God," with no one to help him.
Trro Vignol.
Science and freedom and not religion are the factors of civilization, in all kinds of conceptions, sentiments and social conditions.
Rev. Dr. Lardner.
The interpolation in Josephus aught, therefore, to be forever dis- carded from any place among the Evidences of Christianity.
Seneca.
Let the avaricious ones discard their hopes who would expect happiness after death ; and let anxious ones set aside their fears who would fear punishment after death.
Ernest Renan.
The part which God takes in any matter is greater in proportion io the weakness of men.
Socrates.
To die is one of two things; for either the dead may be annihilated and have no sensation of anything whatever, or, as is said, there is a certain change of passage of the soul from one place to another.
Carrington Forster.
The design theory is a chimera and equally futile is the popular idea of a directing intelligence over human affairs.
Richard Jefferies.
There is no God in nature or in matter anywhere. Universal force is absolutely devoid of consciousness.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 2£
Le Brun.
Vishnu was incarnate five hundred times; while Christ is only in- carnate once. That is rather seldom certainly.
Aristotle.
Men create the gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
Plato.
All these things, the arrangement of matter, naturally subsist from necessity.
Harriet Martineau.
The best state of mind is to be found in those who are called philo- sophical atheists.
Bishop Kidder.
Were a wise man to chose his religion by the lives of those who profess it, perhaps Christianity would be the last religion he would choose.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel.
Inoersoll.
If the people were a little more ignorant, astrology would flourish; if a little more enlightened, religion would perish.
J. D. Shaw.
A preacher who talks only of what he knows, shuts his mouth to all that is distinctly religious.
Maimonides.
W;e must not, like the vulgar, understand literally what is written in the book of Genesis.
.3© views of religion.
Harry Hoover.
The very idea of worship implies abasement of the worshipper and is, therefore, incompatible with the true dignity of manhood.
Confucius.
Why worship the dead when you do not know the living? Why talk of spirits when you do not understand men?
J. P. Richardson.
The religious nature of man originated in ignorance and it is destined to die by the increase of knowledge.
Thomas Hobbes.
Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion.
Arthur S. Peake, D. D.
As a rule, critical questions should be let alone in the pulpit. They may unsettle the faith of older Christians.
Giuseppe Garibaldi.
In the midst of Italy, at its very heart, there is a cancer called Popery, an impostor called Pope. This enemy, young man, is the Priest.
I. Zanguill.
At church, while the music and chanting appeal strongly to my senses, I am pained by the untruth contained in the words of the music.
Hudson Tuttle.
I hold the Christian God to account. I arraign him before the tribunal of reason. If perfect, I demand that his works be perfect.
f
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 3 1
G. Barlow. Against the God who forged despair and thunder, I, Man, protest
Charles Knoll Laporte. The Christian God loves us, and the proof is, that we suffer so much.
i Frances Wright.
The essence of religion is fear and its source is ignorance.
James Cotter Morison.
There seems to be no exception to the rule that the older religions -grow the more infirm do they become, the less hold do they keep -on the minds of well-informed and thoughtful men.
Rev. John Macnaught, A. M.
The notion of the Bible being an infallible teacher, even of religion, is contravened by scripture itself.
Peter Bayle.
You cannot put it out of a philosopher's head that the punishment of a creature being continued for an hundred thousand millions of ages successively is inconsistent with the infinite goodness of the creator.
Rev. Samuel M. Jackson.
The time has come for justice to be done to Thomas Paine. He has been dreadfully slandered by the religious public.
Jesus. I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Cardinal Newman.
The chief, perhaps the only, English writer who has any claim to "be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon.
32 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Schiller.
The decalogue did not come from Mt. Sinai. The precepts were those of Ptah-Hotep centuries before Moses. The Egyptian priests and men versed in statecraft aided Moses in claiming them.
Ernest Renan.
Religion is passing away. France is already for the most part without religion, and we can already imagine the time when Europe will be quite without it.
Jeremy Bentham.
The madman is one incomprehensible both in the ends which he seeks and in the means which he takes to attain them. Now both the ends which the Deity proposes, and the means by which he pur- sues them, are alike above the comprehension of our intellects.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
Tt is far more important to love your wife than to love God, and I will tell you why, you cannot help him but you can help her.
Tiberius. No, let the gods defend their own honor.
Frances Wright.
It is not that religion is merely useless; it is mischievous; mis- chievous by its idle terrors, by its false morality, by its hypocrisy, by its fanaticisim and by its dogmatism.
F. J. Gould.
The very obscurity of Jesus, and the very ignorance of his followers,, made all the more possible the growth of myth around his memory.
Arian. 1 am a man, a part of the universe, as an hour is part of the day*
views of religion. 33,
Herbert Spencer.
What knowledge is of most worth? The uniform reply is, science. This is the verdict on all counts.
James Russell Lowell.
Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone;
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan.
Richard Baxter.
The Christian world was made as a cock-pit and the Christian religion made a scorn by the contention of its bishops.
Jehovah.
Come and see the works of God ; he is terrible in his doings towards the children of men.
Prof. C. Toy. Little of Genesis can be accepted as history.
Thomas Paine.
Of all the modes of evidence of any system to which the name of religion has been given, that of miracles is the most inconsistent.
Viscount Amberley.
No amount of sophistry can ever justify the creation of beings whose lives are to terminate in endless suffering.
Hon. George F. Hoar.
Conduct and not speculation should be the main point of the preacher.
Henry Thomas Buckle.
History forces upon us the recognition of pious fraud as a principle which was by no means inoperative in the earliest days of Christianity.
36 views of religion.
Samuel Laing.
The tide is already running breast high in the direction of angosti- cism.
John Calvin.
In brief, if all the pieces of the crucifix were collected together they would make a big ship load. Yet the gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.
Archbishop Temple.
All the countless varieties of the universe were provided for by an original impress and not by special acts of creation.
Canon Farrar.
Science has had a struggle for life against the fury of theological dogmatists, but in every instance the dogmatists have been igno- miniously defeated.
W. Heaford.
But the chief point of all is, was Jesus ever born — here, there, or anywhere? If he ever existed except as a myth, whence arise the silence of Philo and Josephus ?
Matthew, Arnold.
The theological faculty of the University of Paris, the leading mediaeval university, discussed seriously whether Jesus at his as- cension had his clothes on or not. If he had not, did he appear before his apostles naked ? If he had, what became of the clothes ?
St. Paul. Him whom we ignorantly worship.
Archdeacon Jorttn.
What tricks would not these monks have played if they had pos- sessed the secret of electricity !
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 37
Gerald Massey.
It is just as easy to prove that a historic Christ never existed, as it is to demonstrate that the mermaid or the moon-calf, the sphinx or the centaur never existed.
George Eliot.
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistakes.
Conan Doyle.
It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously dis- turbed; that snakes have talked; that women have been turned into salt; that rods have brought water out of rocks.
Praetextatus. Make me a Bishop of Rome and I will turn Christian directly.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
Ministers do not know whether or not there is a heaven, or a hell, or a God, or anything after death; but they talk as though they were raised with God and had played marbles with Christ.
Prof. Paul Haupt.
A Babylonian tablet, giving an account of a deluge and an ark, was baked 2,500 years B.C. The book of Genesis was not compiled much earlier than 500 B.C.
Lord Brougham.
Let the priests of any religion have power, and let men speak for themselves in opposition to their doctrines, in this case persecution is sure to follow.
G. J. Holyoake.
Hell has been the terror, and prayer the bribe, which have won the allegiance of the timid and the needy.
38 views of religion.
John Peck.
The fertile field of Paganism contrasts in a telling manner with the desert of Christianity.
Richard Carlile.
In the beginning there was Reason, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God.
Prof. Goldwin Smith, D.C.L., LL.D.
No one who reads and thinks freely can doubt that the cosmogoni- cal and historical foundations of traditional religious belief have been sapped by science and criticism.
Bishop of Peterborough.
It is not possible for the state to carry out all the precepts of Christ, A state that attempted to do so could not exist for a week.
Rev. Charles Voysey. Christ could not have been God, because he was not a perfect man. He had faults which neither I nor my readers would venture to imi- tate without loss of self-respect.
Florence Bradshaw.
Enough for us that the remembrance of such men as Vanini, Gali- leo and Bayle shall out-live their foe and tyrant, Religion.
Richard Carlile.
No writer who wrote in the first century, or within one hundred years of the alleged birth, or within seventy years of the alleged death, has made any mention of such a person as Jesus Christ.
Prof. Huxley.
I am of the opinion that there is the gravest reason for doubting whether the Sermon on the Mount was ever preached, and whether the so-called Lord's Prayer was ever prayed by Jesus of Nazareth,
views of religion. 39
Rev. Dr. Giles.
There is good grounds for believing that such a collective body of maxims as contained in the Sermon on the Mount was never, at any time, delivered from the lips of our Lord.
R. W. Mackay.
It is a curious fact that the Lord's Prayer may be reconstructed almost verbatim out of the Talmud.
Sir William Jones.
The great maxim claimed as Christian, Do unto others as you would that others do unto you, is expressed in distinct phrases by Thales and Pittacus.
Charles Darwin. I ought or I ought not, constitutes the whole of morality.
Richard Carlile.
The fable of a God or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity.
Rev. George Matheson.
That Confucius is the author of the Golden Rule is undisputed, and therefore it is undisputable that Christianity has incorporated the article from Chinese morality.
Dr. Grant.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the moral code of Confu- cius is the distinct enunciation of the Golden Rule.
Grant Allen.
Religion is the shadow of which culture is the substance. The one pretends to be what the other is in reality.
40 views of religion.
Rev. Henry Frank. You ask me what God is. If I knew I would be God.
Henry M. Taber.
The basis-doctrine of the Christian religion, the fall of man, is utterly and absolutely false.
Richard B. Westbrook, D.D., LL. D.
As literature the Bible is invaluable; as dogma it is worse than useless. The Old and New Testaments which are treated as histori- cal are strictly allegorical.
Karl Heinzen.
If a God could exist without a cause, then the universe could also. If you can imagine a God to exist without the world from eternity, then you can much easier imagine a world to exist from eternity with- out a God.
Rev. John Page Hopps.
"The Bible and the child"; and "How to read the Bible", these two books absolutely surrender the whole position of ortho- doxy.
Rev. R. Heber Newton. You cannot demonstrate God.
Jortin. Hanging and burning for God's sake became the universal practice.
Andrew Jackson, Pres. U. S. A.
Thomas Paine needs no monument made by hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of libertv.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 41
H. C. Lea.
Religion may succeed religion; the sacred rites of the superseded faith becomes the forbidden magic of its successor, as the gods of Greece and Rome were the malignant devils to the Christian Fathers.
Prof. John Fiske.
The doctrine of hell-fire has almost become universally discredited throughout the more enlightened portions of Christendom.
Cardinal Richelieu. The Church is a mere Society.
Lord Boltngbroke.
A great Prince has it in his power to punish ; he thinks fit to pardon ; but he orders his only and beloved son to be put to a cruel death to expiate man's sins. No man, except a parson, dares to say it would be wise, or just, or good.
SCHLEIERMACHER.
Religion belongs neither to the domain of science nor morals, is essentially neither knowledge nor conduct, but emotion and sentiment only.
Gertrude Atherton.
Men admire God because he made himself of their gender, and knew what he was about when he invented women.
C. S. Horne. The Christian churches are not ashamed to trade on the credulity of the ignorant; and often one is tempted to admire the honesty of the Mohammedan.
Benjamin Jowett. I am afraid we fight the battle about the Athanasian creed in too gentle a manner. As Wesley says of predestination; if the damna- tory clauses are true, God is worse than the devil.
42 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Frederick Harrison. Humanity is the grandest object of reverence.
Prof. Samuel Davidson, D.D., LL. D.
If it be asked whether all the New Testament writings proceeded from authors whose name they bear, criticism cannot reply in the affirmative.
Strauss.
Original sin or total depravity transforms God from an object of adoration into a hideous and detestable being.
George Eliot.
The blessed work of helping the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
Hugh Mortimer Cecil.
The theory of evolution having conquered the intelligence of the whole civilized world, even theologians have no longer the hardihood to deny its truth.
James Chadwick.
Few words of theological parlance have been oftener repeated than mere negation and the resulting ossification of clerical intelligence has been immense.
William K. Clifford.
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station can escape the universal duty of questioning all religious beliefs.
Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D.
The Epistle of the Hebrews cannot be shown to have been written by Paul.
John Stuart Mill.
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known.
views of religion. 4j
John Burroughs.
Walt Whitman turns his face to earth and not to heaven ; he finds the miraculous in the things about him, and gods and godesses in the men and women he meets.
G. Santayana.
But for Shakespeare, in the, matter of religion, the choice lay be- tween Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
J. M. Saunders, Ph. D., LL.D.
If mankind are not sufficiently enlightened for that discrimination between good and evil in freethought then must they relapse under the guidance of religious systems which have made wars, persecutions, ignorance and world-wide suffering.
Bronson C. Keeler.
The Bible as we have it to-day is hardly more than three centuries old. The Protestant church is a book worshipper. It makes a fetish of a book.
AUGUSTE COMTE.
Re-organization without God or king, by the systematic worship of Humanity.
Malcolm Quin.
The worship of the God Christ is to-day as dead as was the worship of Jupiter when it was ridiculed by St. Augustine.
VlRCHAUD GAUDHI.
So long as a Hindu is true to his religion he will never eat or touch meat, wines, or liquors; but as soon as he forsakes his religion and becomes a Christian he is at liberty to do all three and more.
44 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
David Hume.
If we take in hand any volume of divinity, or school of metaphy- sics, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or matter ? No. Does it contain any experimental reason- ing concerning matter of fact, or existence ? No. Commit it, then, to the dames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Prof. F. A. Lange.
Enlightenment and education, as a rule, go hand in hand with a decrease of the clergy in relative numbers and influence.
James Anthony Froude.
Theologians no longer speak with authority. Doctrines once fixed as rock are now fluid as water. Truth is what men trow. WTiat is generally doubted is doubtful.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The cure for theology is mother-wit.
Forget your books and Bibles and traditions and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING.
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.
E. Colbert, M. A.
We cannot doubt that the earth has existed during many millions of years, instead of less than six thousand.
Prof. Goldwin Smith, D. C. L., LL.D.
Miracles are the offspring of a childlike fancy in a totally uncriti- cal age.
Rev. Minot J. Savage. No belief at all is better than a belief that God is heartless and cruel.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 45
E. J. Paine.
The general mark of advancement appears to be an endeavor to refer the phenomena of nature and of society to a rational basis instead of a traditional one.
J. E. Hosmer.
Atheism is founded on justice, on science, and on truth.
Leslie Stephen.
Theology of the old stamp, so far from encouraging us to love nature teaches us that it is under a curse.
Friederich Heinrich Jacobi. By my faith I am a Christian; by my reason I am a heathen.
John Stuart Mill.
I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-men; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.
f
Dr. Ludwig Feuerbach.
The purpose of my writings is to make men anthropologians instead of theologians; man-lovers instead of God-lovers; students of this world instead of candidates for another.
Rev. Abner Kneeland.
Like many others, I once thought that a belief in future existence was absolutely necessary to present happiness. I have discovered my mistake.
George W. Foote. Every thinker is his own priest.
La Place. The telescope sweeps the skies without finding God.
46 views of religion.
Hegel. Religion is a matter of imagination, of spirit.
H. T. Buckle.
'Christianity, in common with Buddhism, teaches a thorough cult -of poverty and mendacity; this is counteracted by intellectual culture proceeding from quite another source.
George Jacob Holyoake.
Replace the idea of the usefulness of piety, by that of the piety of usefulness.
Hugh Mortimer Cecil. A rational religion is a scientific impossibility.
Herman Melville. Already we have been the nothing we dread to be.
t
HOFFDING.
The aim of all physiology is to consider all organic processes as physical or chemical.
Prof. Gold win Smith, D. C. L., LL. D. We may bid farewell to Paul's doctrine of the atonement.
Oscar Peschel.
The worship of a Deity is extinguished the instant that it ceases to satisfy the requirements of causality.
Ouida. Dare is not a word to use in Rome.
views of religion. 47
Samuel Bailey.
No philosophical speculation should begin with a fiction; it is fic- tion to represent natural law, that is, the qualities of objects around us, as divine commands.
Dr. Hardwick.
The doctrine of the atonement is calculated to annihilate every spark of dignity and justice in man's nature and to utterly demoralize him.
Lucy A. Malory.
It is because so many are looking for some supernatural way in which the world is going to be redeemed from its evils that progress halts.
Jesse Torrey.
Religion, the grand farce of pulpit puppet-shows, imaginary gods, devils, hells and other cruel terrors has been adopted as the vast engine for the oppression of mankind.
Voltaire.
On religion many are destined to reason wrongly; others not to reason at all; and others to persecute those who do reason.
Dr. Duyen J. H. Ward, Ph. D., B. D.
Religion is almost the least clear of our ideas. One runs a mortal risk of dethroning a man's faith by the confusion one puts him to in asking him to define it.
Bishop Butler.
Reason is the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning things, even revelation itself.
W. E. H. Lecky.
Theology supplying all the images that acted most powerfully upon the imagination, most madness, for many centuries took a theological cast
48 views of religion.
Pascal. Blessed are the healthy, for theirs is the Kingdom of man.
Charles Watts.
Columbus was sufficiently a freethinker to deny the church asser- tion that the earth is flat.
Edward Clodd, F. R. A. S.
Belief in miracles, the incarnation, the resurrection and the as- cension of Jesus, on which the fundamental tenets of Christianity are based, is slowly perishing.
Buddha.
All living beings resemble those lamps. They are lit and flicker for a while and then dark night reigns over all.
I. K. Maagaard.
If there is a God all-wise and never trivial, he never could have designed me to say he is not — does not exist.
John Locke.
There is nothing in our intellect that has not previously been in our senses.
Malcolm Dean Miller.
An honest person must admit that there is no foundation in ab- solute truth for any religious belief.
Charles W. Eliot, LL. D., Pres. H. C.
We do not claim that religious truth was revealed to us 4000 or 2000 years ago and is there fixed in the world for us to apprehend.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 49
William C. Sturoc.
The aids to theological superstition in the shape of metaphysical disquisitions, or wanderings amid the mists of mere verbal confu- sions, have had there day.
Hallam.
All writers concur in stigmatizing the dissoluteness which prevails among the clergy.
Baron D'Holbach.
The beings which man pictures to himself as above nature, or distinguished from her, are always Chimeras.
Rev. J. W. Chadwick.
The Nicene creed, the basis of Christianity, is all theology, with- out a syllable of ethics.
La Place.
Far from me be the dangerous maxim, that it is sometimes useful to mislead, to enslave and to deceive mankind to ensure their happi- ness.
Cicero.
The principle that impells us to right conduct and warns us against guilt, springs out of the nature of things.
John Emery McLean.
Milton and Cowper in their later days disused religious offices as no longer subservient to their wants.
Judge James G. Maguire.
The Pope enjoys the unenviable, not to say, infamous, distinction of being dangerous only to those who confide in him.
50 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Edward Clodd, F. R. A. S.
Freethinkers have an immense task to perform — namely, to destroy the power of priests and parsons, by ridicule, exposure and incessant attack.
Judge Thomas Lumsiden Strange.
It is impossible that the sin of one man can be imposed upon another, nor can blood of any sort wipe away sin.
Prof. John Fiske.
The thought of to-day will shortly reach a place where there will be no place nor use for orthodoxy.
John Stuart Mill.
The a priori arguments for the existence of God are unscientific ; the idea of God can only prove the idea of him.
George Henry Lewes.
If we are to select the theological mode of thought as our guide we must ignore all experience, sweep away all science, and apply to the Pope or to the Archbishop of Canterbury for answer to the questions in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Is any cultivated mind prepared for it?
Prof. Boyesen.
It is beyond dispute that Christianity has been the strongest of a number of co-operating factors to accomplish degeneracy.
W. Symington Brown, M.D.
We not only have no evidence that a personal God exists, but the mere statement is a contradiction. For a person is necessarily limited ; he must have bounds or outlines ; whereas God is always represented as being omnipresent.
^ j'jv 11 1964 *J
VIEWS OF RELIGION. SI
HOBBES.
Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing.
Epiphanius. Wickedness is the only heresy.
Dr. Louis Buchner.
As man has sprung from nature, he can have no other being than nature, and as there is no force without matter, and no soul without body, the personal mind of man returns after death again into the universal original force, that is to say, there is no personal immor- tality.
Henry Rowley.
God exists only in the imaginations of his worshippers. You can find him nowhere else.
Emmanuel Kant.
Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and re- ligious folly.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
I learned from Diognetus not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers, and about the driving away of demons and such things.
Otto Wettstein.
It requires but a schoolboy's degree of discernment to discover that God does not exist. His non-existence is self-evident.
Elmina Drake Slenker. All gods are man-made imaginings.
A. Schopenhauer. Religions are like fire-flies; they require darkness in order to shine.
52 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Prof. W. K. Clifford.
Do I seem to say: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die ? Far from it; on the contrary, I say, Let us take hands and help; for this day we are alive together.
Wendell Phillips.
The Bible is a poem, and God is a great poet ; and a poet has great license.
Lalande.
I have searched through the heavens; and nowhere have I found a trace of God.
Marquis De Lafayette.
If ever the liberty of the American Republic is destroyed it will be the work of Roman Catholic priests.
H. A. Taine.
An Englishman would be exceedingly mortified if he had no faith in another life. He has a sort of antique map, which is Christianity explained by a highly revered body of geographers, who are the clergy, and he never dreams of distrusting either his geographers or his map.
Thomas Campanella. The ignorant call him a heretic whom they cannot refute.
Arthur Schopenhauer.
Whether one makes an idol of wood, stone, metal, or constructs it from absolute ideas, it is all the same ; it is idolatry, whenever one has a personal being in view to whom one sacrifices, whom one in- vokes, whom one thanks.
Sterling.
Experimental philosophy is the offspring of reason and nature; the empirical school of the Christian contains the pedantic sophisms and the barbaric jargon of theologians.
views of religion. 53
Thomas Paine.
If thou trustest to the book called the Scriptures, thou trustest to the rotten staff of fables and of falsehood.
Lord Alfred Tennyson.
It is hard to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe. I be- lieve in God, not from what I see in Nature, but from what I find in man.
Prof. George D. Herron, D.D.
There can be no rich Christians. Individual wealth is simply impossible to one who follows Christ.
Major- General Forlong.
All gods, being the work of men's minds, require to be kept up to their duties ; and only if our God never forsakes us do we praise his holy name.
David Hume.
If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical nar- ration we are sure to meet afterwards with a denial of the miseries which attend it.
C. C. Moore.
The story of Genesis shows that it was not the original purpose of God to make any women.
Theodore Winthrop. I was a radical in my day; be thou the same in thine.
M. Paul Bert, M. C. D. It is one of the features of the Jesuistical casuistry to always take the part of the sinner.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox. So many gods! So many creeds! So many paths that wind and wind — Whilst just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs.
54 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
J. W. Dean.
If the Bible needs interpreters it is the surest sign that it emanated from no higher source than the human brain and hand.
J. L. Moshedi. Ignorance and fear generate and nourish religions.
W. H. Lamaster.
Religions, like everything else in the world, are seen to undergo birth, growth, maturity, decay and, finally death.
Rev. B. Fay Mills.
Religion itself is called upon to show why it should any longer claim our allegiance.
Rev. Lyman Abbott, D. D.
A large and influential body of Christian scholars of orthodox standing do not believe in what is called the verbal or literal inspira- tion of the Bible.
Gen. M. Boulanger.
A true revelation, proceeding from a just and good God, and nec- essary to all mankind, ought to be clear enough to be understood by all the human race.
Lecky.
The fathers laid it down as a distinct proposition, that pious frauds are justifiable and even laudable.
Thomas Scott.
How the New Testament narratives, unhistorical as they have been shown to be, came into existence is not our business to explain.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 55
T. W. Doane.
The Christian story, as the Gospels narrate it, cannot stand the test of criticism.
Sir William Jones.
The whole crowd of gods and godesses of ancient Rome means only the powers of nature and principally those of the sun.
Rev. S. D. McConnell, D. D.
There is not a single confession of faith that is believed in, in its entirety, by even the most conservative members of the ministry of the church.
James Bonwick. Our love for what is old makes us keep still in the church.
Pliny.
Behold that truly sacred thing, the universe, eternal and immense, which includes within itself everything; it is all in all, or rather itself is all. It is the work of nature and itself is nature.
Ocellus Lucanus.
The universe, when considered in its totality, gives us no indication whatever which would betray an origin or portend a destruction.
Charles Francis Dupuis.
Because man is only an effect he wanted also the world to be one, and in the delirium of his metaphysics, he imagined an abstract being called God, and thus did man create God.
Democritus. The world is managed by nature.
Charlotte Baldwin. Bread is the God of the hungry.
$6 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Prof. Alexander Winchell, LL. D.
I shall proceed to indicate the evidences which seem to sustain the opinion that the biblical Adam was not absolutely the first man.
Charles Morris.
It is being more and more widely held that no belief can be sacred. They who base their belief upon facts are far superior intellectually, and certainly equal morally, to those who accept dogmas upon author- ity.
John M. Bonham.
Nothing can be more of a fallacy than to suppose that Nature pursues one method in dealing with secular theory, and another in dealing with reverent theory.
Louis Tacolliot.
To religious despotism, imposing speculative theological delu- sions, may be attributed the decay of nations.
LUCRETIA MOTT.
Truth for authority and not authority for truth.
Goethe. Living will teach you to live better than preacher or Bible.
Abner Kneeland.
What are meant by the terms God, devil, heaven, hell, angel, spirit ? Do they mean anything except what exists only in the imagination ? If so, why can they not be defined ?
Thomas Hobbes.
Immortality is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings, that they knew it supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them that knew others that knew it supernaturally.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 57
Arthur Collins.
The day is rapidly dawning when our only deities will be the works of genius, and our only prayer the remembrance of our most illustri- ous chiefs.
Gen. Ethan Allen.
To make known our wants to God by prayer is impossible, since his ommiscient mind knows all things.
Clifton N. Levy, A. B.
The gods were men. Amelius' discovery carries history back to ten thousand years ago.
Lord Bolingbroke.
I do not say, that to believe in a future state is to believe in a vulgar error; but this I say, it cannot be demonstrated by reason; it is not in the nature of it capable of demonstration.
Benedict Spinoza.
They say man was deceived and tempted by the devil. But who was it that led astray and tempted the devil himself ? Who, I ask, rendered this the most excellent of intelligent creatures so mad, that he wished to be greater than God ?
Rene Des Cartes.
I have always thought that the two questions of the existence of God, and the nature of the soul, were the chief of those which ought to be demonstrated rather by philosophy than by theology.
i
M. De Voltaire. Speaking philosophically no person believes the Trinity.
Prof. A. E. Dolbeare.
The laws of Moses like the laws of Solomon were man made, and have no higher authority.
60 views of religion.
David Hume. A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.
Thomas Burnet, D. D.
If God had a mind to make a woman start from one of Adam's ribs, it is true it seems to be a matter not very proper, but what more perplexes me is, how, out of one rib, the whole mass of a woman's body could be built.
Baron D'Holbach.
The doctrine of spirituality, such as it now exists, offers nothing but vague ideas, or, rather, is the absence of all ideas.
John B. Smith. There are bad atheists as well as bad Christians.
Robert Taylor, B. A.
Unbelief, and not belief, is the safe side, and a man is more likely to be damned for believing the gospel, and because of his having be- lieved it, than for rejecting and despising it, as I do.
Joseph Barker.
We say that the Bible bears on its very face the marks of human imperfection and error. This is true of every Bible in existence.
Ex. Rev. P. C. Marsh. Religion is a hallucination of the brain.
Lord Byron.
Even gods must yield — religions take their turn;
'Twas Jove's, 'tis Mahomet's — and other creeds
Will rise with other years, 'till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds;
Poor child of doubt and death, — whose hope is built on reeds.
views of religion. 6 1
Raynal.
It is by the double abuse of credulity and authority, that all the absurdities in matters of religion have been introduced into the world.
Sir James Mackintosh.
It is time that men should tolerate nothing ancient that reason does not respect.
Epictetus.
Where are you going ? It cannot be into a place of suffering ; there is no hell. You are going to be again peacably associated with the elements from which you have parted.
Rev. G. E. Fifield.
This religious combination is dangerous; it is trying to drive the entering wedge which shall destroy the American spirit of toleration*
Gen. Ethan Allen.
"And these signs shall follow them that believe." Now if any of them will drink a dose of deadly poison and it does not hurt them, I will subscribe to their divine authority.
Winwood Reade.
It has been shown that this theory of a benignant God is contra- dicted by the laws of nature.
Prof. Arnold Dodel, Ph. D.
The antagonism between faith and knowledge seems to find no end. On the contrary the gulf between the two is gradually expanding.
Plutarch.
Ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics — a picture of the operations of nature.
62 views of religion.
Edward Gibbon.
The more learned ecclesiastics will indeed have the satisfaction of reprobating in the closet what they read in the church.
Oliver Cromwell.
Go hence, the Lord has not been to my house for a good many years.
John M. Bonham. All men stand as manifestations of nature.
Napoleon. Imagination rules the world.
Horace Greeley.
Long slumbered the world in the darkness of error, And ignorance brooded o'er earth like a pall ; And the chains which bound nations in ages benighted, Were cast to the haunts of the bat and the mole.
T. H. Huxley.
Evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural interventions.
John William Draper, M.D., LL. D.
Religion must relinquish that imperious, that domineering, position which she has so long maintained against science.
Feuerbach.
As man is so is man's God.
Max Nordau.
No scientific or rational proof has ever been offered in evidence of the reality of God.
views of religion. 63
Ulrich Hutten.
Untruth should be exposed, whether its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil.
LUDWIG BOERNE.
If any sect should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil, the catechism of such a religion could be found ready made in the code of several monastic colleges.
Felix L. Oswold., M. D.
The root of all hypocrisy is the belief in the atoning efficacy of faith.
Xenophanes.
There is no such thing as passing from non-entity to entity or the reverse.
R. Schamm, D. D.
The scientific faith is grander than any that the religious world has yet attained.
Joseph Barker.
On looking back on the earlier periods of my life, I first see proofs that the orthodox doctrine of original sin is a falsehood.
E. C. Walker. Religion fears inquiry. Religion averts her face from the dawn.
J. P. Richardson.
If there was evidence tending to prove the existence of God we should never have heard of the necessity of faith.
Baltzer.
Eternal nature, to thee my soul shall cling ! All that I am thou gavest me; Let me return to thee in death.
64 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Martin Luther.
As regards the Sabbath or Sunday, there is no necessity of keeping it ; but if you do, it ought not to be on account of Moses* Command- ment, but because nature teaches us from time to time to take a day of rest.
John Milton.
The laws of the Sabbath being thus repealed, that no particular day of worship has been appointed in its place is evident.
Grotius.
These things refute those who suppose that the first day of the week was substituted in place of the Sabbath, for no mention is made of such a thing by Christ or his Apostles.
Jeremy Taylor. The Lord's day is merely an ecclesiastical institution.
Archbishop Whately.
It will be plainly seen that Jesus did decidedly and avowedly vio- late the Sabbath. The dogma that the observance of the Sabbath is a part of the moral law is to me utterly unintelligible.
Neander.
The festival of Sunday, like all other festivals, was always a human ordinance.
Benjamin Franklin.
When I travelled in Flanders, in the afternoon on
Sunday, both high and low went to the play or to the opera, where there was plenty of singing and dancing. I looked around for God's judgments, but saw no signs of them.
Denis Diderot. The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 65
FlCHTE.
The deity is not an object of knowledge, but of faith; not to be conceived, but to be felt.
Edward Gibbon.
The evidence of the heavenly witnesses — the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost — would now be rejected in any court of justice.
John William Draper, M.D., LL. D.
Faith must render an account of herself to reason. Mysteries must give place to facts.
Max Nordau.
Religion is in fact a relic of the childhood of the human race; I go still further and say that it is a functional weakness, caused by the imperfections of our organs of thought.
W. S. Bell.
Theologians have taught for centuries that God created matter out of nothing. Enlightened people have to smile when they hear these stories repeated.
Frederick Douglass.
I prayed for freedom twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
Does God always do just what ought to be done ? Yes. Why do you pray to him? Because he is unchangeable.
Samuel Preston.
The God-idea has been the foundation of all the superstitions in the world, when men have learned to dispense with it their emancipa- tion will be great indeed.
66 views of religion.
Charles Stevenson. When man is powerless heaven cannot save.
Hugh O. Pentecost. I want the idea of God entirely rooted out of the mind.
P. T. Barnum.
The orthodox faith painted God as a revengeful being, and yet people talk about loving such a being.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U.S.A.
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.
Montaigne. Men make themselves believe that they believe.
Hon. John M. Thurston.
Spain is a Christian nation. She has set up more crosses in more lands, beneath more skies and under them has butchered more people than all the other nations of the earth combined.
Kersey Graves.
An all-wise God would not let things get into such a condition as to require the murder of his only son from any consideration whatever.
Trelevan. The devil is as necessary as the Almighty to the orthodox faith.
D. K. Tenney.
The Bible with its gods and the sacred books of all other religions with their gods, will, by-and-by, be relegated to the attic of ancient curiosities, where they belong.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 67
Charles Bradlaugh, M. P. Belief in God is not a faith founded on reason.
Elihu Palmer.
The Christian world worships three infinite gods and one omni- scient devil.
Thomas Herttell.
All mankind have been at all times more or less engaged in the matter of superstition, called religion.
Rev. G. H. Combs.
Faith in theology has died out; faith in form, in ceremony, in in- fallible book, will not survive.
Matilda Joslyn Gage.
The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.
Rev. A. H. Lewis, D. D.
Immoral houses were licensed in London in the twelfth century, the Bishop of Westminster receiving the proceeds of such license.
Rev. Mtnot J. Savage, D. D.
I would rather sweep away all belief in God, soul, and future life, than to keep the old beliefs of the last two thousand years.
St. Augustine.
The same thing which is now called Christian religion existed among the Ancients.
Baron D*Holbach.
The doctrine of spirituality affords nothing but vague ideas; it is rather a poisoner of all ideas.
68 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Hon. Thomas B. Reed.
If I were to select the greatest triumph of the human race, I should select our victory over the fear of the unknown, over demons and witches and all the false gods.
Schiller.
O, mother! empty mockery, God hath not justly dealt with me; Have I not begged and prayed in vain ; what boots it now to pray again?
W. Stewart Ross.
That there is anything divine or supernatural about the Bible, more than there is about the Vedas and the Koran and the Times Newspaper is an utterly untenable hypothesis.
Dr. Engledue.
If the sum of all bodily functions — life, be not an entity, how can the product of the action of one portion of the body — brain, be an entity ?
Herbert N. Casson.
The churches would not be attacked if it were not for their impu- dent and shameless pretentions.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
But as to creation, where there is no discontinuity there can be no origination.
Dr. Isaac Watts.
The greatest part of the Christian world can hardly give any reason why they believe the Bible to be the word of God, but because they have always believed it, and as they were taught so from their infancy.
Dr. Lyman Beecher.
Females of education and refinement — females of respectable stand- ing in society, are made converts to atheism.
views of religion. 69
Dr. Joseph Priestley.
It has generally been supposed that there are two distinct kinds of substance in human nature — matter and spirit, or mind. I maintain that there are not. The notion of two substances that have no com- mon property, and yet are capable of intimate and mutual action, is absurd.
George Combe.
I have known men in whom the reasoning organs were amply developed and well cultivated, who assured me that they could not reach the conviction of the being of a God.
Lemuel K. Washburn. Religion is inherited fear.
Elihu Palmer. The spiritualization of human existence has made man a fool.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U.S.A.
Gouverneur Morris has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system, Christianity, than he did himself.
John Prescott Guild.
To talk about religious truth is to talk pious rot. Religion is fable, the weaving and worship of myths.
Voltaire.
I am tired of having it repeated that twelve men were sufficient to establish Christianity. I feel like proving to them that one man is enough to destroy it.
Max Nordau, M. D.
Every separate act of a religious ceremony becomes a fraud and a criminal satire when professed by a cultivated man of this nineteenth century.
70 views of religion.
William Godwin. The system of religious comformity is a system of blind submission.
Gen. Ethan Allen.
Reason, therefore, must be the standard, by which we determine the respective claims of revelation. If reason rejects the whole of these revelations, we ought to return to the religion of nature and reason.
Rudyard Kipling.
There is one creed, and only one, the common creed of common sense.
Dr. Felix L. Oswold.
If paradise can be regained we should try to enjoy it on this side of the grave.
Lord Francis Bacon.
Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural honor, to laws, to reputation, all of which may be guides to moral virtue, though religion were not.
D. M. Bennett.
The more the laws governing the universe are understood, the more apparent it becomes to observing minds that natural causes govern natural operations and produce natural results.
John Meslier.
Long enough have the instructors of the people fixed their eyes on heaven; let them at last bring them back to earth.
Sir Isaac Newton.
We are to admit no more causes of things than are sufficient to explain appearances.
Shakespeare. Nature is made better by no mean — but nature makes that mean.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 7 1
Charles Bradlaugh, M. P.
If God is affirmed to represent an existence which is distinct from the existence of which I am a mode, then I deny God, and affirm that it is impossible that God can be.
Wordsworth.
Come forth into the light of things; Let nature be your teacher.
Lord Alfred Tennyson.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Martin Luther.
There is something in the office of a Bishop which is dreadfully demoralizing.
Jesus.
How much then is a man better than a sheep, wherefore it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath day.
Lucretius.
Wherefore, as nothing nature's power creates, so death dissolves, but not annihilates.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
What is it to die ? We shall find it to be nothing but the mere work of nature, but it is a childish folly to be afraid of what is natural.
Ellen Battelle Dietrick.
Girls of Christian families are commonly inoculated in their ig- norant and, therefore, helplessly credulous youth, with unquestioning belief that the New Testament was written in the first century of our era.
J2 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
William Wollston.
He who religiously regards truth and nature, will not only not be unjust, but more, not unmerciful, and much less cruel.
Charles Bradlaugh, M. P.
What effect is there which the forces of existence are incapable of producing ?
VOLTAIRE.
Our priests are not, in truth, what a vain people see; Their craft is only born of our credulity.
Zeno.
Universal matter is necessarily eternal: there is no real existence which is not corporeal.
Herbert Spencer.
Over that art which you say adds to nature, is an art which nature makes.
Dryden.
All things are altered, nothing is destroyed, The shifted scene from some new show employed.
Ralph Cudworth.
The universe is always substantially the same, neither more nor less, but only proteanly transformed into different shapes.
Dr. Cleig.
None of the Philosophers of ancient Greece appears to have be- lieved a creation possible.
Jeremy Taylor. Ignorance is the mother of devotion.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 73
John G. Whtttier.
The wolf's with the flock, And the fox with the fowl, When freedom we trust With the crozier and cowl.
Montaigne.
Diagoras and Theodoras flatly deny that there were ever any gods at all.
Aristotle.
No entity in nature could either be brought from nothing or re- duced to nothing.
Sir Thomas More.
The holiest and best religion in the world might be overlaid with so much foolish superstition that it would be quite choked with it.
-W. Stewart Ross.
You created not these, O God; but we created you.
You are made in the image of man ; in the image of man are you made.
Max Muller.
As regards the denial of a creator, I do not think that any one passage from the books of the canon, in any way, presupposes the belief in a personal God or a creator.
John Locke.
How many men have no other ground for their tenets than the supposed honesty, or learning, or number of those of the same pro- fession.
Stephen Girard.
Keep the tender minds of the orphans free from the excitement which clashing doctrines and sectarian controversy are so apt to produce.
74 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Francis S. M. Fenelon.
All is uncreated. God is no more spirit than body, nor body than spirit; to speak properly he is neither the one nor the other; for to say there are two sorts of substance is to express a precise difference of being, and consequently a limit, which can never suit a universal being.
Epicurus. All we are to ascribe to nature.
Susan B. Anthony.
The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
Montesquieu. All pagans do not merit eternal damnation.
Giordano Bruno.
The foolish renounce this world and pursue an imaginary world to come.
Buckle.
The system of morals propounded in the New Testament contains no maxim which had not been previously enunciated.
Hon. W. E. Gladstone.
It may be that we shall find Christianity itself is in some sort a scaffolding, and that the final building is a pure and perfect theism.
Dryden.
A hapless babe, first he by instinct cries ! He next essays to walk, but downward prest, On four feet, imitates his brother beast. Now sapless, on the verge of death he stands, Contemplating his former feet and hands.
views of religion. 75
Thomas Paine. The world is my country, and to do good is my religion.
Voltaire.
In reading the Bible, I am doing as the counsel in a law suit; I am examining the papers of the other side.
Clara B. Neyman.
The truth is that Christianity has in many instances circumscribed woman's sphere of action, and has been guilty of great injustice to- wards the whole sex.
Antoninus.
Nothing which now exists can proceed from nothing, nor be re- solved into non-existence.
Selden. Searching the Scriptures has undone the world.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. *
The real difficulty in woman's case is that the whole foundation of the Christian religion rests on her temptation and man's fall.
Martin Luther.
If men only believe enough in Christ, they can commit adultery and murder a thousand times a day without perilling their salvation.
Jonathan Swift.
Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives; for instance whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a cer- tain berry be blood or wine.
Jesus.
In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrine the command- ments of men.
76 views of religion.
Claude Adrian Helvetius.
What is more barbarous than the institution of convents among the papists.
J. J. Rousseau. There is an universal justice springing from Reason above.
Xenophanes. The infinite universe cannot have emanated from nothing.
Thomas Chubb.
Religious institutions cannot possibly lay men under any reasonable restraint which natural religion does not lay them under.
George Le Clerk Buffon. Death destroys the form but has no influence on the matter.
Marie Corelli.
The world is growing tired of monotonous sermons on the old doctrine of original sin and necessary sacrifice.
John Stewart.
Religion or priestcraft will probably maintain its ground longer in England than in any other country, notwithstanding the progress of its great enemy — wisdom.
Thomas Paine. My own mind is my own church.
William Pitt, Earl.
Superstition, or what the world means by religion, is the greatest possible encouragement to vice, by setting up something as religion, which shall atone and commute for the want of virtue.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 77
O. B. Whitford, M. D.
Now that there is no more a hell and that the devil is dead, what are we paying out millions of dollars to the clergy for?
Parmentdes. No real entity is either made or destroyed
Mary Wollstonecraft.
Madame De Genlis affords some useful hints, but I shall pass over her vehement argument in favor of the eternity of future punishments because I blush to think that a human being should ever argue ve- hemently in such a cause.
John Stewart.
The philosophy of Theism assumes the opinion that all organisms must be produced by one intelligent mind; but if we examine the operations of nature, we find that each organism, each relation or analogy, contradicts this assertion.
John R. Kelso, A. M.
The first ten words of the Bible contain two assumptions and one assertion.
Charles Morris.
Mythology, however, occupies the most prominent position in the growth of religious beliefs.
Rev. Mr. Geikie.
No hint is given in the New Testament of Christ's appearance; and the early church, in the absence of all guiding facts, had to fall back on imagination.
Mrs. Mary Lincoln.
Mr. Lincoln had no hope and no faith, in the usual acceptation of the words.
80 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Prof. Henry Maudsley, M. D.
It is absurd to think that mankind will cease to feel emotion, even though it should say in its heart that there is no personal God.
Lucretius.
Besides were souls immortal, ne'er began, But crept in the limbs to make up man; Why cannot they remember what was done In former times ?
Empedocles.
There is no production of anything anew, but only mixture and separation of things mingled.
Lord Bolingbroke.
The world is as well fitted for a dog as for man, with respect to physical nature.
Richard Carlile.
Sir Isaac Newton denounced the idea of a Heaven, and of a God whose being was limited to any part of space, or whose authority was circumscribed by the fictitious potent monarch of that fictitious place, hell.
John L. Stoddard.
I would rather associate with a nice wholesome sinner than with an uncleanly saint.
Elihu Palmer.
I know of but one remedy for the moral pestilence of superstition, which is, to assemble the inspired idiots of all countries, that reason would burst her sides with laughter.
Buddha.
The law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 8 1
Rev. B. Fay Mills.
By the great modern gospel brought to us by science we have come to learn once for all the utter lack of foundation for any theory con- cerning the fall of man.
John M. Robertson.
The reconciliation of religion and science consists in religion, as such, disappearing.
Prof. Henry Maudsley, M. D.
Herein lies the imputable mischief of prayer, that it is an imbe- cility of will.
M. De Montaigne.
Of mean understandings, little inquisitive, and little instructed, are made good Christians.
Vedas.
The ignorant assert that the Universe did not exist and that it was
created out of nothing. O Ye, whose hearts are pure! how could something arise out of
nothing ?
Heraclitus.
The universe has been made neither by one of the gods nor of men, but it has been, and is, and will be eternally.
John Gasper Spurzheim.
It seems absurd that a particular profession should enjoy the privilege to establish religious opinions incumbent on all the rest of the community.
Herbert Spencer.
The cruelty of a Fijian God, who, represented as devouring the souls of the dead, may be supposed to inflict torture during the process is small compared with the cruelty of a God who condemns men to tortures which are eternal.
82 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
William Lawrence.
When shall we find proof of the mind's independency on the bodily structure ?
Frederic Harrison.
Although the unknowable is logically said to be something, yet the something of which we neither know nor conceive anything is practically nothing.
Frances Wright.
My friends, I am no Christian, in the sense usually attached to that word. I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mohamedan nor theist; I am but a member of the human family.
Virchow. Life is a part of the sum total of matter.
Xenophanes. It is impossible that anything should be made out of nothing.
John Wesley.
They are well pleased that their parishioners grow more diligent and honest, but, the truth is, the Methodists know and teach that all that is nothing before God.
Robert Owen.
Men will no longer expend their time and faculties upon imaginary future existences which belong not to their nature.
Mrs. Lynn Linton. God has been incarnate in man no more than in the Egyptian bull.
John M. Bonham. The whole theory of theology is contradicted by its practice.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 83
John Mason Good, M. D.
Atheism is at this moment and has been for nearly a thousand years, the established belief of the whole of the Burman Empire.
SWAMI VlVEKANANDA.
If God comes in the form of a dove it is the Holy of Holies. But if He comes in the form of a cow, it is heathen superstition; condemn it. That is how the world goes.
James Martineau.
If we cannot think of anything as existing, then, surely, we have no right to assert its existence.
Heinrich Heine.
I shall turn Japanese.
They hate nothing so much as the cross.
I shall turn Japanese.
Dr. William Henry Channing.
Injustice to the sex reached its culmination in the enthronement of a personal God with a son to share his glory, but wifeless, mother- less, daughterless.
Rev. Robert Collyer, D. D.
Orthodoxy has exchanged the old fetters of iron for silken bands with an elastic base. The day is not far distant when the old belief will have rotted down.
Michelet.
The parson, being Lord, expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride, but was willing to sell his right to the husband.
Canon Charles Kingsley.
The Christian church was swamped with hysteria from the third to the sixteenth centurv.
84 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Thomas Moore.
Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
Joseph Butler.
Since consciousness is a single and individual power, it should seem that the subject in which it resides, must be so too.
John Stewart.
Religion, being divested of the grosser ceremonies, or proofs of its absurdity, leaves the mind fewer substitutes for real virtue, probity and sympathy.
Soame Jenyns.
By what sure mark her essence can we trace, when each religion, age and place, sets up some fancy idol of its own ?
Shadworth H. Hodgson.
It is bad enough to be told by theologians, .... that there are noumena behind phenomena; but that this noumena is entirely unknowable .... would require a greater than Hegel to comprehend.
John Ruskin.
Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U.S.A.
I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by the Lockes, the Tracys and the Stewarts.
Heber Newton, D. D.
If mortality be a fact, it must be a material fact. We know nothing of life unclothed with organization. We know nothing of mind apart from matter.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 85
Euphrates.
Praise and welcome that philosophy which agrees with nature, and shun that which pretends to be inspired by the gods.
Parker Pillsbury.
I studied the Trinity many weeks in two theological seminaries. Just one thing had been learned, and no more, and that was that nobody, not even the professors themselves, knew, or could know, anything about it.
Jehovah. To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me ?
Confucius. Heaven is principle — is to be something, and not to go somewhere.
Thomas Inman, M. D.
Men can live peaceably together without religion, just as do the bisons, buffaloes, antelopes and even wolves.
Joseph Henshaw.
Man's life is like unto a winter's day; Some break their fast, and so depart away; Others stay dinner, then depart full-fed; The longest age but sups, and goes to bed.
Lucretius.
I give instruction concerning mighty things and proceed to free the mind from the closely-confining shackles of religion.
Canon Farrar.
A great Puritan divine said that he preferred to believe the Holy Ghost rather than Newton, yet Newton was absolutely right, and the Puritan divine was hopelessly wrong.
86 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
G. W. Brown, M. D.
Is not the fact fully established, .... that the character, Jesus, .... is wholly a creature of the imagination? Like all myths, he has faded from sight as the place and time of his birth have been approached.
John R. Kelso, A. M.
I have found Deity in all its forms a remnant of pagan mythology, founded entirely upon ignorance and superstition.
Abraham Lincoln, Pres. U. S. A. I am not a Christian.
John Locke. The Clergy are naturally more eager against error than against vice.
Reville.
The Trinity does not transcend human reason; it contradicts and destroys it.
Chrysostom.
In my judgment you will want no oracle if you arrive at under- standing.
P. Le Page Renouf.
The triumph of right over wrong, of right in speech and in action, is the burden of nine-tenths of the Egpytian texts.
Dean Mansel.
The adversity of the good, the prosperity of the wicked, the tardy appearance of moral and religious knowledge in the world, are facts which no doubt are reconcilable, we know not how, with the infinite goodness of God.
Max Muller. My interest in all religions is chiefly historical.
views of religion. sj
Celsus.
I could relate many things more concerning Jesus, all of which are true, but which have quite a different character from what his disci- ples relate touching him.
Sir Henry Maine.
No society which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions is ever likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the Roman law.
Archbishop of York.
Infidelity, which was once confined to a small class of thinkers, seems now to be spreading everywhere.
Frederick May Holland.
These precepts — toleration, family affection, charity, patriotism and philanthropy — will be seen to be older than Christianity.
James Parton.
Let us not forget, also, that the money expended in maintaining religion comes out of the most sacred part of the scanty earnings of man.
Henry Fielding.
I do not like a jure divino tyrant, who imagines that people are slaves or his commodity.
Abraham Lincoln, Pres. U. S. A. What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.
John Newton, C. C.
The assumption that some form of religious faith is absolutely a necessity for man is only founded on the fanatics who know little of the world.
88 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
U. S. Grant, Pres. U. S. A.
In 1850, 1 believe, the church property of the United States, which paid no tax, amounted to $87,000,000. In 1900, without a check, it is safe to say, this property will reach a sum exceeding $3,000,000,000. I would suggest the taxation of all property equally.
Edward Clodd, F. R. A. S.
Anthony Collins, the deist, caustically said that nobody doubted the existence of the deity till they set to work to prove it.
Rev. N. A. Staples.
About woman's treatment in the Bible, . . . it is a shameful book in some of its chapters on that subject.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Through theological superstitions woman finds her most grievous bondage.
J. Donaldson, LL. D.
It is a prevalent opinion that woman owes her present high position to Christianity.
I used to believe in this opinion.
Neander. Christianity diminishes the influence of women.
Stephen Girard.
I enjoin and require that no ecclesiastic missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatever in said (Girard) college.
Thomas Hobbes.
The opinion that spirits are incorporeal or immaterial could never enter the mind of anv man bv nature.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 89
Bishop Gilmore. Religion is fast passing away.
Ephraim E. Hitchcock.
That is what the churches are now-a-days, social clubs; and as social clubs they are well enough.
Horace Scudder.
We do not now learn for the first time that a man may be good without being religious.
Goethe.
He who rises not high enough to see God and nature as one knows neither.
The Right Hon. R. L. Shiel, M. P.
The Bible contains details of atrocity at which human nature shudders.
Benjamin Franklin. When a religion is good I conceive that it will support itself.
Prof. D. G. Brinton.
They imagine that the primal man had fallen from some high estate; we know beyond cavil or question that the earliest man was also the lowest man.
Lemuel K. Wtashburn.
Where religion is afraid of liberty, liberty should be afraid of religion. ♦
Susan H. Wixon. There is no evidence that Jesus went to church on Sunday.
Zeno. Temples are not to be built to the gods.
90 views of religion.
Virgil.
Mantura was my mother, Calabria took me hence, Parthenope is now my home; I have sung of pastures, of the country and of chief- tains.
Talleyrand.
No! it is not man's fault, but the impostures of priests and kings, which have everywhere destroyed truth ; they alone have invented the worship of a God of Gods.
Hon. George Boutwell.
The intellectual world of to-day is drifting away from the religious belief of the past.
Lord Macaulay.
Men who would have been useful and honest as laymen are hypo- critical and immoral as churchmen.
Dr. T. S. Bell.
The British and Foreign Bible Society, after having circulated millions of copies of the King James Bible, doubts whether it can be truthfully called the word of God.
Mary A. Livermore.
The early church fathers denounced women as noxious animals, necessary evils and domestic perils.
Ganganelli (Pope).
A Pope is a mere shadow conjured up by a powerful body of men ; it is an idol they raise up to frighten a credulous and stupid populace.
Rev. John W. Chadwick.
The inconsistencies, contradictions, errors and blots, irretrievably demolish the supernatural idea of the Bible.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 9 1
Bishop Faustus.
It is certain the New Testament was written a long time after Christ, by unknown authors.
Alexander Von Humboldt.
Each religion fills some blank space in its creed with the name of a different teacher.
Justin Martyr.
As to Jesus Christ having been born of a virgin, you have your Perseus to balance that.
Prof. John Fiske.
The Hindoo sacred writings contain all the myths and fables found in the Christian Bible.
George Eliot.
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evan- gelical belief.
Kepler.
When miracles are admitted every scientific explanation is out of the question.
Prof. Proctor.
Herbert Spencer shows abundantly the nothingness of the evidence on which the common belief in a future life has been based.
Ernst Haeckel.
We can as little think of mind or soul separated from our brain, as we can conceive of the circulation of our blood apart from the action of the heart.
Matthew Arnold.
All things seem to have what we call a law of their beings; whether we call this God or not is a matter of choice.
92 views of religion.
Bishop Warburton. Moses failed to teach belief in a future life.
Prof. Lewis G. Janes. Doubt in miracles is faith in the eternal order of nature.
Andrew Dixon White.
Comparatively few thoughtful, intelligent beings believe in a per- sonality called God.
Sir William Hamilton.
As a transcendental is an unconditioned being, God cannot be scientifically known.
Bishop Gilmore. Religion is rapidly ceasing to be an integral part of our social life.
Rev. Dr. Van Dyke, Jr. Why should we retain in our creeds what none of us believe ?
Nicoli. God and the devil make the whole of religion.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U. S. A.
I do not find in our particular superstition, Christianity, any re- -deeming feature.
Rev. Dr. W. S. Rainsford.
Rather than believe in the literal truth of the Bible, you might better throw it out of the window.
Rev. W. H. Thomas, D. D.
I question whether it is possible for the human intellect even to stand without the possibility of doubt with reference to God.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 9J
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U. SvA. Question with boldness even the existence of God.
Joubert. It is easy to believe in God if you are not asked to define him.
Rev. T. De Witt Talmage. If you ask me how I know about God I cannot tell you.
De Foe. Where God erects a house of prayer the devil builds a chapel.
Robert Cooper.
What, an omniscient deity the author of a book replete with more contradictions, more immoralities and more absurdities than any book extant !
Prof. Briggs, D. D.
It is sheer assumption to claim that the original biblical documents were inerrant.
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The God of the Bible is a moral monstrosity.
Lange.
Education and enlightenment, as a rule, go hand in hand with the decrease of the clergy.
Prior.
The devil must be very powerful since the sacrifice of a God for men has not rendered them any better.
Seneca. Perfect beings have no power to do harm.
94 views of religion.
Michael Bakounine.
If God is, man is a slave; now man can and must be free; then, God <ioes not exist.
Cicero.
It is the universal opinion of philosophers that God never is angry nor does any harm.
Rev. Dr. Behrend. Current orthodoxy does not teach verbal inspiration.
Rev. Phillips Brooks.
The minister should be the model of tolerance of what is honest doubt.
Michael Bakounine.
All religions, with their gods, their demigods and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men.
Rev. James Freeman Clarke.
The Bible does not differ from other sacred books in its method of production.
Ernest Renan.
Nearly everything in Christianity is mere baggage brought from the pagan mysteries.
Guizot. The church always ranged herself on the side of despotism.
William Lloyd Garrison, Jr.
Human progress has always been advanced by the few laborers outside the church, than by the many professors within it.
Annie Besant. While Christianity reigned supreme Europe lay in chains.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 95
CONDERCET.
The triumph of Christianity was the first signal of the decline of science and of philosophy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. When I speak of God, I prefer to say it.
Alfonzo X., King of Castile.
If the deity were now to reconstruct the world I could give him a few useful hints.
Giordano Bruno.
Monks are personages very ready to give away places in the king- dom of heaven, but incapable of earning an inch of ground for them- selves.
De Mauvissiere. Mind is nothing else but nature come to consciousness of itself.
Talleyrand. Spain is a land where two and two make five.
Rabbi Charles Fleischer.
There is never, whether in time of war or peace, any efficiency in a prayer, which we do not mean to "answer" ourselves. Under no circumstances do I believe that prayer has objective value.
Henry George.
On the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field.
Signor Crispi.
It is the priests, who reign almost as sovereigns everywhere in Spain, who have ruined the country.
9^ VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Heinrich Heine.
My religious convictions and views are still untainted by any tincture of ecclesiasticism. I have dallied with no dogma and I have not utterly renounced my reason.
Monterio.
Every thing is possible with God, even to the making of a valley without two hills, a straight stick without two ends, a world out of nothing.
Victor E. Lennstrand.
With regard to the infallibility of the Bible, there are no less than 9,000 mistakes in science, and double as many in history and chron- ology.
Arthur Lillie.
Buddha delivered a sermon on the mountain and taught in parables. The cases of Maya and Mary are quite similar. Buddha, too, had his fasting, baptism and temptation.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U. S. A.
It is wicked and tyranical to compel any man to support a religion in which he does not believe.
Richard M. Mitchell.
The voice of Christendom proclaiming that God was circumvented by an independent and inferior power, constitutes the greatest insult that man has ever offered to his Creator.
William Penn.
I abhor two principles in religion. The first is obedience upon authority, and the other, destroying them that differ from me, for God's sake.
Captain Robert C. Adams. I. H. S. was a monogram of Bacchus.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 97
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.
There was never such a gigantic lie told as the fable of the Garden of Eden.
Rev. W. H. H. Murray.
Ancient legends which became hardened into modern dogma are now being relegated to the limbo, unto which are flung the cast-off garments of vagabond theories.
Hon. Charles B. Watte.
Many of the more prominent doctrines of the Christian religion prevailed hundreds of years before Christ.
Lord Chief Justice Coleridge.
The moment you come to distinguish between animals and man, you consent to limit the pursuit of knowledge to considerations not scientific.
Lord Byron.
A death-bed is a matter of nerves and constitution, and not of religion.
Mosheim.
As to when or by whom the books of the New Testament were collected in one volume, there are various conjectures of the learned.
Scalliger.
The Church Fathers put into the Scriptures whatever they thought would suit their purpose.
Bishop Temple.
The Bible is handed down from age to age and moulded by each in turn.
Henry M. Taber.
There is no religion but what is founded in superstition, with an understratum of ignorance.
98 views of religion.
Prof. Smyth. The Bible is untrustworthy.
Prof. Swing. The Bible has not made religion, but religion has made the Bible.
Lord Francis Bacon. A Christian is one who believes things he cannot comprehend.
Thomas Inman, M. D.
I found, moreover, that the sharply defined line, commonly drawn between paganism and Christianity, is worthless — the doctrines of the latter being, in many respects, identical with or deduced from the former.
Archbishop Tillotson.
It cannot be denied, that the manner and circumstances of the Christian dispensation are full of condescension to the weakness of mankind and very much accommodated to the common and deeply radicated prejudices of men.
Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B.
Did the annals of human folly or madness ever record anything more extravagant, than that new-born children should be consid- ered to have offended God ?
Maximus. Christians are the votaries of execrable vanity.
Henri Bayle. A dispute with divines serves as an amusement to me.
Milton Woolley, M. D. Ignorance, let the reader remember, is the basis of all religion.
views of religion. 99
Emperor Adrian.
There is no presbyter of the Christians who is not either an astrol- oger, a soothsayer, or a minister of obscene pleasure.
Cornelius Tacitus.
Christians were odious to mankind and their religion a pernicious superstition.
Mosheim.
The wiser part of mankind, about the time of Christ's birth, looked upon religion as a just object of ridicule and contempt.
James A. Garfield, Pres. U. S. A.
If you exempt the property of any church organization, to that ex- tent you impose a tax upon the whole community.
Francis Broussais.
I have no fear or hope as to future life, since I am unable to con- ceive it. As to God, I cannot form any notion of such a power.
Thomas H. Huxley.
Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes besides that of Hercules.
John Baskerville.
May the example contribute to emancipate the mind from the idle fears of superstition and the wicked arts of the priesthood.
Ganganelli (Pope.) I have resolved to overthrow Christianity — that is to say, idolatry.
Elizur Wright. Religion is dying, but humanity is taking its place.
IOO VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Frances Wright.
Religion as distinguished from morals may be defined thus: a be- lief in, and a homage to, existences unseen and causes unknown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I do not fear skepticism for any good soul.
A just thinker will allow full sway to his skepticism.
SWAMI VlVIKANANDA.
Our God is the cooking-pot and our religion is: Don't touch me I am holy.
Buckle.
For eight centuries there were not in all Christian Europe four men who dared to express an independent opinion.
W. H. Burr,
The Christian Sabbath was instituted, not in Judea, but in Great Britain; not in the first, but in the seventeenth century; not by Christ or his apostles, but by the Puritans.
William Penn.
To call any day of the week a Christian Sabbath is not Christian but Jewish, Give me one scripture for it and I will give you two against it*
Origen.
For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun and moon and stars ?
Viscount Amberley.
Another weak point in the system of Jesus is his aversion to wealth and to wealthy men. His conceptions of justice are not more perfect than his conceptions of social arrangements.
views of religion. ioi
Dryden.
By education most have been misled; We so believe because we so are bred ; The priest continues what the nurse began, And thus the boy imposes on the man.
U. S. Grant, Pres. U. S. A.
No sectarian tenet should be taught in any school supported by state or national tax.
Prof. Rossiter W. Raymond.
If you have got an authorized revelation, why don't you give it tons?
Prof. E. S. Morse,
I have never seen anything in the discoveries of science which could in the slightest degree support a belief in immortality.
Annie Besant.
Where does Christ come from ? He comes from every place where superstition is stronger than science.
Hugh Miller. The Scriptures have never yet revealed a scientific truth.
Very Rev. Evan Davies, D. D., LL. D. Jehovah-worship was originally devil-worship.
Cardinal Manning, The last act of reasoning precedes the first act of faith.
Guizot. Morality may exist independently of religious ideas.
102 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Count Lyeff Tolstoi.
I began to analyze the Christian doctrine, which serves as the foundation of the delusion of entire Christian humanity.
Rev. George J. Mingens.
Of the 40,000 people who die every year in New York City not ten per cent believe in God.
Robert Burns.
Try every art of legal thriving;
No matter — stick to sound believing.
Dean Stanley.
Our present legal institution of Sunday was appointed by Con- stantine's authority, but not as a Christian Sabbath.
President Harper, C. U.
The Bible knows no science. The writer speaks of things as they appear to the untrained, unscientific eye.
M. De Condorcet.
Religion, far from acknowledging the power of reason, boasted of having subjected and humbled it.
John M. Robertson.
What good has religion, as such, ever done to science? Forced it to admit the final mystery of things ? Why, science never denied that at any stage and has been affirming it for centuries.
Benjamin Gastineau.
In the sphere of the philosophical there is absolute reaction against Christianity! Man is dependent only upon himself — upon the con- science and reason.
views of religion. 103
Parker Pillsbury.
The Christian system is burdensome, enslaving, expensive, exclu- sive; .... it has utterly failed.
Garibaldi.
Man has created God, not God man. The priest is the personifica- tion of falsehood.
Lucretius. Who and what are you that you dream of immortality ?
Dean Dudley.
It seems to me that faith and hope, which are considered the principal parts of religion, are peculiarly poetical themes. They are not scientific deductions, or historical facts.
Etienne Dolet. Dolet himself does not grieve but the pious crowd grieves.
AUGUSTE COMTE.
Reorganize society without God and without King by the syste- matic cultus of humanity.
John Meslier.
All the gods are of a barbarous origin; all religions are antique monuments of ignorance, superstition and ferocity.
M. Babcock.
Any religion that is founded upon the doctrine of believe or be damned in my judgement is a false religion.
Abner Kneeland. The Universalists believe in a God which I do not.
104 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
G. W. Bar Ptolemy.
It is safe to say that no one ever supposed a spirit to be made of absolutely nothing. Neither can they suppose God to be so con- stituted. So the universal belief is in a material God. Then if your God is mere matter, he is unworthy of worship.
Madame Roland. To-morrow I shall cease to exist.
Matmonides.
This book of Genesis, taken according to the letter, gives the most extravagant notions of the Deity.
Voltaire.
I am to-day eighty-four years old. I have more aversion than ever to extreme unction and those who administer it.
James Anthony Froude.
Educated Romans had satisfied themselves that there is no here- after.
Emperor Adrian.
They have, however, but one God, and it is one and the self-same whom Christians, Jews and Gentiles alike adore, i.e. money.
Lemuel K. Washburn. The entire New Testament is the work of Catholic Churchmen.
Milton Woolley, M. D. He who knows all religions believes none.
Democritus. Every occurrence has its cause, from which it follows by necessity.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. I05
Emperor Constantine The Great.
The events which befall men are consequent upon the tenor of their lives. Pestilence, sedition, famine and plenty are all regulated with reference to our course in life.
Charles Darwin.
I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument.
Lucilio Vanini.
Come, let us die cheerfully like a philosopher I Ah, my God! No, that is a fashion of speaking. He, Christ, sweated with fear and weakness, and I, I die undaunted.
Bishop Svnesius.
The people are desirious to be deceived; there is no acting other- wise with them. For my own part, to myself I shall always be a philosopher, but in dealing with the mass of mankind I shall be a priest.
Herbert Spencer.
We everywhere see fading away the anthropomorphic conception of the unknown Cause.
Herbert Junius Hardwick, M. D.
The popular theology, called Christianity, is not what we have hitherto believed it to be. The Bible is not authentic.
Nelson C. Parshall. Evolution sweeps into oblivion all the childish fables of the past.
Ltvy. Nothing is so apt to deceive, by specious appearances, as religion.
106 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Abraham Lincoln, Pres. U. S. A.
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other.
Dean Alford.
There is many a thing said in many a sermon that, should the preacher enter a room with an intelligent parishioner, eye to eye, he dare not stick to.
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.
There is no other so bad as the government of an ecclesiastical class.
Martin Luther.
We see by experience that God does not take care of the temporal life.
Lord Sherbrooke. Where has a nation been freed by submission and prayer?
Prof. Henry Drummond.
We have been accustomed to look for spiritual gifts to come in answer to prayer. They do not come in that way.
M. M. Mangasarian. Theology is passing away and virtue is taking its place.
Benjamin Kidd. A rational religion is a scientific impossibility.
Virgil.
Daphnis is now a God and, in the sheen of his divinity, looks for the first time on the threshold of Heaven and sees the clouds and stars beneath his feet.
views of religion. 107
Prof. James Mtlleson. They twaddle about immortal minds and future existence.
Leon Gambetta. I decline to be rocked asleep by the myths of childish religions.
Prof. Richard A. Proctor.
There is the old question always asked, whether by searching, we can find God; and science will give the old answer to this question: — We cannot find him out.
President Patton, P. U. Christianity is not a life, but a dogma.
Emperor Frederick The Great.
The imbecile priests! The best destiny they can look for is that they and their vile artifices will forever remain buried in the darkness of oblivion.
Rev. Dr. T. De Witt Talmage.
It is easy to have one's faith destroyed. I can give you a receipt for it. Read infidel books. It is easy to banish soon and forever all respect for the Bible.
Tuttle. The utterance of prayer is like the dog baying the moon.
Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It is very strange that we should stand in need of any other than natural religion.
Erasmus Darwin, M. D., F. R. S.
In regard to religious matters, there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of the people from their infancy; to inquire or exert their reason is denounced as sinful.
lo8 VIEWS OF RELIGION,
Denis Diderot,
Posterity is for the philosopher what the other world is for the devout.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. The scien- tific mind must have a faith which is science. Let us have nothing now which is not its own evidence.
Mohammed.
There are two things which I abhor, the learned in his infidelities and the fool in his devotions. •
Peter Eckler.
There is not a rite, ceremony or belief we now practice or profess that cannot be traced to its origin in Chaldean idolatry, in Assyrian, Egyptian or Roman Mythology.
Prof. Smyth, D. D. Faith should be rational rather than Scriptural.
Helen H. Gardener.
The precepts of Jehovah are taught every week from the pulpit and carefully legislated against every winter in congress.
Kant. The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Lord Francis Bacon.
The trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker.
Rev. Howard Crosby, D. D. There is no safety in our country but in non-sectarian education.
views of religion. 109
Lord Coleridge. Christianity is no longer the law of the land.
Horace.
Thou dost govern because thou confessest that the gods are greater than thou.
Henry Fielding.
But to represent the Almighty as avenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if not blasphemous.
George Washington, Pres. U. S. A.
The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.
Rev. Henry M. Field. Four-fifths of the young men of the country are skeptics.
Dr. Edward McGlynn. Religion is vanishing from nearly every part of the world.
Richard Baxter.
My certainty that I am a man is before my certainty that there is a God.
Abraham Lincoln, Pres. U. S. A. The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession.
John Morley, M. P.
Religious people who warn you most solemnly that man who is a worm, .... cannot possibly compass in his puny under- standing the attributes of the divine being, will yet tell you all about him, as if he were the man who lives in the next street.
IIO VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Noah Webster.
Many passages in the Bible are expressed in language which decency forbids to be repeated.
Etienne Dolet. In all persuasions the bigots are persecutors.
James Anthony Froude.
Scattering the Bible in all places, among all persons, is the most culpable folly of which it is possible for man to be guilty.
Thomas Moore.
Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Zoroaster, Confucius, Osiris and Buddha have no human father, and between the lives of the last two and that of Christ an almost perfect parallel is shown.
D'Holbach.
To practice the principles of morality men have no need of theology, of revelation or of God.
Locke.
I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust and a worship that I abhor.
Rev. James Freeman Clarke,
No church is infallible; no creed is infallible; no book is in- fallible.
Anacharsis Clootz.
Nature is a good mother; a work evincing the nullity of all reli- gions. All she includes is eternal, imperishable like herself. Now let me sleep.
views of religion. 1 1 1
Charles Darwin. I do not believe in any revelation.
Heinrich Heine.
I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.
Bishop Colenso.
Would it not be well to eliminate from the Bible whatever is un- truthful and immoral?
Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B.
We have looked for historical evidence which might justify a rational man to himself, in believing the Christian religion to be of God, and there are none — absolutely none.
John De Ferreras.
It was even Cyriac of Ancona who first foisted this bit of Christian evidence upon human credulity.
Bishop Marsh.
John, who was inspired as well as Matthew, Mark and Luke, had the advantage of having a better memory.
Danton.
My abode will soon be annihilation ; but I shall live in the Pantheon of history.
Viscount Amberley. Intellectually Socrates' superiority to Jesus cannot be disputed.
George M. Gould, M. D. Science will be the great peace-bringer of civilization.
112 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Casaubon.
It mightily affects me to see how many there were in the earliest times of the church, who considered it as a capital exploit to lend to heavenly truth the help of their own inventions.
Bishop Colenso.
The statements in Genesis i., if regarded as statements of historical matter-of-fact, are directly at variance with some of the plainest facts of natural science.
Prof. Henry Maudsley, M. D.
If the prime condition of true religion be to get rid of the belief of special supernatural interventions in human affairs, the maintenance of such belief cannot be a strength but a weakness to the mind.
S. Baring-Gould.
We find that a condition of the first importance to religions exal- tation of feeling is ignorance.
Ammonius Saccus.
Christianity and Paganism when rightly understood, differed in no essential points, but had a common origin.
Homer.
Who dares think one thing and another tell, My soul detests him as the gates of hell.
|£ * Lord Byron.
Man died calmly before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity.
[, Judge Paul Dudley.
The third lecture to be for the detecting and convicting and expos- ing the idolatry of the Romish Church.
views of religion. 113
Talleyrand.
Who gave you the privilege of calling yourself ambassador and vicegerent of a Ghost-begotten God ?
Plutarch.
The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.
George Washington, Pres., U.S.A.
Religion is a matter which belongs to the church and not to the state.
John Stuart Mill.
The desire for future life is no more an argument that there will be a future life than is the desire for food an argument that we shall be fed in a future life.
George Allen White.
Soon, instead of religion ostracizing science, science will ostracize religion.
Rev. James Freeman Clarke.
It took the church three centuries to make up its mind what books ought to belong to the New Testament.
Sir Charles Lyell.
It would follow, if the claims of the Natchez man to have coexisted with the mastadon are admitted, that North America was peopled more than a thousand centuries ago by the human race.
Rev. Mark Hopkins, D. D.
The New Testament, which we now receive, was not, in all its parts, formally agreed upon till between three and four hundred years after the birth of Christ.
Victor Hugo. God is behind everything, but everything hides God.
114 views of religion.
Harriet Martineau.
What an insult it is to our best moral faculties to hold over us the promises and threats of heaven and of hell.
Charles Darwin.
Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other. I do not believe any revelation has ever been made.
Richard Carlile.
Heaven is altogether a place of the fancy or imagination; it has no reality; and such is hell.
Morris Einstein.
Religion, thus originated, formed and developed by priests in their own interests, became, in their hands also, a most powerful instru- ment for the subjugation of the masses.
Samuel P. Putnam.
Having shown that religion is a curse and that religion is a disease, I now propose to show that religion is a lie.
James Anthony Froude.
Hume's essay on miracles threw into words a conviction which had been already formed in every logical mind in Europe.
Mirabeau. If the sun is not God, it is at least his cousin-german.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U. S. A.
To say that the human soul, angels, God are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism or masked atheism, crept in, I do not exactly know.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. IIS
M. LlTTRE.
I find it impossible to accept the theory of the world which Chris- tianity prescribes to all true believers.
Xenophanes. In nature there is no origin, either of mode or material.
John Stewart.
I have always observed that morality and religion were constantly in enmity; and where the one reigned, the other was exiled.
David Hume.
When two miraculous assertions oppose each other, believe the least miraculous.
Emperor Frederick The Great.
M. De Voltaire: I will tell you the truth. I see in you the most beautiful genius the ages have produced. I admire your verses. I like your prose.
Bishop op Ontario.
Heads of families, who are church-goers and outwardly believe, are at heart agnostics.
John E. Remsburg. A single atheistical society of Paris numbers twenty thousand.
Thomas Carlyle. Just in the ratio that knowledge increases faith diminishes.
Godfrey Higgins, F. A. S.
The king and priest were generally united in the same person. The sole object of the initiated was, as it yet is, to keep the people in a state of debasement, that they might be more easily ruled.
il6 views of religion.
Francois Rabelais. Extreme unction greases the boots for the great journey.
Henry Etherington.
I calmly and deliberately declare that I do not believe in the popular notion of the existence of an Almighty, all-wise and benevolent God.
Thomas Hobbes.
They define God's nature as spirit incorporeal and then confess their definition to be unintelligible.
Dr. Adam Clark.
I have proved and so might any man, that no serpent, in the com- mon sense of the term, can be intended in the third chapter of Gen- esis.
Godfrey Higgins, F. S. A.
Modern divines, a very sensitive race, have been much shocked with the doctrine of the ancients, that nothing could be created from nothing.
Roger Bacon. [ All religions have a suspicious origin.
H BOCHART.
In memory of Samson's foxes there were let loose in the circus at Rome about the middle of April, foxes with firebrands.
I G. H. Toulmin, M. D.
If something always has existed or must have been eternal, why not grant eternity to nature ?
Hallam.
Persecution for religious heterodoxy, in all its degrees, was, in the sixteenth century, the principle as well as the practice of every church.
views of religion. 117
Proudhon. The Revolution can come to no terms with the Divinity.
Alexander Pope.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
Lord Shaftesbury. Solemnity is the essence of imposture.
Walt Whitman.
Why, who makes much of a miracle; as to me I know of nothing else but miracles.
Lilian Leland.
The monks still keep the Mission and exhibit some very old and correspondingly vile pictures and relics.
Dean of Westminster.
This is the earliest instance of the falsification of scripture to meet the demands of Science.
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, A. R. G. B.
Six thousand years ago the course of the sun through the year was practically very well known.
Cuvier. Among wolves one must howl a little.
Archbishop Agobard.
The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe.
il8 views of religion.
William of Conches.
You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But did he ever do it?
Sterzinger.
Why should the almighty strike his own consecrated temples or suffer Satan to strike them?
Luis De Leon. As theological and obscure as the most orthodox could desire.
Cardinal Bellarmine.
The doctrine of the incarnation depends upon the retention of the Ptolemaic astronomy.
Tacitus. Christianity is a pestilent superstition.
Prof. Canon Driver, Ox.
Like other people, the Jews formed theories to account for the beginnings of the earth and man.
Edward Clodd, F. R. A. S.
Giving up belief in the devil is, practically, giving up belief in the atonement — the central idea of the Christian faith.
Edward Clodd, F. R. A. S.
Modern science knows nothing of a beginning, and, moreover, holds it to be unthinkable.
Senor Emilio Castelar.
The Regent procured meditation by the Pope without ministerial authorization, creating a precedent fraught with danger to good government.
views of religion. 119
Prof. Hitzig.
Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the hare; .... every zoologist knows that it does not chew the cud.
Cowper.
Some drill and bore the solid earth,
And from the strata there extract a register,
By which we learn that he who made it and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
Bishop of Chichester.
Some doubts were once expressed about the flood: Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud.
Lamarck. Life is a purely physical phenomena.
Von Baer.
Fishes, lizards, lions and men, resemble one another so closely in the earlier stages of their development that no difference can be detected between them.
Burton.
I see mimicry of the arch-deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests and the sacrifices.
Middleton. The fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of religion !
Lucretius.
So loath to suffer mute,
We, peopling the void air, Make gods to whom impute
The ills we ought to bear.
120 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Ferdinand Magellan.
Though the church hath evermore from holy writ affirmed that the earth should be a widespread plain, yet in the eclipse of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round.
Peter Martyr.
Wrong opinions about the creation, as narrated in Genesis, would render valueless all the promises of Christ.
Aristotle. Zeus rains, not that corn may be increased, but from necessity.
Renan.
A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it.
Montaigne. Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
Bishop Tait.
These things have so effectually frightened the clergy that I think there is scarcely a bishop on the bench, that is not useless for the purpose of preventing the widespread alienation of intelligent men.
Socrates.
I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can and, when the time comes, to die.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
For in Abraham's time all the then known parts of the world were developed. Egypt had many magnificent cities, which magnificence needed a parent of more antiquity than those other men have sup- posed.
views of religion. 121
Shakespeare. Even prayer itself, whence others gain comfort and relief in all manner of misfortunes, is that which most adds to our confusion and distress.
Ovid.
The existence of the gods is a matter of public policy, and we must believe it accordingly.
Huxley.
Though science, like nature, may be driven out with a fork, ec- clesiastical or other, yet she surely comes back again.
Archdeacon Wilson.
The theory of evolution is indeed fatal to certain quasi-mytho- logical doctrines of the atonement which once prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit.
Francisco Suarez.
It is not probable that God, in inspiring Moses to write a history of creation, would have made him use language, the true meaning of which it was hard to discover and still harder to believe.
Fairholme.
There could have been no deluge before moral guilt could possibly have been incurred.
Simonides.
The longer I consider the subject of God, the more obscure it becomes.
Matmonides.
Know that we shrink not from affirming that the world hath existed from eternity, because of what scripture saith concerning the world's creation.
Thomas Hood. He thinks he's pious when he's only bilious.
122 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Benedict De Spinoza.
Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith, as we have abund- antly proved, looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
Lord Beaconsfield.
Ah! Mr. Dean, that is all very well, but you must remember, — No dogma, no deans.
Dr. Arthur Stanley.
There were, there are, perhaps, still, two modes of reconciliation of scripture and science, which have been each in their day attempted, and each has totally and deservedly failed.
Alfred R. Wallace.
Man's special creation is entirely unsupported by facts, as well as in the highest degree improbable.
Prof. Canon Driver.
Read without prejudice or bias, the narrative of Genesis creates an impression at variance with the facts revealed by science.
Sir John Lubbock.
How much Misery would have been saved to Europe if Christians had been satisfied with the Sermon on the Mount.
Francis Bacon.
They have endeavored to found a natural philosophy on the books of Genesis and Job and other sacred scriptures, so seeking the dead among the living.
Dr. Temple.
Many years ago you urged us from the university pulpit to under- take the critical study of the Bible. You said that it was a dangerous study, but indispensable.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. I2J
Bishop of London.
What can be a grosser superstition than the theory of literal in- spiration ?
Sir William Temple.
When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best but like a forward child that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the case is over.
Melanchthon.
As well as an ass's head is suited to a human body, so well is the Pope suited to be head over the church.
Prof. Sayce.
It takes us back to the age when the gods were believed to dwell in the visible sky, and when man, therefore, did his best to rear his altars as near them as possible.
Leibnitz.
There is as much reason for supposing Hebrew to have been the primitive language of mankind, as there is for adopting the views of Goropius, who published a work in Antwerp in 1850 to prove that Dutch was the language spoken in paradise.
St. Francis Xavier.
And I am said to have raised the dead! What a misleading man I am ! Some men brought a youth to me as if he were dead ; who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ, straightway arose.
Hippocrates.
Demoniacal possession is nowise more divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease.
Heraclttus.
Man is kindled and put out like a light in the night-time.
124 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Lord Palmerston.
Go home and clean the streets; fast days should not be appointed to ward off cholera.
M. Bakounine. We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.
Nature, which governs the whole, will soon change all things thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new.
FONTENELLE.
All nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savage, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism.
Emperor William II.
Prayer- meetings for the cure of pestilence lead to neglect of prac- tical means of human help.
Leibnitz.
We care for science only because it enables us to speak with authori- ty in philosophy and religion.
Spinoza.
The free man thinks of nothing so little as death, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.
Turgot.
The root of most of wrong thinking that has been is a manacle to science.
Thales.
Nothing comes into being out of nothing, and nothing passes away into nothing.
views of religion. 1 25
Grant Allen. If systems that be are a part of God, revolt is a part of the order.
Anaximander. Man is like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning.
Xenophanes.
Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among men.
COURTLAND PALMER.
A man should believe only what he can prove.
Victor Hugo.
Hell is an outrage on humanity.
When you tell me your deity made you in his own image,
I reply that he must have been very ugly.
Bishop Stillingfleet.
Christianity became nothing else but reformed Paganism, as to its divine worship.
Pittacus. The Gods themselves cannot resist necessity.
Thales. Necessity rules all the world.
Rev. E. H. Keens.
When the young lawyer asked Jesus what to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus replied, go sell all thou hast and give to the poor, a teach- ing which if obeyed to-day, by any man, would cause him to be adjudged insane.
i26 views of religion.
Chilon.
Providence of future things, collected by reason, is the virtue of a man.
Xenophon. Man is the hardest of all animals to govern.
Sir William Smith, LL. D. The flood of Noah extended only over a limited area of the globe,
Hugh Miller.
There are, then, it must be confessed, very strong grounds for be- lieving that no universal deluge ever existed. John Meslier.
The dogma of another life is useful but for those who profit by it at the expense of the credulous public.
Sosiades.
Be in childhood modest, in youth temperate, in manhood just, in old age prudent and die untroubled.
Solon. Make reason thy guide.
Madame De Stael.
I assure you, general, that your mythological compliment is totally lost upon me ; I shall prefer that you judge me worthy to talk reason with you.
Justin Martyr.
By declaring the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our master Jesus Christ, to be born of a Virgin, without any human mixture, we say no more in this than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove.
views of religion. 12 j
Horace Seaver.
He who does not believe in a God cannot injure him and cannot of course be impious.
Otto Wettstein.
Because nature is here and universal, a God cannot be here and universally present also.
Thomas Stanley. As for the gods and their worship Solon decreed nothing.
Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost. I am not an agnostic. I believe there is no God.
Strabo.
Thales was the first of the Grecians to make inquiry into natural causes.
Homer. The ocean, whence all things receive their birth.
Anaximander.
The gods are native, rising and setting by long intervals. There are innumerable worlds.
Xenophon.
Death, in my opinion, is neither good nor ill, but the end of this life.
Rev. Dr. William J. Long. The principal difference is that I disbelieve in eternal punish- ment.
Milman.
It was admitted and avowed that to deceive in Christianity was so valuable a service as to hallow deceit itself.
128
VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks.
How many men in the ministry to-day believe in the doctrine of verbal inspiration which our fathers held ? And how many of us have frankly told the people that we do not believe it ?
Dr. Knappert.
The account of the creation from the hand of the priesdy author is utterly different from the other narrative.
Horace Seaver. Philosophy depends on argument; religion, on credulity.
Dr. Cooper.
My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel if there had never been a priest.
Grant Allen.
Most people nowadays think that the highest and noblest thing in life is to dwell upon the attributes of imaginary beings.
Lord Chief Justice Coleridge.
The vast majority of men and almost all women in this age, as in every age, can hardly be said to think at all upon religion.
Horace L. Traubel.
Do not get between the four walls of a denomination, and close all the windows and ventilators, and lock the doors, and die from all human use to the chant of priests.
Walt Whitman.
Seeing, hearing, feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle; this head, more than churches, Bibles, and all the creeds.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. , 1 29
Matthew Arnold.
Protestant ministers cried out against Galileo's assertion of the earth's movement just as loudly as Catholic priests.
John Sterling.
Not above one educated man in ten who has not very great doubts of the reality of any of the miracles of the Bible.
Moleschott.
Force is no impelling god, no entity separate from the material substratum.
Emile Zola.
In conclusion, gentlemen, I presume to offer you a faith; yes, I beseech you to put your trust and your faith in work.
Dr. Cyrus Edson.
As a little baby just born into the world is but a little animal, so the sage becomes but a dying animal at last.
Charles Francis Adams.
There are quite as many phases of religious belief in communities not, like Spain, still medieval, as there were altars in Athens.
Emperor Julian.
The savage beasts are not more formidable to men than the Chris- tians are to each other when they are divided by creed or opinion.
Paine. Prophesying is lying professionally.
Lady Florence Dixie. Well, this much I do know, that a man wrote the book of Genesis.
i30 views of religion.
Sir Thomas More.
That the conceptions of God, or of gods, have no substantial reason for their existence, seems to be evinced by the fact that these ideals are always influenced by the character of the people that entertain them.
Queen of Roumania. It is better to have a physician for a confessor than a priest.
Prof. Lewis Janes.
Christianity is no exceptional faith. Its claims of supernatural origin and attestation by miracle are unfounded and irrational.
Lucretius Carus.
Nature does all things by intuition and without the interference of the gods.
Thomas Watson The finer our churches are the bigger Mr. Krupp makes his cannon.
Juvenal.
A sot
Because into a gown and pulpit got,
Though surfeit-gorged, and reeking from the stews,
Nothing but abstinence for his theme will choose.
Colton.
Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; anything but— live for it.
Napoleon.
I am surrounded by priests who repeat incessantly that their king- dom is not of this world and yet they lay hands on everything they can get
views op religion. 131
Henry More. Take away reason and all religions are alike true.
Mme. du Chatelet.
Nothing remains of those miserable times but convents founded by the superstitious.
Robert Burns.
All my fears and cares are of this world; if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it.
Napoleon. Instruction and history are the great enemies of religion.
Baron Von Humboldt.
Comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by physical forces.
Shelley. Religion itself means intolerance.
James Madison, Pres. U.S.A.
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions, may establish, with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects?
Andrew Lang.
Then the burning of witches slowly dies outas the educated classes become skeptical.
Sir Richard Steele.
There is this difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England — the one professes to be infallible, the other to be never in the wrong.
132 views of religion.
John Henry Mackay. God must fall in every shape.
Prof. Le Conte. Evolution is the central idea of geology.
Prof. Youmans.
The creation of species was an office which theology had reserved for a supernatural being.
Empedocles.
None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man; it has always been.
Voltaire.
God is made the author of sin in all systems except in that of the atheists.
Colton.
There are only two things in which the false professors of all re- ligions have agreed; to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own.
Lydia Maria Child.
If Christians habitually looked at themselves and at the followers of foreign religions, from the same point of view, there would be much less exultation over their own superiority.
Thoreau. It is a sad mistake to acknowledge the personality of God.
Prof. Youmans.
Evolutionists are in the right path because they believe in the universality of natural causation.
views of religion. 133
Ludwig Feuerbach. If we are born for heaven, we are lost for earth.
Walt Whitman.
Pointing to another world will never stop vice among us; shedding light over this world can alone help us.
Rabelais.
Can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and to direct his courses by the sound of a bell and not by his own judgment and discretion.
Heraclitus.
The universe, that is the All, is made neither of gods nor of man, but ever has been an eternal living fire, kindling and extinguishing.
Napoleon Bonaparte.
Priests have everywhen and everywhere introduced fraud and falsehood.
Goethe.
Great powers the mountains boast; There nature works, omnipotently free — The priest's dull mind blames it as sorcery.
Frederick the Great.
There are so many things to be said against religion that I wonder they do not occur to everybody.
John Wilson.
The nations in which faith in theology remains the strongest at the present day are certainly not in the front ranks of civilization.
Diogenes. How can death be an evil, as it is never felt when it is death ?
134 views of religion.
Walt Whitman.
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God ; and that there is no God more divine than yourself.
Spinoza.
The study of wise men is how to live, and not how to die. There is nothing a brave man thinks of less than death.
Kant.
Give me matter and I will show you how a world shall be evolved thence.
Thoreau.
There is more religion in man's science than there is science in his religion.
Bret Harte.
The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.
Pliny. The earth is a phenix, and remains once for all.
Napoleon. All our religions are evidently the work of man.
Lara. Man has done much to civilize and humanize God.
Napoleon.
I once had faith, but when I came to know something, I found my faith attacked. It is said that I am a papist; I am nothing.
VI£WS OF RELIGION. 135
Prof. W. B. Carpenter, F. R. S.
When the doctrine of evolution is looked at in its moral aspect, who shall presume to say that it is a fact of no account?
John Morley, M. P.
There is no counting with certainty on the justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worshiping an unjust divinity.
Grote.
The clergy have the strongest interest in the depravation of the human intellect.
Ivan Tourguentef.
Whatever a man may pray for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer comes to this: Great God, let twice two not make four.
Ben Jonson.
An ass is rev'rend purple. So you can hide his two ambitious ears, and he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.
Thoreau.
It must be submitted to the D. D.'s. I would it were the chickadeedees.
Gregg.
The doctrine that sins can be forgiven, and the consequences of them averted, has in all ages been a fertile source of mischief.
Napoleon.
It cannot be doubted that, as emperor, the religious incredulity which I felt, was favorable to the nations which I had to govern.
Lord Salisbury.
The cloud of impenetrable mystery hangs over the development, and still more over the origin, of life.
136 views of religion.
Butler.
What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, Proved false again? — Two hundred more.
Mazzini.
Earth is the home wherein we are to strive towards the realization of that ideal of the true and just.
Edgar C. Beall.
To-day we know with as much certainty as we know anything, that force is not independent of matter.
Alexander Bain.
The special creation view is a phrase that nearly expresses our ignorance.
Descartes. Give me matter and motion and out of them I will build the universe.
Prof. Swing.
The man is to be pitied who asks the temple of religion to teach him not to cheat or slander or destroy his fellow-man.
Sir Charles Lyell.
All changes in the crust of our earth have been brought about by causes that are still in action.
Bishop Phillips Brooks.
How many of us hold that the everlasting punishment of the wicked is a clear and certain truth of revelation ? But how many of us who do not have ever said a word ?
views of religion. 137
Lord Chesterfield.
If we know a man's religion we still enquire as to his morals; but if we know his morals, the question as to his religion seldom arises.
Hudson Tuttle.
If all sacred books were blotted from the earth this day not a single truth would be lost.
Prof. F. A. Kidder.
If the Church abandoned its outworn creeds, .... it could do far more good.
Goethe.
An able man, who has something to do here, leaves the future until it comes.
J. S. Mill. God is a word to express not our ideas but the want of them.
Friedrich Von Shtt.ler.
A healthy nature needs no God or immortality. There must be a morality which suffices without this faith.
J. A. Froude. What has ecclesiasticism to do with moral laws?
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It is less violence to our nature to deify protoplasm than it is to diabolize the deity.
James Parton.
The coming religion must induce a higher morality than the Christian religion has inculcated.
138 views of religion.
David Atwood Wasson.
Yet wherefore cry to Heaven? 'Tis the trick of craven souls to vex the gods with importunity.
Alexander Pope.
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
Aonius Palearius. The inquisition was a poniard aimed at the throat of literature.
I. D'Israeli.
We have lost many good things of Cervantes and other writers because of the tribunal of religion and dullness.
Felix Adler.
If you tell me the morality of the common people depends on religion, I deny it
John Burroughs.
What remains, then, for those who cannot pray? This alone, To love Virtue, to love truth.
Douglass Jerrold.
There are a good many pious people who are as careful of their religion as of their best china.
Andrew Marvell. Priests were the first deluders of mankind.
Henry Maudsley, M. D., LL. D. The history of supernaturalism in human belief is a condemnation.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 139
William Lloyd Garrison.
All Christendom professes to receive the Bible as the word of God, and what does it avail ?
Charles Sumner.
I am convinced that Christ was commissioned to preach a revela- tion to men. I do not think I have a basis of faith to build upon. I am without religious feeling.
Rev. Myron Adams.
The time has come for personal convictions in place of priestly teachings.
Haeckel.
We know of matter which does not possess force and, on the other hand, we know of no forces which are not joined to matter.
Tindal.
Twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song.
Walt Whitman.
Divine am I inside and out and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from.
Lord Salisbury.
Whether you believe that creation was the work of design or of inconscient law, it is equally difficult to imagine how this random collection of dissimilar material came together.
David Hume.
Why, then, eternal punishment for the temporary offenses of so frail a creature as man?
Stubbs. The past has no claim to infallibility any more than the present.
140 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Count Cavour.
The educated classes of Europe and America are not believers in the doctrines of the church which they tolerate and support.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The truth is that the whole system of beliefs which comes in with the story of the fall of man, .... is gently falling out of en- lightened human intelligence.
James Russell Lowell.
It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest.
Louise M. Alcott. My parents never bound us to any church.
Henry Ward Beecher.
It is discouraging to see so many men religious without having morality.
Prince Otto Von Bismarck.
Men say they must have something to worship. Well, then, let them worship the State; let it be all in all. I have wished to crush Rome that I might crush Christianity.
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, A. M. Abstract science is independent of a system of nature — of a crea- tion— of everything except memory, thought and reason.
Felix L. Oswold, M. D.
For fifteen centuries the pilot of the church lured our forefathers to a whirlpool of mental and physical degeneration.
views of religion. 141
Ambroise Pare.
The priest stayed with him till death and seized his purse, for fear another man should take it, saying he would say masses for his poor soul. Also, he took his clothes and everything else.
Buchner. Long enough have we believed; now we want to know.
Jean Fontanie.
The Jew marvelled greatly that the Christians were so greedy to eat the bodies of the dead.
John Lothrop Motley, D. C. L.
There are your true monks — none of your bare-footed, rosaried and roped friars, but jovial old gentlemen, living complacently on the fat of the land and at the peasants' expense.
Ambroise Pare.
The cruelty, avarice, blasphemies and wickedness of the Spaniards have utterly estranged the poor Indians from the religion that these Spaniards professed.
William Hazutt.
Saint's days and festivals divert from labor and give an idle and disorderly turn of mind.
Laurence Sterne.
Our doctors say that the dead shall rise again with bodies. This notion appears to be an article of faith, agreeable rather to the doc- trines of a Mohammedan priest, than of a Christian divine.
Walter Charles Lockyer, B. A.
In space we see across millions and millions of miles; in time we may travel back through millions of centuries. The moon is the world of yesterday; the earth is the world of today; Jupiter is the world of tomorrow.
142 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Edward Everett Hale, D. D.
The monkish pictures of hell, the notion of God sitting as a judge, the Holy Ghost sitting over against him as another God. Dismiss all such imagery as so much heathenism.
Henry Charles Lea.
Under the guidance of a church such as this the moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved.
Dugald Stewart.
We may lay it down as a fundamental principle that our ideas of the moral attributes of God must be derived from our own moral perceptions.
Sir William Herschel.
We have thus pointed out to us, as the great and indeed only ultimate source of our knowledge of nature and its laws, experience.
Shakespeare.
Tongues in trees — books in running brooks — Sermons in stones — and good in everything.
Stephen Paget, M. D.
So long as the church forbade the shedding of blood to the phy- sicians, surgery was kept at the level of a low unorganized trade.
John Keats.
I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion — I have shuddered at it.
Ambroise Pare.
By the light of God, Sire, I think you remember your promise never to commend these four things to me: To enter again into my mother's womb, to look after myself in battle, to leave your service, and to go to mass.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. I43
John Keats.
Why did I laugh ? No voice will tell: No God, no demon of severe response,
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell, Then to my human heart I turn at once.
William Hazlitt.
The creed of the Catholics absolve them from half their duties, atones for all slips and patches up all deficiencies. ;
John G. Saxe.
When Kepler, with intellect piercing afar, Discovered the laws of each planet and star, The doctors who ought to have loved his name, Derided his learning and blackened his fame.
Henry Charles Lea.
We have seen that the ages of faith, to which romantic dreamers regretfully look back, were ages of force and fraud.
Archbishop William Paley, D. D.
The Deity, it is true, is the object of none of our senses; but reflect what limited capacities animal senses arel
Ambroise Pare.
M. Pare. — Do you believe you will be saved in the next world? Queen mother of Francois II. — Surely, madame; for I do what I can to be a good man in this world.
Archbishop William Paley, D. D. Of the origin of evil, no universal solution has been discovered.
144 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Francis Galton, F. R. S.
A salutary change has come over the nation since the present leading men of science were boys, for education was at that time conducted in the interest of the clergy, and was strongly opposed to science.
Rev. Charles C. Everett, D.D., LL.D.
In these days of differing and changing beliefs it is not easy to define accurately the theology of any body of Christians.
Rev. William Ellery Channing, D. D.
Think no man the better, no man the worse, for the church he belongs to. Try him by his fruits.
Rev. E. A. Horton, D. D.
This struggling world of man is poorly aided by the Christian church.
Laurence Sterne.
The doctors of Sorbonne caused a priest to be deprived of his benefice for mispronouncing the words quisquis and quamquam, Which were the greater fools, they or the priest ?
Wendell Phillips.
If there is anything of value in the work I am doing, to-day, it may in an important sense be said to have had its root in Theodore Parker's heresy.
Right Hon. John Morley, M. P.
History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction it will sink to a curiosity, from being a guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a chapter in a book.
views of religion. 145
Laurence Sterne.
When a misfortune is impending, I cry God forbid — but when it falls upon me, I say, God be praised.
Mrs. Lynn Linton.
My father's fellow-parsons were a very queer lot. Some drank and fought in public-houses and it was not uncommon to hear the officiating clergyman exclaim, when his Sunday's ministrations were over, "Gosh, that job's jobbed."
Laurence Sterne.
You may see what sort of reasoners priests must have been from the beginning.
James Freeman Clarke, D. D.
The sacramental motive to attend church has nearly gone out of Protestant churches.
Frederic Harrison.
We see here a new thing — a statesman (Leon Gambetta) of the first rank in Europe who formally repudiated theology in any shape — the first ruler in France in the century who has chosen to rule on purely human sanctions.
Ludwig Van Beethoven.
When I regard myself as a part of the universe, what am I, what is he who is called the greatest ?
The Right Rev. Lord Bishop of Ely.
I do not ask you to admit the truth of miracles, or the inspiration of the Apostles, or the genuineness of the fourth Gospel, or anything which any moderately reasonable man can doubt of.
146 views of religion.
Frederic Harrison.
For the first time in this century Europe looked on and saw one of the foremost men (Gambetta) laid in his grave by a nation in grief without priest or church, prayer or hymn.
Beethoven.
Bonaparte has concluded a Concordat with the pope — such a sonata? But good heavens! such a sonata, in this fresh dawning Christian epoch. No, No! — it won't do, I will have none of it.
AUGUSTE COMTE.
Towards humanity, who is for us the only true great being, we, the conscious elements of whom she is composed, shall henceforth direct every aspect of our life, individual or collective. Our thoughts will be devoted to the knowledge of humanity, our affections to her love, our actions to her service.
Samuel Rogers, Poet. I believe in one God, no devil and twenty shillings to the pound.
Littre.
The positive philosophy does not busy itself with the beginning of the universe, if the universe had a beginning, nor yet with what happens to living things, plants, animals, man, after death, or at the consummation of the ages, if the ages have a consummation.
John G. Whittier. We are better than Adam and Eve, and if they fell, they fell up.
Prof. Maria Mitchell.
There is a God, and he is good, I say to myself. I try to increase my trust in this, my only article of creed.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 147
Ludwig Van Beethoven.
Sing daily the Epistles of St. Paul and daily visit Father Werner who can show you in his little book how to go straight to heaven. See how anxious I am about the welfare of your soul!
Martin Luther. To do so no more is the truest repentance.
Rev. Sidney Smith, M. A.
Among a hundred ploughmen, we shall not find one sceptic; among the same number of men of very cultivated faculties, we should probably find some who entertained captious and frivolous doubts against religion.
Sidney Smith.
In the church a man is thrown into life with his hands tied, and bid to swim; he does well if he keeps his head above water.
Prof. George Rawlinson, M. A.
According to the complaints of the German orthodox writers, no objective ground or standpoint is left on which the believing Theo- logical science can build with any feeling of security.
Rev. Charles Row, M. A.
The issues . . . involve the central position of Christianity; the all important question, whether Jesus Christ was an historical person or a creature of the imagination. .
James Anthony Froude.
What has ecclesiasticism to do with moral laws ? It puts them all aside and puts its own creed and catechism in their place.
Herbert Spencer.
Whether wickedness can in any way affect the higher power, or whether we are punished after death for sins committed in this life, are questions about which we are superlatively ignorant.
143 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Prof. George Rawlinson, M. A.
Questions as to the origin of man, whether by development or by direct creation, whether from one pair or from more .... lie beyond the domain of history proper.
Rev. Edward Everett Hale, D. D.
Unitarians worship God. They do not worship any son of God. They do not think that, in any fair use of words, the God of heaven, the present power who rules the universe to-day, walked from Caper- naum to Jerusalem.
Mary E. Lease.
When we have learned how to live we need no theology to teach us how to die.
John William Draper, M. D., LL. D.
The tutelar saints, who had worked so many miracles when there was no necessity, were found to want the requisite power when so greatly needed.
Macchiavelli.
For they (ecclesiastical princedoms) are acquired by merit or good fortune, but are maintained without either.
Frederic Harrison.
There will be no complete religion until religious men have just as keen an interest in the progress of the commonwealth as they now profess in the welfare of the soul.
M. Flourens.
Either natural selection is nothing or it is nature, but nature en- dowed with the attributes of selection — nature personified, which is the last error of the last century; the nineteenth century has done with personifications.
Hegel.
An animal is a miracle for the vegetable world.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 149
MOLESCHOTT.
Without phosphorous there is no thought.
Prof. Charles Row, M. A.
Let us not deceive ourselves, if the Gospels are not in their main outlines historically true, Christianity is no more divine than Shakes- peare.
The Right Rev. Lord Bishop of Gloucester.
Religion generally is accepted as a buttress to the rising edifice of morality, but is nothing more.
Beethoven.
To-day happens to be Sunday; so I will quote you something out of the Bible, — Love one another.
Dean C. C. Everett, H. D. S.
Man cannot be saved by any scheme for his salvation consists in the development of his best nature.
Rev. Edward Everett Hale, D. D.
If what you want is an old statement of duty, authorized by the traditions of many centuries, you had better go to the Greek Church.
Macchiavelli.
A prince should therefore be very careful that nothing ever escapes his lips which is not replete with .... mercy, good-faith, humanity and religion. And there is no virtue which it is more neces- sary for him to seem to possess than this last. Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are.
James Freeman Clarke, D. D.
Books and lectures, schools and societies for study, have been so much multiplied that one whose aim is self-culture can often get more aid outside of the church than within.
150 views of religion.
Denis Diderot.
He is a good Christian, who proves to me every minute of the day how much better it would be to be a good man.
Pascal.
What is God ? A question that we put to children, and that phil- osophers have much trouble to answer.
Pascal.
The diversity of religious opinions has led the deists to invent an argument that is perhaps more singular than sound.
Charles Dickens.
The congregation fall upon their knees and are hushed into pro- found stillness as he delivers an extempore prayer, in which he calls upon the sacred founder of the Christian faith to bless his ministry, in terms of disgusting and impious familiarity not to be described.
Francis, Duke of La Rochefoucould.
Everything however has been written which could by possibility persuade us that death is not an evil; nevertheless, I doubt whether any man of good sense ever believed it.
Denis Diderot.
I let the people see, that in such a collection as the Encyclopaedia, we ought to treat the history and experience of the dogmas and dis- cipline of the Christian exactly like those of the religion of Brahma or Mohammed.
Stanislaus, King of Poland.
Too much devotion leads to fanaticism; too much philosophy to irreligion.
views of religion. 151
Charles Dickens.
And now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner; the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the wel- fare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops.
Prof. Winslow Upton, A.M.
The science of astronomy had its beginning in Chaldea and Egypt before historical annals were written.
Dr. Edwin Grant Conklin.
On the whole, the facts which are at present at our disposal justify a return to the position of Darwin.
Charles Dickens.
People have grown sullen and obstinate and are becoming dis- gusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Prince Breiner and Count Arco stand in need of the Archbishop, but I do not; and if it comes to the worst and he forgets all his duties as a Prince — a spiritual Prince — then come to me at Vienna.
Ambroise Pare.
I have things which I would communicate to God and to no one else.
Dr. G. Stanley Hall, Pres. C. U.
Evolution is the most precious thing we have. Religion of the best kind is often taught in the laboratory.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
We live in this world in order always to learn industriously and to enlighten each other by means of discussion and to strive vigorously to promote the progress of science and the fine arts.
15a VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Prof. Maria Mitchell.
I stayed five hours to-day to see the Pope wash feet, which was very silly; for I saw mother wash them much more effectually twenty years ago.
David Starr Jordan, LL. D., Pres. L. S. U.
Darwin had felt that a crucial test of his theory would be his ability to convince Lyell, Hooker and Huxley in England and Asa Gray in America. These four illustrious men were among his first converts.
Denis Diderot.
The revealed law contains no moral precepts which I do not find recommended and practiced under the law of nature; therefore it has taught us nothing new upon morality.
Swift.
As Rochefoucould his maxims drew From nature, — I believe them true.
Moses Mendlessohn.
I know that the lower orders of all sects are mighty fond of con- verting. The narrower the mind the more excluding the principles.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
If the Archbishop of Salsburg were to offer me a salary of 2,000 florins and any other person 1,000, 1 would except the latter, because with the 1,000 1 should enjoy health and peace of mind.
Prof. Winslow Upton, A. M.
Powerful telescopes bring to the observer a hundred million stars— that is, a hundred million suns similar to ours and surrounded by worlds counted by thousands of millions.
views of religion. 1 53
Pascal.
We know the age at which a child ought to learn to read, to sing, to dance, to begin Latin or geometry. It is only in religion that you take no account of his capacity.
Prof. Maria Mitchell. I am more and more disgusted with the preaching that I hearl
Prof. G. H. Darwin.
Fifty-four millions years ago the earth's day was only three hours long, and the constant increase due to tidal action will in 150,000,000 years give us a day seventy times as long as at present.
Prof. Simmons, R. C. S.
Ages ago the day was only three or four hours long and the tidal action of the moon has increased it to the present value.
John G. Whittier. Annihilation is better for the wicked than everlasting punishment
Prof. Maria Mitchell.
He said the unbeliever is already condemned. It seems to me that if anything would make me an infidel, it would be the threat lavished against unbelief.
David Starr Jordan, LL. D., Pres. L. S. U.
He was the faithful mirror of nature, and in all the years since then no important statement of fact admitted by Darwin has been cast aside as spurious.
Prof. David Starr Jordan, LL.D., Pres. L. S. U.
No man who has studied animal life would hold the old notion of the special creation of their species and look an animal in the face.
154 views of religion.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Do not be uneasy, dear father, about the state of my soul. It is not true that I boasted of eating meat on fast-days; but I did say that I cared little for it and considered it no sin.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U.S.A.
Millions of men, women and children since the introduction of Christiaity have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
Prof. Maria Mitchell.
On the whole, it is strange that people who go to church are no worse than they are.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel.
You have represented me as a goddess, whereas I have done noth- ing but what I believe to be right; and wherever I did wrong, it was because I knew no better.
Rev. George A. Gordon, D. D.
Prediction is the word in any discussion or consideration of im- mortality. The event of death alone can furnish the utter refutation or the complete demonstration of the belief.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
We are surrounded here by disagreeable specimens of pastors who embitter every pleasure of their own or of others ; dry, prosaic pedants who declare that a concert is a sin, a walk frivolous and pernicious, but a theatre the lake of brimstone itself.
Goethe.
. Men knew neither from God, nor from nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude what is valuable beyond ap- praisement.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 1 55
Lord Bishop Creighton, D. D.
Persecution is supposed to be an iniquity peculiar to ecclesiastical institutions.
Prof. F. Huberty James.
The system of Confucius is, politically and ethically, one of the best that man has invented. No people have a clearer perception of right and wrong than the Chinese.
Theodore Parker.
The Scriptures are no finality to me. I do not believe there ever was a miracle or ever will be. I take not the Bible for my master, nor yet the church, nor even Jesus of Nazareth for my master.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
If people, however, understand by the word "saint" a pietist, one of those who lay their hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for them, .... such an one I am not, and hope never to become, so long as I live.
Rev. Robert Stuart MacArthur, D. D., LL. D.
We are better able to make creeds than were those who made the so-called ecumenical creeds of the church.
Rev. Dr. F. A. Nobde.
Contractors when pressed never hesitate to complete their jobs on Sunday; even though it be the chapel of a Christian university.
Epicurus.
Fabulous persuasion in faith is the approbation of feigned ideas or notions; it is credulous belief in the reality of phantoms.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
But when people come, and talk at random about common-place matters, and of God and the world, my mood becomes again so unutterably mournful that I do not know how to endure it.
156 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel.
Before the optical parts were finished, many visitors had the curi- osity to walk through it, (Telescope Tube) among the rest King George III. and the Arcbishop of Canterbury, following the King, and finding it difficult to proceed, the King turned to give him the hand, saying, Come my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to Heaven.
Feuerbach.
Nature is deaf to the complaints and prayers of man; she sends him back to himself without mercy.
Hume.
The intolerance of almost all religions which have maintained the unity of God is as remarkable as the contrary principle among Polytheists.
De Montroui.
The common appellation of Dii, Dei, Divi, given to all the beings who are the object of worship, come from the Sanscrit root Div, to shine, and signifies neither more nor less than the brilliant.
Anaxagoras.
If the birds made themselves a god, he would have wings; the god of horses would have four legs.
Archbishop Anselm.
I do not seek to understand in order to believe but to believe in order to understand.
Hutton.
In the economy of the world, I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end.
B. Cotta.
Every miracle, if proved, would show that the creation does not deserve the veneration with which we regard it.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 157
ZlMMERMANN.
Whence do animals come ? The idea that God created them by his will is not only unsatisfactory, it is unworthy of him.
Edgar Sultus.
Nature, which is unconscious in her immortality, entrancing in her beauty, savage in her cruelty, imperial in her prodigality and ap- palling in her convulsions, is not only deaf but dumb.
Sainte-Beuve. The eternity of the world once admitted, all else follows.
Alfred de Vigny.
They talk of faith; what is it, after all, this rare thing? I have studied it in every priest who said he possessed it and have found but a fervent hope — certainty, never.
Sainte-Beuve. Our desires, ephemeral and contradictory as they are, prove nothing.
Eschylus. Zeus is the earth; Zeus is the sky; Zeus is the whole world and yet more than the world.
Louis Viardot.
It is not my fault if these reflections have destroyed, piece by piece, all the edifices of ordinary belief, and have reduced me like Montaigne, to have nothing whereon to lay my head, but the pillow of doubt.
Ella E.Gibson.
There will never be any permanent progress until all authority in the Bible is destroyed.
Israel Zangwill. Faith is belief in what you know is untrue. True religion in not a branch of Engineering.
158 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
M. Ernest Havet.
The science of nature is essentially non-religious, since religion confounds itself with the supernatural.
Laplace. Ah, God is an hypothesis of which I have no need.
Esquirol.
Mental alienation, which ancient nations regarded as an inspira- tion or a chastisement of the gods, in all its kinds, differs in nothing from other maladies.
Rev. F. W. Robertson.
The universal voice of mankind is not infallible. It was the uni- versal belief once, on the evidence of the senses, that the earth was stationary; — the universal voice was wrong. The universal voice might be wrong in matter of a resurrection.
Descartes.
I confess that by natural reason alone we can make many con- jectures about the soul; we have flattering conjectures, but no sort of certainty.
Montaigne.
Let us ingenuously confess that God alone has dictated it (im- mortality) to us, and faith; for 'tis no lesson of nature and our own reason.
Claude Bernard.
When we inject oxygenized blood into the decapitated head of a dog, by means of the carotid artery, we see come back, little by little, not only the vital properties of the muscles, the glands and the nerves, but we perceive those of the brain also to return in like measure.
Mohammed. Be just; justice is piety.
views of religion. 1 59
Emile Littre.
The right is sought for itself, and with no other reward than that of having practiced it.
D'Holbach.
If the soul makes my arm to move when nothing opposes it, it cannot make my arm raise a weight which is too heavy for it.
Hume.
The weakness of the body and that of the mind in infancy, are exactly proportioned; their vigor in mankind, their sympathetic dis- order in sickness, their common gradual decay in old age; the step further seems unavoidable, their common dissolution at death.
M. GUAMN DE VlTRY.
I beg pardon of M.M. the Cardinals, but the human race, instead of having come down from heaven, seems rather to have risen from the earth and the monkeys are more nearly related to us than the angels.
Hallam.
If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape.
Louis Viradot.
A sun itself, if it can get on fire, can become extinct and in the universal and eternal life its existence of millions of centuries does not go for more than the life of a butterfly.
Canon Pierre Charron.
If religion were fixed by a divine tie, nothing in the world could shake it in us. Such a tie could never be broken.
Buckle. To assert that Christianity communicated to man moral truths previously unknown argues on the part of the assertor either gross ignorance or else wilful fraud.
l6o VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Goethe. God — the watch-maker!
Louis Viardot.
So, like science and with science, let us resolutely put aside all that is supernatural, much more all that is divine.
Lamennais.
Why do bodies gravitate one towards another? Because God so willed it, said they of old. Because they attract one another, says science.
Voltaire.
I know a man who is firmly persuaded that at the death of a bee its buzzing ceases.
Prevost Paradol.
We may behold the wisest men, the noblest moralists, the most generous martyrs, all of them persuaded that existence, even spiritual existence is an evil; we see them all longing for annihilation.
Montesquieu.
The religion of Confucius denies the immortality of the soul and the sect of Zeno did not believe in it.
Bayle.
It is better to be an atheist than an idolater. It is less dangerous to have no religion at all than to have a bad one.
Lord Brougham.
The question conceives a perfectly good being and asks how such a being can have permitted any evil at all.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. l6l
Lyell.
Professor Agassiz .... confesses that he cannot say in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those of a young chimpanzee.
Montaigne.
The saliva of a wretched mastiff touching the hand of Socrates might disturb and destroy his intellect.
Denis Diderot.
I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.
Lord Bacon.
Atheism did never perturb states ; for it maketh men wary of them- selves as looking no farther.
Archbishop Whately.
Moses thus represented the sanction of his law as consisting of temporal rewards and punishments only.
Byron. I need not paradise but rest.
Peter Eckler.
If religions were founded on the demonstrated truths of science, there would be no mystery, no supernaturalism, no miracles, no skepticism, no false religion.
Sir £. L. Bulwer, Bart. Filled by the fear which believes, with the notion of superior powers, they assisted their ignorance by the conjectures of their superstition.
l6? VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Edgar Saltus.
The best that we can do, the best that has ever been done, is to contemplate as calmly as we can the nothingness from which we are come and into which we shall all disappear.
Shakespeare.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Lord Brougham. Evil arises, he says, (Archbishop King) from the nature of matter. Who doubts it? But is not the whole question, why matter was created with such properties as of necessity to produce evil?
Lord Brougham.
Must the subject, (origin of evil) of all others the most interesting for us to know well, be to us always as a sealed book of which we can never know anything?
Goethe.
The denial of the ordinary belief can only lead to good, when the thinking powers are strong. Reason alone is worthy to succeed to the religion of duty.
E. Littre.
Mind is a property of matter, as gravitation is of every material particle.
Byron. All that we know is, (of the soul) nothing can be known.
Feuerbach.
A God supernatural is nothing else than a supernatural ego: the being of man who has exceeded his bounds and raised himself above his being. '
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 163
M. EMILE BURNOUE.
God ceases continually to renew or repair his works. Instead of being the workman, he becomes the model: the real workman is man; he who builds temples, raises altars, offers sacrifices, prays.
Voltaire.
If the soul were a separate being, thought would not only be its mode of action, but its essence; it would always be thinking, which is far from the case. During deep sleep, lethargy, a fit, does man think ?
Louis Agassiz.
Most of the arguments of philosophers in favor of the immortality of man, apply equally to the permanence of the principle in other living beings.
Richard Braithwaite.
To Banbury come I, O profane one! Where I saw a Puritane-one Hanging of his cat on Monday For killing of a mouse on Sunday.
Gen. Blanco.
The supremacy of the priests is the real cause of the decline of Spain.
Hon. W. E. Gladstone.
Evolution, in the name of unchangeable laws discharges God from governing the World.
Rev. Bishop F. D. Huntington, D. D.
As it appears to me, the tendencies in religion in the present genera- tion ... are largely towards indifference, . . unbelief, • • . . with a neglect of public and household worship.
William Jewett Tucker, Pres. Dart. Col.
I call your attention to the very theories and doctrines which the church has tried to make itself believe.
164 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Dr. Alexander Bruce, D. D.
I am disposed to think that a great and steadily increasing portion of the moral worth of society lies outside of the church.
Roger Williams.
An oathe is an act of worship and forced worship stinks in God's nostrils.
Shakespeare.
I'll take thy word for faith, not ask thy oath; Who shuns not to brook one will sure crack both.
Gen. A. W. Greely, U. S. A.
There is no reliable evidence that he (Washington) ever took com- munion.
Prof. William Denton.
By fossils we learn that the earth has been inhabited by living beings for millions of years.
SCHLEGEL.
Liberalism will never prevail with those who, in politics, are at- tached to monarchy and, in religion, to Christianity.
Rev. T. De-Witt Talmage, D. D.
All the leading scientists who believe in evolution, without one ex- ception the world over, are infidels. I say nothing against infidelity, mind you.
Rev. James De Normandie, D. D.
When I was a boy I had pointed out to me as a dreadful infidel and a very dangerous man one who in a small and church-going com- munity never went to church, but everybody added, He was the kind- est and most honorable and best man in town.
views of religion. 165
John Stuart Mill.
On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is the duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.
Rev. James Freeman Clarke.
So ended the Roman religion; in superstition among the ignorant, and in disbelief among the wise.
Omar Khayyam.
Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, And hell a shadow from a soul of fire.
Thomas Henry Huxley.
There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is, when the garment of make-belief, by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped off.
Prof. Maria Mitchell. The more I see and hear, the less do I care about church doctrines.
Rev. Benjamin Fay Mills.
The idea of a creator of something out of nothing is buried in the grave of the world's superstitions.
James Monroe, Pres. U. S. A.
To the welfare of Thomas Paine the Americans are not, nor can they be, indifferent.
Napoleon.
A statute of gold ought to be erected to you (Thomas Paine) in every city in the universe.
l66 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Haeckel.
No other branch has been so wilfully obscured and mystified by priestly influence, as has the germ-history of man.
PrrrAcus.
The gods themselves, if gods there are, must be subjected to necessity.
Grant Allen
Christianity surged up from below, from the dregs of the world; it arose among an obscure sect of local fanatics.
Hon. John Morley, M. P.
It is time that there should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of republicans and freethinkers and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings and churches.
Bishop William White.
General Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
The foundation of superstition is ignorance, the superstructure is faith and the dome is a vain and foolish hope.
Lemuel K. Washburn. Nature has no need of a Holy Ghost.
A. De Musset. Every philosopher is cousin to an atheist.
Matthew Arnold.
Protestant ministers cried out against Galileo's assertion of the earth's movements just as loudly as Catholic priests.
VIEWS OP RELIGION. 167
Robert G. Ingersoll.
This world was no more made for man than it was for snakes and spiders.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
The inspired Bible has been and is the greatest curse of Christendom. Read the Bible as you would any other book.
Robert G. Ingersoll. All progress has been due to the devil. He was the first investigator,
Haeckel.
These human embryos conceal a greater wealth of important truths than is afforded by the whole mass of most other sciences and of all so-called revelations.
Schiller.
Meanwhile, until philosophy Sustains the structure of the world, Her workings will be carried on By hunger and by love.
Vanini.
The devil wishes to have us go to hell; and most of us do. God's will is that all men should go to heaven, but scarcely any one does. The devil is stronger than God.
Phyrro.
Nothing is so favorable to happiness as to avoid taking sides with anyone in theology or metaphysics.
Sir James Herschel.
He must have studied astronomy to little purpose who can suppose man to be the only object of his Creator's care.
l68 VIEWS OF RELIGION.
Thomas Henry Huxley.
Untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that
clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else and to whatever denominations it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science.
Prof. Richard A. Proctor.
Astronomy, first of all sciences, introduced doubts respecting the meaning at least, if not the truth, of portions of the Bible record.
Prof. E. Colbert, M. A.
We cannot doubt that the earth has existed during many millions of years, instead of less than 6000.
Gen. Andrew Jackson, Pres. U. S. A.
Thomas Paine needs no monument made by hands; he has erected himself a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson, Pres. U. S. A.
You ask my opinion of Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine. They were alike in making enemies of the priests and pharisees of their day. Both were honest men.
Prof. Thomas Davidson.
Christianity is a mere tallow candle, rather making the darkness visible than expelling it.
W. S. Bell.
The corner stone of Christianity rests upon a dream 1 Take away this dream and Christianity has nothing left.
Tertullian. I believe it because it is impossible.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 169
William Makepeace Thackeray.
To my mind, Scripture only means a writing and Bible means a book.
Edward Bellamy.
Poor fellows, the clergy, theirs was indeed a trying business, lay- ing down laws of conduct which the laws of self-preservation com- pelled men to break .
Sir Godfrey Higgins. Priests have been the curse of the world.
William Makepeace Thackeray.
Smith's truth being established in Smith's mind as the divine one, persecution follows as a matter of course — martyrs have roasted all over Europe, all over God's world, upon this dogma.
Benjamin Franklin. The bell calls others to church, but itself never minds the sermon.
Amelia E. Barr.
Even the truth has now to depend on the currency and the most evangelical societies pay treasurers as well as missionaries.
Rev. Joseph Blanco White.
I come prepared to describe to you the character of the church of Rome; and in the first place I am to prove that she exerts her whole power in making her members superstitious.
Benjamin Franklin. The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.
Rev. Anthony Gavin.
I say that the confessors, priests and especially friars, make good this saying: friar or fraud is the same thing.
i70 views of religion.
Benjamin Franklin.
Here lies, who need not here be named;
For theologic knowledge famed;
To every heretic a foe,
Was he an honest man ? So, so.
John G. Whittier.
Not vainly Roman hearts have bled To feed the crozier and the crown, If roused thereby, the world shall tread The twin-born vampires down.
John G. Whittier.
Yet, scandal of the world! from thee
One needful truth mankind shall learn:
That kings and priests to Liberty And God are false in turn.
Prof. Thorold Rogers.
We do not owe them to the church, which has been, since the days of the first Edward, the willing servant of statecraft and has rarely raised its voice against wrong-doing.
Gov. Brownlow (Tennessee).
Here, as in all parts of the South, the worst class of men are preachers.
Prof. Richard S. Ely (University of Wisconsin).
They, the clergy, have too often made themselves the advocates of conservatism simply as conservatism, regardless of all abuses which it embraced.
Thomas Carlyle.
Speedy end to superstition, a gentle one if you can contrive it, but an end. What can it profit any mortal to adopt locutions and imagin- ations which do not correspond to fact; which no sane mortal can deliberately adopt in his soul as true ?
VIEWS OP RELIGION. 171
Dean Farrar.
Christians are not called upon to believe that there was an actual garden, an actual talking-serpent and actual trees.
Origen.
What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that god planted trees in paradise like an husbandman?
Rxjdyard Kipling. Religion has no influence on conduct.
Prof. William James (Harvard).
The whole subject of immortality has its prime roots in personal feelings.
Thomas Babbington Macaulay.
We know that the restraints which exist in Spain and Italy have not prevented atheism from spreading among the educated classes.
Hon. Mr. Cooper, M. C.
It is no part of the functions of the government of the United States to teach an Indian that the Pope is infallible.
William Combe.
That thankless parent, mother church, Has ever left me in the lurch; And when so many fools are seen, To strut a rector or a dean.
Ambrose Bierce. Camels and Christians receive their burdens kneeling.
Mrs. B. F. Mills.
I know of no reason why we should conceive of a ready-made heaven any more than a ready-made hell.
172 views of religion.
Frederick the Great. All religions must be tolerated, but none must make unjust en- croachments upon the others. In this country every man must get to heaven his own way.
Peter Bayle. I am a protestant, for I protest against all religions.
Lemuel K. Washburn Worship is rendered unnecessary by living well.
Miss M. T. Elder.
Has Catholic New Orleans, after one hundred and fifty years of Catholicity, produced one great Catholic? No, not one!
Maria Agnesi.
Algebra and geometry are the only provinces of thought in which peace reigns.
Phillip Grangeaud.
Human species had not yet appeared on the earth when the Pyre- nees, the Alps, the Carpathians and the Himalayas were formed.
Dr. J. M. Taylor, Pres., Vass. College.
In so far as they ground themselves in religion, morals should not be taught in the American public school.
Heine.
The human spirit has its right and will not be rocked to sleep by the lullaby of church bells.
Jean de Riquetti.
I am, or was, a merchant of police here, a high office eligible for the nobility alone, much in the same manner as my Lord the Bishop is a merchant of holy water.
VIEWS OF RELIGION. 1 73
M. Paul Bert.
Modem societies march towards morality in proportion as they leave religion behind.
Monsieur Freret.
This horrid and almost uninterrupted chain of religious wars for fourteen centuries never subsisted but among Christians; no people but themselves ever spilt a drop of human blood for theological disputes.
M. Paul Bert. The conquests of education are made on the domain of religion.
Hypatia.
Why not, in an age when emperors and consulars crowd to the tombs of a tent-maker and a fisherman; and kiss the mouldy bones of the vilest slaves? Why not, among a people whose God is the crucified son of a carpenter?
Dr. J. M. Taylor, Pres., Vass. College.
The history of every union of church and state has been tjie history of a tyranny, even in England.
Mirabeau. Is not a miracle a stick with only one end ?
Moncure D. Conway.
Ethically, we are required to do evil that good may come; theologi- cally, to worship a deity who is doing just that all the time.
Horace Greeley. Better tend to each world in its proper order.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Religion should be regarded as the art of right living.
174 views op religion.
Monsieur Freret.
If God had deigned to make himself a man and a Jew and to die in Palestine by an infamous punishment to expiate the crimes of man- kind and to banish sin from the earth, there ought no longer to have been any sins or crimes on the face of it
; Rev. R. Heber Newton, D. D.
Orthodoxy, in its creed, affirms the unity of God, but through its metaphysical speculation there came about a hopeless confusion of divine unity.
Swinburne.
O, gods dethroned and deceased, Cast forth, wiped out in a day! From your wrath is the world relieved, Redeemed from your chains, men say.
Senor Montero Rios.
There are, moreover, really no Carlists but the priests, who recall the gloomiest period of our history.
Cu-su.
There is no such thing as heaven. Every planet is environed by its atmosphere as with a shell, and rolls in space around its sun.
Prince Kou.
These are some, though a very small sample, of the reasons for questioning the soul's existence.
Mantel Sands.
The only authority is truth, the only word of God is fact, the only text-book is the universe.
Rabelais. I am going in quest of a great Maybe.
views op religion, 175
Rev. Dr. Plumb.
It seems to me that the old ship of Andover is out on a very stormy sea.
La Mothe Le Vayer.
My friend, I have so much religion that I am not of your religion.
Peter Bayle.
See what that thing (Christianity) called truth is I
Mademoiselle Hubert.
The practice of the virtues can have no relation with the tenets of religious doctrines.
Mirabeau.
Hell is the pet subject with these ministers, whose religious fury contributes, above a little, to fill bedlam, which lies closely contiguous to one of their conventicles.
Ali Ben Abdallah, Basha op Cairo.
Nothing, sublime Emperor, would be more advantageous than, if it were possible, to abolish and suppress our religion.
Malancthon. The observance of the sabbath, nor of any other day, is necessary,
Bucer.
It is not only a superstition, but an apostasy from Christ, to think that working on the Lord's day, in itself considered, is a sinful thing.
Erasmus.
It is meet, therefore, that the keeping of the sabbath-day give place to the commodity and profit of man.
Calvin.
Christians, therefore, should have nothing to do with the super- stitious observance of days.
i76 views of religion.
Jehovah.
For after that in the wisdom of God the world knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that be- lieve.
Dr. Oscar Blumenthal. When the resurrection comes, I shan't get up.
St. Paul.
One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.
Calvin.
The very church of God, which ought to please God, what does it but provoke him to anger?
Martin Luther.
The world grows worse and worse and becomes more wicked every day; less modest, and in fine, more wicked than in papacy.
Macauley.
It is an unquestionable and most instructive fact that the years during which the political power of the Anglican hierarchy was in the zenith were precisely the years