“When I stood at the grave of a man whom everybody knew as a drunkard, and we both knew such a man, who, going home at night drunk from a party, fell from his horse and broke his collar bone, and died from his injury mainly because he was dissipated. He was worse than a drunkard, a seducer of innocence, a debauchee, most profane and vulgar in all his conversation. He was vice personified; destitute of all pure noble feelings, spending his nights in vice and his days in intrigue, whose acquaintance was fatal to a woman, and who reveled in the putridity of immorality. Every decent person loathed him while he was living, and only recognized him because he was in a prominent government position. When we stood at his grave, and the chaplain said the words:
“‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,—’
“I could not help thinking, you are either a fool or a liar and I recalled the saying of Garibaldi: ‘A priest knows himself to be an imposter unless he be a fool, or have been taught to lie from boyhood.’
“Such a performance as that, and I don’t know what else to call it, is degrading a religious service, and turning it into a falsehood, making a sham or mockery of what at such a solemn moment should be—most truthful and sacred. Everybody present at the time knew the service was a lying flattery, a religious farce. Is it any wonder that so many people lack sincerity, and lose faith not only in the church, its ministers, but in all things religious? The clergy go through their forms whether they are suitable for the occasion or not.”
I suggested that perhaps his hymns might not always be appropriate.
“Why not?” he asked. “They would not lie about God or the dead, but would be only for the living. Another thing. As this man to whom I referred was near death, they sent for the chaplain. He may have found a suitable prayer, or have said some good words, but what could he do for such a man in the awful hour of death? They say, ‘The man may repent,’ and then? Would he go to heaven? What kind of a heaven would be suitable for him? What society is he fitted to enjoy? What delight would he take in anything that is pure and holy? That is another of the false, baneful teachings of the Church, that the vilest of men may in a dying hour, by a few words of the priest, by partaking of the communion, by the anointing of oil, or the sprinkling of a few drops of so-called holy water, in an instant, be fitted to go into the presence of God and associate with angels and the pure and good. You might as well take a savage cannibal, or a wild Hottentot, suddenly into a London drawing room, among the refined and educated, and expect him to enjoy himself and be at ease, as to think of a vile, polluted man gaining admittance into Heaven, and to be happy should he get into it. Of what interest would God be to a soul in a future life, who had nothing to do with Him here?
“With me it is not a question if I shall go to Heaven, but how shall I like it when I get there? Strip many people of all that is in them that pertains wholly to this life, and there would be little left that would be worth taking over into that other life. The whole church scheme is founded on the idea that Heaven is a kind of a pen, or a big sheep-fold, and that the keeper of the gate can be cajoled or bribed to let in anybody who is vouched for by some priest; that even those so vile as to pollute the earth by their presence, who can get past the keeper through the gate, or by any hook or crook get in, will at once bloom out into saints and angels.
“Is it strange that so many live in vice and sin, when their salvation is made so easy, by getting in a priest at the last moment? How can honest men, as clergymen, bolster up such a flattering delusion? If it is criminal to deceive men about things in this life, how much more so when it is about that which affects their eternal life? If the parsons cannot keep a man from sinning, or make him lead a good life here, how can they, in the hour of death, save him from Hell or fit him for Heaven, when his body is racked with pain and his senses are benumbed? Is it not a gross deception to teach that, when a man becomes so feeble from his vices, that he can enjoy nothing more on earth, neither of its good or evil, and has nothing left but its dregs, that he can take communion, and reach Heaven?
“Colley Cibber wrote of Nell Gwynn, the notorious profligate mistress of Charles the Second: ‘She received the last consolations of religion. Her repentance in her last hours appeared in all the contrite symptoms of Christian sincerity.’
“This is only one instance of thousands of similar statements. How can a person’s death-bed be illumined by the holy consolations of religion, after a whole life spent in the meanest kind of wickedness? What sacrilegious rubbish!