"Thou shalt not covet." Your history is the history of covetousness itself. Christian Rome has tried to devour the world. A little while ago we saw the Greek cross planted upon the Balkan—saw the Russian eagle perched upon those snowy crags, gloating over the misfortunes of Turkey, eager to clutch in his greedy talons the territory of Islam, and prevented only by the jealous wolves of Protestantism.
No wonder that the warmest hearts and brightest intellects are leaving you. Upon your walls they read the fateful words that met the terrified gaze of Babylon's sinful king. Your devotees are looking forward to a millennium when your power on earth shall be supreme. Delusive phantom! your millennium has come and gone. That dark blot on the page of history—that withering pall stretching across the centuries from Constantine to Luther—that constitutes the thousand years of Christian rule foretold in the Apocalypse. But that has past, and your power is vanishing, never to be restored again. From the ashes of that dauntless hero, Giordano Bruno, young Science, phoenixlike, arose, and in the soil prepared by Luther, sowed the seed whose harvest is your death. Even now I hear your death-knell ringing; even now I gaze into a sepulchre where soon must lie your Bible and your creeds—your stakes, your gibbets and your racks—your priests, your devil and your God! And when the last have been entombed, then gather up the crumbling bones of the one hundred million human beings who have perished at your hands, and let this ghastly pile remain, a most befitting monument to your unbounded cruelties and crimes!
It is a pleasing thought to know that bigotry is fading from the earth. It can flourish only in the malarial swamps of ignorance and superstition, and the poisonous vapors arising from these loathsome regions are being fast dispelled by the sun of science.
An incident in the life of Nicholas I. of Russia furnishes a fitting parallel to what the bigots of our time are now experiencing. Among the many admirers of that other great Deist, Voltaire, was the Empress Catharine, who ordered a statue of him from the leading sculptor of Europe. When it arrived Catharine was dying, and for years it lay untouched in the box in which it had been shipped.
At length Alexander caused it to be set up in a room of the imperial palace, where it remained until Nicholas ascended the throne. Nicholas was a most admirable type of the religious bigot; he was ignorant and intolerant, and the character of Voltaire was the object of his especial hatred. Hardly had he donned the imperial robes before he began to realize
"How uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."
An insurrection had broken out in one of his provinces. Troubled and perplexed, he was wandering through the halls of the palace when, suddenly, he stood face to face with the statue of Voltaire. That haughty smile, so natural to the face of the living Voltaire, had been transferred to his marble image; and now it seemed to mock the troubled emperor. He summoned one of his ministers and ordered him to remove the offensive work. The minister did so, placing it in an old lumber room of the palace. All went well with the emperor until one night the cry of "fire!" resounded in his ears. The palace was on fire. Rushing to the scene of the conflagration he chanced to pass through the very room to which the statue had been removed, and again he stood before the object of his hatred. The red glare of the flames added to the terrors of the scene, and, for a moment, Nicholas fancied himself translated to the dominions of Satan and standing before his throne. The flames were finally extinguished, the greater portion of the palace was saved, and with it the statue. But the remembrance of this terrible scene haunted him like an apparition all night long. He could not sleep. In the morning he summoned his minister and ordered him to destroy the work of art. Out of respect for the dead Catharine the order was unheeded. Years rolled by; the armies of England and France had invaded the Crimea and defeated with frightful slaughter the armies of the czar. Then flashed to St. Petersburg news of the bombardment of Sebastopol which ultimately fell. It was night, and, wild with anguish, Nicholas was again wandering through those desolate halls—lighted only by the weird moonbeams that came straggling through the palace windows—when, for the third time, he was confronted by the ghostly statue. Again he summoned his minister. But his iconoclastic spirit was broken. He no longer demanded the destruction of the statue, but simply begged his official to remove it to where he should never more behold it. The wily minister bethought him of a place never visited by his sovereign, and accordingly had it removed to the imperial library. Nicholas is no more; but the statue remains—a silent monarch in that realm of thought—an object, not of abhorrence and dread, but of admiration.
As the Russian bigot was haunted by the statue of Voltaire, so the bigots of our day and country are haunted by the memory of Paine. Theological insurrections are breaking out on every hand; the intellectual fires of the twentieth century are encircling and consuming the rude palace of Superstition; they hear the cannon of Science thundering before the walls of their Sebastopol. Terror-stricken, aimlessly and hopelessly they wander on, only to be confronted at every turn by the ghost of Thomas Paine. Unhappy beings, this will not forever last. Not always will the good name of Thomas Paine stand as a phantom to frighten bigots. Gently and lovingly his friends are removing it, passing it on from generation to generation, to a better and a grander age—to an age across whose threshold no bigot's foot shall ever pass. Then, when the Republic of the World has been established, and the Religion of Humanity has become the universal religion, all mankind will recognize the worth and revere the memory of him who wrote the political and religious creed of this glorious day:
—THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY, TO DO GOOD MY RELIGION.
THE END.