All kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable serenity. As a rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast any discredit on his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold, with a priest on either side, smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The man who has succeeded in making his home a hell meets death without a quiver, provided he has never expressed any doubt as to the divinity of Christ or the eternal "procession" of the holy ghost. The king who has waged cruel and useless war, who has filled countries with widows and fatherless children, with the maimed and diseased, and who has succeeded in offering to the Moloch of ambition the best and bravest of his subjects, dies like a saint.
177. The first Corpse and the first Cathedral
Now and then, in the history of this world, a man of genius, of sense, of intellectual honesty has appeared. These men have denounced the superstitions of their day. They pitied the multitude. To see priests devour the substance of the people filled them with indignation. These men were honest enough to tell their thoughts. Then they were denounced, condemned, executed. Some of them escaped the fury of the people who loved their enemies, and died naturally in their beds. It would not be for the church to admit that they died peacefully. That would show that religion was not actually necessary in the last moment. Religion got much of its power from the terror of death. Superstition is the child of ignorance and fear. The first grave was the first cathedral. The first corpse was the first priest. It would not do to have the common people understand that a man could deny the Bible, refuse to look at the cross, contend that Christ was only a man, and yet die as calmly as Calvin did after he had murdered Servetus, or as King David, after advising one son to kill another.
178. The Sixteenth Century
In the sixteenth century every science was regarded as an outcast and an enemy, and the church influenced the world, which was under its power, to believe anything, and the ignorant mob was always too ready, brutalized by the church, to hang, kill or crucify at their bidding. Such was the result of a few centuries of Christianity.
179. An Orthodox Gentleman
By Orthodox I mean a gentleman who is petrified in his mind, whooping around intellectually, simply to save the funeral expenses of his soul.