Now, then, these are all the heroines, to show you how little they thought of woman in that day. In the days of the old testament they did not even tell us when the mother of us all (Eve) died, nor where she is buried, nor anything about it. They do not even tell us where the mother of Christ sleeps, nor when she died. Never is she spoken of after the morning of the resurrection. He who descended from the cross went not to see her; and the son had no word for the broken-hearted mother.
The story is not true. I believe Christ was a great and good man, but He had nothing about Him miraculous except the courage to tell what he thought about the religion of His day. The new testament, in relating what occurred between Christ and his mother, mentions three instances; once, when they thought He had been lost in Jerusalem, when He said to them, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" Next, at the marriage of Cana, when He said to the woman, "What have I to do with thee?"—words which He never said; and again from the cross, "Mother, behold Thy Son;" and to the disciple, "Behold thy Mother!" So of Mary Magdalene. In some respects there is no character in the new testament that so appeals to us as loving Christ—first at the sepulchre—and yet when He meets her after the resurrection He had for her the comfort only of the chilling words, "Touch me not!" I don't believe it. There were thousands of heroic women then. There are heroic women now. Think of the women who cling to fallen and disgraced husbands day by day, until they reach the gutter, and who stoop down to lift them from that position, and raise them up to be men once more! Every country is civilized in proportion as it honors woman. There are women in England working in mines, deformed by labor, that would become wild beasts were it not for the love they bear for home. Can you find among the women of the new testament any women that can equal the women born of Shakespeare's brain? You can find no woman like Isabella, where reason and purity blend into perfect truth; no woman like Juliet, where passion and purity meet like red and white within the bosom of a flower; no woman like Imogen, who said, "What is it to be false?" No woman like Cordelia, that would not show her wealth of love in hope of gain; nor like Hermione, who bore the cross of shame for years; nor like Miranda, who told her love as the flower exposes its bosom to the sun; nor like Desdemona, who was so pure that she could not suspect that another could suspect her of a crime.
And we are told that woman sinned first and man second; that man was made first and woman not till afterwards. The idea is that we could have gotten along without the woman well enough, but they never could have gotten along without us. I tell you that love is better than piety, love is better than all the ceremonial worship of the world, and it is better to love something than to believe anything on this globe. So this minister, seeking a mark to throw an arrow somewhere—trying to find some little place in the armor—charges me with having disparaged Queen Victoria. That you know is next to blasphemy. Well, I never did anything of the kind—never said a word against her in in life, neither as wife, or mother, or Queen—never doubted but that she is a good woman enough, and I have always admitted that her reputation was good in the neighborhood where she resides. I never had any other opinion. All I said in the world was—I was endeavoring to show that we are now to have an aristocracy of brain and heart—that is all—and I said, 'speaking of Louis Napoleon, he was not satisfied with simply being an emperor and having a little crown on his head, but wanted to prove that he had something in his head, so he wrote the life of Julius Caesar, and that made him a member of the French Academy; and speaking of King William, upon whose head is the divine petroleum of authority, I asked how he would like to exchange brains with Haeckel, the philosopher. Then I went over to England, and said "Queen Victoria wears the garment of power given her by blind fortune, by eyeless chance; 'George Eliot' is arrayed in robes of glory, woven in the loom of her own genius." Thereupon I am charged with disparaging a woman. And this priest, in order to get even with me, digs open the grave of "George Eliot" and endeavors to stain her unresisting dust. He calls her an adulteress—the vilest word in the languages of men—and he does it because she hated the Presbyterian creed, because she, according to his definition, was an atheist, because she lived without faith and died without fear, because she grandly bore the taunts and slanders of the Christian world. "George Eliot" carried tenderly in her heart the faults and frailties of her race. She saw the highway of eternal right through all the winding paths, where folly vainly stalks with thorn-pierced hands, the fading flowers of selfish joy; and whatever you may think or I may think of the one mistake in all her sad and loving life, I know and feel that in the court where her conscience sat as judge she stood acquitted, pure as light and stainless as a star. "George Eliot" has joined the choir invisible whose music is the gladness of this world, and her wondrous lines, her touching poems, will be read hundreds of years after every sermon in which a priest has sought to stain her name shall have vanished utterly from human speech. How appropriate here, with some slight change, the words of Laertes at Ophelia's grave:
Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring; I tell thee, priest and minister, A ministering angel shall this woman be When thou liest howling.
I have no words with which to express my loathing hatred and condemnation of the man who will stain a noble woman's grave.
The next argument in favor of the "sacred scriptures" is the argument of numbers; and this minister congratulates himself that the infidels could not carry a precinct, or a county, or a state in the United States. Well, I tell you, they can come proportionately near it—just in proportion that that part of the country is educated. The whole world doesn't move together in one life. There has to be some man to take a step forward and the people follow; and when they get where that man was, some other Titan has taken another step, and you can see him there on the great mountain of progress. That is why the world moves. There must be pioneers, and if nobody is right except he who is with the majority, then we must turn and walk toward the setting sun. He says "We will settle this by suffrage." The Christian religion was submitted to a popular vote in Jerusalem, and what was the result? "Crucify Him "—an infamous result, showing that you can't depend on the vote of barbarians. But I am told that there are 300,000,000 Christians in the world. Well, what of it? There are more Buddhists. And they say, what a number of bibles are printed!—more bibles than any other book. Does this prove anything? True, because more of them. Suppose you should find published in the New York Herald something about you, and you should go to the editor and tell him: "That is a lie;" and he should say: "That can't be; the Herald has the largest circulation of any paper in the world." Three hundred millions of Christians, and here are the nations that prove the truth of Christianity: Russia 80,000,000 Christians. I am willing to admit it; a country without freedom of speech, without freedom of press—a country in which every mouth is a Bastille and every tongue a prisoner for life—a country in which assassins are the best men in it. They call that Christian. Girls sixteen years of age, for having spoken in favor of human liberty, are now working in Siberian mines. That is a Christian country. Only a little while ago a man shot at the emperor twice. The emperor was protected by his armor. The man was convicted, and they asked him if he wished religious consolation. "No." "Do you believe in a God?" "No;" if there was a God there would be no Russia. Sixteen millions of Christians in Spain—Spain that never touched a shore except as a robber—Spain that took the gold and silver of the new world and used it as an engine of oppression in the old—a country in which cruelty was worship, in which murder was prayer—a country where flourished the Inquisition—I admit Spain is a Christian country. If you don't believe it I do. Read the history of Holland, read the history of South America, read the history of Mexico—a chapter of cruelty beyond the power of language to express. I admit that Spain is orthodox. If you will go there you will find the man who robs you and asks God to forgive you—a country where infidelity hasn't made much headway, but, thank God, where there is even yet a dawn, where there are such men as Castelar and others, who begin to see that one schoolhouse is equal to three cathedrals and one teacher worth all the priests.
Italy is another Christian nation, with 28,000,000 Christians. In Italy lives the only authorized agent of God, the pope. For hundreds of years Italy was the beggar of the earth, and held out both hands. Gold and silver flowed from every land into her palms, and she became covered with nunneries, monasteries, and the pilgrims of the world. Italy was sacred dust. Her soil was a perpetual blessing, her sky was an eternal smile. Italy was guilty not simply of the death of the Catholic church, but Italy was dead and buried and would have been in her grave still had it not been for Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour. When the prophecy of Garibaldi shall be fulfilled, when the priests, with spades in their hands, shall dig ditches to drain the Pontine marshes, when the monasteries shall be factories, when the whirling wheels of industry shall drown the drowsy and hypocritical prayers, then and not till then, will Italy be great and free. Italy is the only instance in our history and in the history of the world, so far as we know, of the resurrection of a nation. She is the first fruits of them that sleep.
Portugal is another Christian country. She made her living in the slave trade for centuries. I admit that all the blessings that that country enjoyed flowed naturally from Catholicism, and we believe in the same scriptures. If you don't believe it, read the history of the persecution of the Jewish people. I admit that Germany is a Christian nation; that is, Christians are in power. When the bill was introduced for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of the Jews, Bismark spoke against it, and said "Germany is a Christian nation, and therefore, we cannot pass the bill." Austria is another Christian nation. If you don't believe it, read the history of Hungary, and, if you still have doubts, read the history of the partition of Poland. But there is one good thing in that country. They believe in education, and education is the enemy of ecclesiasticism. Every thoroughly educated man is his own church, and his own pope, and his own priest.
They tell me that the United States—our country—is Christian. I deny it. It is neither Christian nor pagan; it is human. Our fathers retired all the gods from politics. Our fathers laid down the doctrine that the right to govern comes from the consent of the governed, and not from the clouds. Our fathers knew that if they put an infinite God in the Constitution there would be no room left for the people. Our fathers used the language of Lincoln, and they made a government for the people by the people. This is not a Christian country. Some gentleman said, "How about Delaware?" I told him there was a man in Washington some twenty or thirty years ago who came there and said he was a Revolutionary soldier and wanted a pension. He was so bent and bowed over that the wind blew his shoestrings into his eyes. They asked him how old he was, and he said fifty years. "Why, good man, you can't get a pension, because the war was over before you were born. You mustn't fool us." "Well," said he, "I'll tell you the truth: I lived sixty years in Delaware, but I never count it, and hope God won't." And these Christian nations which have been brought forward as the witnesses of the truth of the scriptures owe $25,000,000,000, which represents Christian war, Christian cannon, Christian shot, and Christian shell. The sum is so great that the imagination is dazed in its contemplation. That is the result of loving your neighbor as yourself.
The next great argument brought forward by these gentlemen is the persecution of the Jews. We are told in the nineteenth century that God has the Jews persecuted simply for the purpose of establishing the authenticity of the scriptures, and every Jewish home burned in Russia throws light on the gospel, and every violated Jewish maiden is another evidence that God still takes an interest in the holy scriptures. That is their doctrine. They are "fulfilling prophecy." The Christian grasps the Jew, strips him, robs him, makes him an outcast, and then points to him as a fulfillment of prophecy; and we are today laying the foundation of future persecution—we are teaching our children the monstrous falsehood that Jews crucified God, and the nation consented. They crucified a good man. What nation has not? What race has not? Think of the number killed by the Presbyterians; by the Catholics. Every sect, with maybe two or three exceptions, have crucified their fellows, and every race has burned its greatest and its best. And yet we are filling the minds of children with hatred of the Jewish people. It is a poor business. "Ah?" but they say, "these people are cursed by God." I say they never had any good fortune until the Jehovah of the bible deserted them. Whenever they have had a reasonable chance they have been the most prosperous people in the world. I never saw one begging. I never saw one in the criminal dock. For hundreds of years they were not allowed to own any land, for hundreds of years they were not allowed to work at any trade; they were driven simply to dealing in money, and in precious stones, and things of that character, and, by a kind of poetic justice, they have today the control of the money of the world. I am glad to see that kings and emperors go to the offices of the Jews, with their hats in their hands, to have their notes discounted. And yet I am told by clergymen that all this infamy has been kept up simply to establish the truth of the gospel. I despise such doctrine. As long as the liberty of one Jew is unsafe, my liberty is not secure. Liberty for all, and not until then will the liberty of any be assured. "Ah"; but says this man, "nobody ever died cheerfully for a lie. The Jewish people have suffered persecution for 1,600 years, and they have suffered it cheerfully." If this doctrine is true, then Judaism must be true and Christianity must be false. But martyrdom doesn't prove the truth if the martyr knows it. It simply proves the barbarity of his persecutors, and has no sincerity. That is all it proves.