But it is not scoffers who wage this war of the rational against the supernatural: let none deceive themselves with that vain thought, or perpetuate the incorrect assertion. Of such books as the present, such writings as the present, some at least are the words of men and women who have been born to, and striven toward a godly life, with intense effort, with groanings not to be uttered: who, nursed in the bosom of the Church, and partakers in all her most sacred ordinances, crushed down as unholy the first and the repeated breathings of doubt and of reasoning their minds; who held to the falseness of their early teachings,—till there came that final struggle, when they wrestled with God,—to hold him,—not to lose him; gasping with fevered lips and shut teeth and scalding eyelids, "I will not let thee go ": and who won a blessing they knew not of in that they proved the Jehovah of Hebraism, the God of Christianity, to be an Apollyon of Superstition: who cast him off in disgust, in loathing, in half despair; who lay faint and bleeding through a night of darkness: but to whom, with the dawn, has come the free and bracing air of reason, and then the deep warm glow of true life, and humanity, and universal love,—love given this time not to a fetish, but to every fellow being, to man and beast, to tree and moss, to stone and star.
With a great price obtained we this freedom, and we will that our Sons and that our Daughters be free born. To such a liberator as Robert G. Ingersoll the thanks of present parents are lovingly offered; his name will be cherished by our children, and his memory hallowed in the gratitude of generations yet unborn.
B. E.
Rudyard:
9th Month, 1881.
BOUQUET GARNI.
It is the curse of England that its intellect can see truths
which its heart will not embody.
—Laurence Oliphant
The root of all tyranny and oppression, of all social and
human ills, is found in witholding from the masses of each
community mental culture, or knowledge that may be conferred
on all.
—Rd. Carlile.
Atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety,
laws, reputation, and every thing that can serve to conduct
him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these, and
erects itself into tyranny over the understandings of men.
—Bacon.
A healthy poetic nature wants, as you yourself say, no Moral
Law, no Rights of Man, no Political Metaphysics. You might
have added as well, it wants no Deity, no Immortality, to
stay and uphold itself withal.
—Letter from Schiller to Goethe.
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the
meanest thing that feels.
—Wordsworth.
* A Bouquet Garni is a little bundle of herbs, some bitter
some sweet, but all salutary.