And he tells you—this Catholic—that Voltaire was an exceedingly good Christian compared with me. Do you know I am glad that I have compelled a Catholic—one who does not believe he has the right to express his honest thoughts—to pay a compliment to Voltaire simply because he thought it was at my expense?
I have an almost infinite admiration for Voltaire; and when I hear that name pronounced, I think of a plume floating over a mailed knight—I think of a man that rode to the beleaguered City of Catholicism and demanded a surrender—I think of a great man who thrust the dagger of assassination into your Mother Church, and from that wound she never will recover.
One word more. This gentleman says that children are destructive—that the first thing they do is to destroy their bibs. The gentleman, I should think from his talk, has preserved his!
They talk about blasphemy. What is blasphemy? Let us be honest with each other. Whoever lives upon the unpaid labor of others is a blasphemer. Whoever slanders, maligns, and betrays is a blasphemer. Whoever denies to others the rights that he claims for himself is a blasphemer.
Who is a worshiper? One who makes a happy home—one who fills the lives of wife and children with sunlight—one who has a heart where the flowers of kindness burst into blossom and fill the air with perfume—the man who sits beside his wife, prematurely old and wasted, and holds her thin hands in his and kisses them as passionately and loves her as truly and as rapturously as when she was a bride—he is a worshiper—that is worship.
And the gentleman brought forward as a reason why we should not have free speech, that only a few years ago some of the best men in the world, if you said a word in favor of liberty, would shoot you down. What an argument was that! They were not good men. They were the whippers of women and the stealers of babes—robbers of the trundlebed—assassins of human liberty. They knew no better, but I do not propose to follow the example of a barbarian because he was honestly a barbarian.
So much for debauching his family by telling them that his precepts are false. If he has taught them as he has taught us to-night, he has debauched their minds. I would be honest at the cradle. I would not tell a child anything as a certainty that I did not know. I would be absolutely honest.
But he says that thought is absolutely free—nobody can control thought. Let me tell him: Superstition is the jailer of the mind. You can so stuff a child with superstition that its poor little brain is a bastile and its poor little soul a convict. Fear is the jailer of the mind, and superstition is the assassin of liberty.
So when anybody goes into his family and tells these great and shining truths, instead of debauching his children they will kill the snakes that crawl in their cradles. Let us be honest and free.
And now, coming to the second gentleman. He is a Protestant. The Catholic Church says: "Don't think; pay your fare; this is a through ticket, and we will look out for your baggage." The Protestant Church says: "Read that Bible for yourselves; think for yourselves; but if you do not come to a right conclusion you will be eternally damned." Any sensible man will say, "Then I won't read it—I'll believe it without reading it." And that is the only way you can be sure you will believe it; don't read it.