Governor Woodford says that we are responsible for our thoughts. Why? Could you help thinking as you did on this subject? No, Could you help believing the Bible? I suppose not. Could you help believing that story of Jonah? Certainly not—it looks reasonable in Brooklyn.
I stated that thought was the result of the impressions of nature upon the mind through the medium of the senses. He says you cannot have thought without memory. How did you get the first one?
Of course I intended to be understood—and the language is clear—that there could be no thought except through the impressions made upon the brain by nature through the avenues called the senses. Take away the senses, how would you think then? If you thought at all, I think you would agree with Mr. Coudert.
Now, I admit—so we need never have a contradiction about it—I admit that every human being is responsible to the person he injures. If he injures any man, woman, or child, or any dog, or the lowest animal that crawls, he is responsible to that animal, to that being—in other words, he is responsible to any being that he has injured.
But you cannot injure an infinite Being, if there be one. I will tell you why. You cannot help him, and you cannot hurt him. If there be an infinite Being, he is conditionless—he does not want anything—he has it. You cannot help anybody that does not want something—you cannot help him. You cannot hurt anybody unless he is a conditioned being and you change his condition so as to inflict a harm. But if God be conditionless, you cannot hurt him, and you cannot help him. So do not trouble yourselves about the Infinite. All our duties lie within reach—all our duties are right here; and my religion is simply this:
First. Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.
Second. If you tell your thought at all, tell your honest thought. Do not be a parrot—do not be an instrumentality for an organization. Tell your own thought, honor bright, what you think.
My next idea is, that the only possible good in the universe is happiness. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to try and make somebody else so.
My good friend General Woodford—and he is a good man telling the best he knows—says that I will be accountable at the bar up yonder. I am ready to settle that account now, and expect to be, every moment of my life—and when that settlement comes, if it does come, I do not believe that a solitary being can rise and say that I ever injured him or her.
But no matter what they say. Let me tell you a story, how we will settle if we do get there.