But the defendant, still speaking of the infant Christ, is charged with having said:
"God smiled when he was comfortable. He lay in a cradle and was rocked to sleep."
Yes, and there is no more beautiful picture than that. Let some great religious genius paint a picture of this kind—of a babe smiling with content, rocked in the cradle by the mother who bends tenderly and proudly above him. There could be no more beautiful, no more touching, picture than this. What would I not give for a picture of Shakespeare as a babe,—a picture that was a likeness,—rocked by his mother? I would give more for this than for any painting that now enriches the walls of the world.
The defendant also says, that:
"God was sick when cutting his teeth."
And what of that? We are told that he was tempted in all points, as we are. That is to say, he was afflicted, he was hungry, he was thirsty, he suffered the pains and miseries common to man. Otherwise, he was not flesh, he was not human.
"He caught the measles, the mumps, the scarlet fever and the whooping cough."
Certainly he was liable to have these diseases, for he was, in fact, a child. Other children have them. Other children, loved as dearly by their mothers as Christ could have been by his, and yet they are taken from the little family by fever; taken, it may be, and buried in the snow, while the poor mother goes sadly home, wishing that she was lying by its side. All that can be said of every word in this address, about Christ and about his childhood, amounts to this; that he lived the life of a child; that he acted like other children. I have read you substantially what he has said, and this is considered blasphemous.
He has said, that:
"According to the Old Testament, the God of the Christian world commanded people to destroy each other."