When a stout, able-bodied woman sits herself down and whines out, "I can't work," she gets down very low. What is such a woman good for?
It has been said that woman is man's imaginative side. Well, I imagine that there is a great deal of truth in the remark so far as many men are concerned, and this simple fact has ruined many a wife. A woman may operate very well upon a man's imagination, but that will never help him to make a living.
Let woman be, to all intents and purposes, the equal of man, trained for the work of every-day life, for this is what the word education means. Then throw open to her all the employments lying within her strength, which are now monopolized by men, and let this new advantage work a reformation in her education. What is her education even now, and in our own country? Instead of being educated for health and long life, they are trained in many instances for disease and a premature death. The history of woman, as woman, is not in our reach; at least I am not prepared to say it has been written. I wish it had, for I am persuaded that woman has been the great redeeming element upon the human side of bliss, without which our world could not exist.
"And they charge that he (Thomas Paine) was a drunkard. That is another falsehood. He drank liquor in his day, as did the preachers. It was no unusual thing for the preacher going home to stop in a tavern and take a drink of hot rum with a deacon, and it was no unusual thing for the deacon to help the preacher home."—Ingersoll.
Therefore, if a man stops at a hotel and drinks till he has to be helped home, he is no drunkard? No! Ingersoll is a temperance man (?) and he knows.
THE TESTIMONY OF AN INFIDEL IN WHOSE HEART EVERY SPARK OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE WAS NOT EXTINGUISHED.
J.J. Rousseau says: The gospel, that divine book, the only one necessary to a Christian, and the most useful of all to the man who may not be one, only requires reflection upon it to impress the mind with love of its author and resolution to fulfill his precepts. Virtue never spoke in gentler terms; the profoundest wisdom was never uttered with greater energy or more simplicity. It is impossible to rise from the reading of it without feeling a moral improvement. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp, how little they are compared with this. Shall we say that the history of the gospel is a pure fiction? This is not the style of fiction, and the history of Socrates, which nobody doubts, rests upon less evidence than that of Jesus Christ; and, after all, this is but shifting the difficulty, not answering it. The supposition that several persons had united to fabricate this book, is more inconceivable than that one person should have supplied the subject of it. The spirit which it breathes, the morality which it inculcates, could never have been the invention of Jewish authors, and the gospel possesses characters of truth so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing object than the hero.—J.J. Rousseau, vol. 36, pp. 36, 39.