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Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll--Latest
Contents
Thomas Paine
Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
Orthodoxy
Blasphemy
Some Reasons Why
Intellectual Development
Human Rights
Talmagian Theology (Second Lecture)
Talmagian Theology (Third Lecture)
Religious Intolerance
Hereafter
Review of His Reviewers
How the Gods Grow
The Religion of our Day
Heretics And Heresies
The Bible
Voltaire
Myth and Miracle
Ingersoll's Letter, on The Chinese God
Ingersoll's Letter, Is Suicide a Sin?
Ingersoll's Letter, The Right To One's Life
Ingersoll's Lecture on Thomas Paine--Delivered in Central Music Hall,
Chicago, January 29, 1880 (From the Chicago Times, Verbatim Report)
Ladies and Gentlemen:--It so happened that the first speech--the very
first public speech I ever made--took occasion to defend the memory of
Thomas Paine.
I did it because I had read a little something of the history of my
country. I did it because I felt indebted to him for the liberty I then
enjoyed--and whatever religion may be true, ingratitude is the blackest
of crimes. And whether there is any God or not, in every star that
shines, gratitude is a virtue.
The man who will tell the truth about the dead is a good man, and for
one, about this man, I intend to tell just as near the truth as I can.
Most history consists in giving the details of things that never
happened--most biography is usually the lie coming from the mouth of
flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice, and whoever
attacks the religion of a country will, in his turn, be attacked.
Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by
all the meanness of ingenuity. Whoever attacks a superstition will find
that there is still one weapon left in the arsenal of Jehovah--slander.
I was reading, yesterday, a poem called the "Light of Asia," and I read
in that how a Boodh seeing a tigress perishing of thirst, with her mouth
upon the dry stone of a stream, with her two cubs sucking at her dry and
empty dugs, this Boodh took pity upon this wild and famishing beast,
and, throwing from himself the Yellowrobe of his order, and stepping
naked before this tigress, said: "Here is meat for you and your cubs."
In one moment the crooked daggers of her claws ran riot in his flesh,
and in another he was devoured. Such, during nearly all the history of
this world, has been the history of every man who has stood in front of
superstition.
Thomas Paine, as has been so eloquently said by the gentleman who
introduced me, was a friend of man, and whoever is a friend of man is
also a friend of God--if there is one. But God has had many friends who
were the enemies of their fellow-men. There is but one test by which to
measure any man who has lived. Did he leave this world better than he
found it? Did he leave in this world more liberty? Did he leave in
this world more goodness, more humanity, than when he was born? That is
the test. And whatever may have been the faults of Thomas Paine, no
American who appreciates liberty, no American who believes in true
democracy and pure republicanism, should ever breathe one word against
his name. Every American, with the divine mantle of charity, should
cover all his faults, and with a never-tiring tongue should recount his
virtues.
He was a common man. He did not belong to the aristocracy. Upon the
head of his father God had never poured the divine petroleum of
authority. He had not the misfortune to belong to the upper classes.
He had the fortune to be born among the poor and to feel against his
great heart the throb of the toiling and suffering masses. Neither was
it his misfortune to have been educated at Oxford. What little sense he
had was not squeezed out at Westminster. He got his education from
books. He got his education from contact with fellow-men, and he
thought, and a man is worth just what nature impresses upon him. A man
standing by the sea, or in a forest, or looking at a flower, or hearing
a poem, or looking in the eyes of the woman he loves, receives all that
he is capable of receiving--and if he is a great man the impression is
great, and he uses it for the purpose of benefiting his fellow-man.
Thomas Paine was not rich, he was poor, and his father before him was
poor, and he was raised a sailmaker, a very lowly profession, and yet
that man became one of the mainstays of liberty in this world. At one
time he was an excise man, like Burns. Burns was once--speak it softly
--a gauger--and yet he wrote poems that will wet the cheek of humanity
with tears as long as the world travels in its orb around the sun.
Poverty was his brother, necessity his master. He had more brains than
books; more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He
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