“ The visible Presence only makes more vivid the sense of actual Absence. Every feature, every substance, every phenomenon is there, and is unchanged. You have seen the eyes as firmly closed, the limbs as motionless, the breath almost as imperceptible, the face as fixed and expressionless before, in sleep or in trance, without the same peculiar sensation. The impression made is indefinable, and is not the result of any conscious process of thought—that that body, quite unchanged to the eye, is not, and never was your friend—the Ego you were conversant with ”

“ HUMANITY’S GAIN FROM UNBELIEF AS an unbeliever, I ask leave to plead that humanity has been real gainer from scepticism, and that the gradual and growing rejection of Christianity—like the rejection of the faiths which preceded it—has in fact added, and will add, to man’s happiness and well being. I maintain that in physics science is the outcome of scepticism, and that general progress is impossible without scepticism on matters of religion. ”

“ In each minute of your life the aforetime future is present born, and you need dry and keen eyes to give it and yourself a safe and happy deliverance. When shall they that mourn be comforted? Are slaves that weep salt tear-drops on their chains comforted in their weeping. Each pearly overflowing as it falls rusts mind, as well as fetter. Ye who are slaves and weep, will never be comforted until you dry your eyes, and nerve your arms, and, in the plenitude of manliness:
“Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep hath fallen on you.” ”

“ The earth is yet drenched with the blood they have spilled. Civil tolerance alone is not sufficient to secure the peace of nations. Every dogma is a seed of discord and injustice sown amongst mankind.”
“Why do you make the Supreme Being resemble an eastern tyrant? Why make him punish slight faults with eternal torment? Why thus put the name of the Divinity at the bottom of the portrait of the devil? Why oppress the soul with a load of fear, break its springs, and of a worshipper of Jesus make a vile, pusillanimous slave? It is the malignant who paint a malignant God. ”

“ Your boasted precept, to him that strikes thee on thy right cheek turn the other also, is not only contrary to the feelings of man, but a flagrant violation of every principle of justice; it emboldens the wicked by impunity, degrades the virtuous by the servility to which it subjects them; delivers up the world to disorder and tyranny, and dissolves the bands of society—such is the true spirit of your doctrine. ”

“ For the purpose of this argument I take Monotheism to be the doctrine ‘that the universe owes its existence and continuance in existence to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-existent, eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent personal being, who is distinct from and independent of what he has created.’ By wisdom and will I mean that which I should mean using the same words of any animal able to perceive, remember, reflect, judge, and determine, and active in that ability or those abilities. ”

“ The God of the Bible is a just God, but it is hard for weak flesh to discover the justice of this proemial decree, which so sentenced to servitude the children of Esau before their father’s birth. Jacob came into the world holding by his brother’s heel, like some cowardly knave in the battle of life, who, not daring to break a gap in the hedge of conventional prejudice, which bars his path, is yet ready enough to follow some bolder warrior, and to gather the fruits of his courage. ”

“ My plea is, that modern heresy, from Spinoza to Mill, has given brain-strength and dignity to every one it has permeated—that the popular propagandists of this heresy, from Bruno to Carlile, have been the true redeemers and saviors, the true educators of the people. The redemption is yet only at its commencement, the education only lately begun, but the change is traceable already; as witness the power to speak and write, and the ability to listen and read, which have grown amongst the masses during the last hundred years. ”

“ He proceeds: “I have often wondered that men who boast of the great advantage they enjoy under the Christian dispensation—the peace, the joy they experience, the brotherly love they feel towards all in its exercise—should nevertheless contend with so much acrimony, and show such intolerance and unappeasable hatred towards one another. If faith had to be inferred from action rather than profession, it would indeed be impossible to say to what sect or creed the majority of mankind belong.” ”

“ So it is a more permanent and more complete revolution which is effectuated by educating men to a sense of the majesty and worth of true manhood, than is any mere sudden overturning a rotten or cruel usurpation. Monarchies are most thoroughly and entirely destroyed—not by pulling down the throne, or by decapitating the king, but by educating and building up with a knowledge of political duty, each individual citizen amongst the people.
It is here that heresy has its great advantage. ”

“ Reject Adam, and you cannot accept Jesus. Refuse to believe Genesis, and you cannot give credence to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul. The Old and New Testaments are so connected together, that to dissolve the union is to destroy the system. The account of the Creation and Fall of Man is the foundation-stone of the Christian Church—if this stone be rotten, the superstructure cannot be stable. ”

“ A clergyman of the Church of England writing on this says: “That the Devil should appear personally to the Son of God is certainly not more wonderful than that he should, in a more remote age, have appeared among the sons of God, in the presence of God himself, to torment the righteous Job. But that Satan should carry Jesus bodily and literally through the air, first to the top of a high mountain, and then to the topmost pinnacle of the temple, is wholly inadmissable, it is an insult to our understanding, and an affront to our great creator and redeemer.” ”

“ The religion of Christ finds its source in the forbidden fruit of the yet undiscovered Garden of Eden.
Adam’s sin is the corner-stone of Christianity, the keystone of the arch. Without the fall there is no redeemer, for there is no fallen one to be redeemed. It is, then, to the history of Adam that the critical examinant of the Atonement theory should first direct his attention. ”

“ If the salvation is from the punishment for Adam’s sin alone, and if belief and baptism are, as Jesus himself affirms, to be the conditions precedent to any saving efficacy in the much-lauded atonement by the son of God, then what becomes of a child that only lives a few hours, is never baptised, and never having any mind, consequently never has any belief? Or what becomes of one idiot-born who, throughout his dreary life, never has mental capacity for the acceptance or examination of, or credence in any religious dogmas whatever? ”

“ His proof of the existence of Deity is thus stated by Lewes:—“Interrogating his consciousness, he found that he had the idea of God, understanding by God, a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent. This, to him, was as certain a truth as the truth of his own existence. I exist: not only do I exist, but exist as a miserably imperfect finite being, subject to change, greatly ignorant and incapable of creating anything. In this, my consciousness, I find by my finitude that I am not the All; by my imperfection, that I am not perfect. ”

“ None of the orthodox, and few of the spiritualists, contend that the “memory” of the rat, the cow, or the horse is to survive the decease of rat, cow, and horse. Scarcely anyone is hardy enough to maintain that the ghost of the thinking sheep persists with active thought after the slaughterhouse and dinner of roast mutton. Yet if one range of animal mental ability is to be classified as immortal, why not all? Why claim immortality for the “soul” of the idiot, and deny it to the thought, memory, reason, faith, doubt, and will of the retriever? ”

“ It is impossible to conceive existence terminated by a primal or initial cause. The “beginning,” as it is phrased, of the universe is not thought out by the Theist, but conceded without thought. To adopt the language of Montaigne; “Men make themselves believe that they believe.” The so-called belief in Creation is nothing more than the prostration of the intellect on the threshold of the unknown. We can only cognise the ever-succeeding phenomena of existence as a line in continuous and eternal evolution. ”

“ Having thus placed all science on a philosophical basis, no matter what, he freed philosophy herself from her long servitude, and proclaimed her queen of the intellect. Hence everyone who has wished to account to himself for his existence, everyone who has desired to know himself, to know nature, and to rise to its author; in a word, all who have wished to make a wise use of their intellectual faculties, to apply them, not to hollow speculations which border on nonentity, but to sensible and practical inquiries, have taken and followed some direction from Descartes. ”

“ The human family is a vast chain, each man and woman a link. There is no snapping off one link and preserving for it, isolated from the rest, an entirety of happiness; our joy depends on our brother’s also. Jesus teaches that “many are called, but few are chosen;” that the majority will inherit an eternity of misery, while but the minority obtain eternal happiness. And on what is the eternity of bliss to depend? On a truthful course of life? Not so. Jesus puts Father Abraham in Heaven, whose reputation for faith outstrips his character for veracity. ”

“ Helvetius argues that any religion, of which the chiefs are intolerant, and the conduct of which is expensive to the state, “cannot long be the religion of an enlightened and well governed nation. The people that submit to it will labor only to maintain the ease and luxury of the priesthood; each of its inhabitants will be nothing more than a slave to the sacerdotal power. A religion to be good should be tolerant and little expensive. Its clergy should have no authority over the people. A dread of the priest debases the mind and the soul, makes the one brutish and the other slavish. ”

“ Christian Theism teaches that God, though no respecter of persons, selected as his favorite one nation in preference to all others; that man can do no good of himself or without God’s aid, but yet that each man has a free will; that God is all-powerful, but that few go to heaven, and the majority to hell; that all are to love God, who has predestined from eternity that by far the largest number of human beings are to be burning in hell for ever. Yet the advocates for Theism venture to upbraid those who argue against such a faith. ”

“ Here, in the two sentences, we have the declaration of belief in a power that has created the universe. Now, the very term “belief” implies that the thing is not known; for when we have attained knowledge, we are beyond mere belief. As the believers are in doubt about the existence of a creator, I will endeavor to investigate the probability of there being such an existence. If you put any inquiries to a Christian as to the creation, he will tell you that God made matter out of nothing. If you ask him who or what God is, he will tell you that God is quite incomprehensible. ”

“ Nor could all men inherit Adam’s misfortune if it be true that it is not to one but to many centres of origin that we ought to trace back the various races of mankind.
The theologian who finds no evidence of death prior to the offence shared by Adam and Eve is laughed to scorn by the geologist, who points to the innumerable petrifactions in the earth’s strata, which with a million tongues declare, more potently than loudest speech, that myriads of myriads of living things ceased their life-struggle incalculable ages before man’s era on our world. ”

“ If the inference from design is to avail at all, it must avail to show that all the phenomena leading to misery and mischief, must have been designed and intended by a being finding pleasure in the production and maintenance of this misery and mischief. If the alleged constructor of the universe is supposed to have designed one beneficent result, must he not equally be supposed to have designed all results? And if the inference of benevolence and goodness be valid for some instances, must not the inference of malevolence and wickedness be equally valid from others? ”

“ The word ‘nature’ is another equivalent for the word universe or existence. By uniformity of happening I mean that, given certain conditions, certain results always ensue—vary the conditions, the results vary. I do not attack specially either the Polytheistic, Pantheistic, or Monotheistic presentments of Theism. To me any pretence of Theism seems impossible if Monism be conceded, and, therefore, at present, I rest content in affirming one existence. If Monism be true, and Atheism be Monism, then Atheism is necessarily the true theory of the universe. ”