Various

“ From all that we have before us it appears that all things in the gospel of Jesus Christ constitute, simply, “the ministration of the Spirit written upon the hearts of New Testament apostles and prophets, or teachers, by the Spirit of the living God, and that we have in their preaching and teaching the rivers of living water, flowing out from the throne of God to slake the thirst of a famishing world, and that all this is attributable to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them.” Such being the case, “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believes.” ”

“ Our first work must be destruction and annihilation of everything as it now exists. You must accustom yourselves to destroy everything, the good with the bad; for if but an atom of this world remains the new will never be created.
“According to the priests' fables, in days of old, a deluge destroyed all mankind, but their God especially saved Noah in order that the seeds of tyranny and falsehoods might be perpetuated in the new world. ”

“ And as the object to be accomplished is now connected with mind, the Spirit now moves upon the face of the great deep of the human heart or mind. But shall he move upon all hearts throughout all time in order to dispel moral darkness, and so the extraordinary become the ordinary? Or shall he move in an extraordinary manner and cause the light of revelation to flash across the world and dispel the darkness consequent upon the mental and moral condition of the children of men, and give us a glorious lamp of light, along with law, order and system? ”

“ For many hundred years monarchs and priests have inoculated the hearts and minds of mankind with this notion of a God ruling over the world. They have also invented for the people the notion of another world, in which their God is to punish with eternal torture (not a Bible term) those who have refused to obey their degrading laws here on earth. This God is nothing but the personification of absolute tyranny, and has been invented with a view of either frightening or alluring nine-tenths of the human race into submission to the remaining tenth. ”

“ What Is To Be The Religion Of The Future. “Brahmanism has avoided the fatal mistake of Catholic and Protestant philosophy by assuming an impersonal deity in three modes of manifestation, while Christian thinkers have played around the logical contradiction of one personality in three equal persons for fifteen hundred years. We must utterly break with the idea of a personal God, and accept that of one impersonal essence behind all phenomena.” ”

“ Who ever heard of persons dying willingly in attestation of a false fact? Can we be made to believe that any set of rational men could be found who would willingly die in attestation of the false fact that the President of the United States is now on the throne of England? The witnesses of Christ died in attestation of those facts which they say they saw, and heard, and knew, among which was the great fact of the resurrection of Christ. ”

“ There is no charity in influencing a person, willfully, to stop short or go beyond the truth in Christian faith or obedience. There is no charity in giving a man money knowingly to purchase whisky to get drunk upon. Charity never conflicts with truth or right. On the contrary, it endeavors to bring all men to the standard of truth and rectitude.
The phrase “Broad-gauge” seems to have been gotten up to express the idea of an intelligent relaxation from “human creeds” as bonds of union and fellowship. In this sense we all ought to be the advocates of “Broad-gauge religion.” ”

“ The only fort to be held in order to hold the gospel of Christ is the sincerity of his witnesses. When a man gets rid of the evidence upon which the reputation of those witnesses for honesty rests, he has removed the only evidence upon which it is possible for him to build a reputation for truth and honesty. So, if a man succeeds in sinking the gospel of Christ, he succeeds, at the same time and by the same means, in sinking himself. ”

“ It is love, in the New Testament sense of the term, as modified by all the essential elements of the Christian religion, so it is “the fulfilling of the law.” It is not passion, but affection. To my sensuous life all my passions belong. The brute has also a sensuous life. But man has, in addition to this, an intellectual life. Passion always passes away with its object, but affection remains to soften the heart years after its object is gone.
My intellectual nature is the field of all legitimate gospel operations with reference to the production of a Christian life and character. ”

“ Truth Is Immortal. Philosophy has sometimes forgotten God, as great people never did. The skepticism of the last century could not uproot Christianity because it lived in the hearts of the millions. Do you think that infidelity is spreading? Christianity never lived in the hearts of so many millions as at this moment. Many forms under which it is professed may decay, for they, like all that is the work of man's hands, are subject to the changes and chances of mortal beings, but the spirit of truth is incorruptible ”

“ Then, as the world of matter existed as an inactive, confused mass, surrounded by an envelope of darkness which shut out the light of the heavens, so the human family, without the knowledge of God, without the light of knowledge, left to its own mental and moral wanderings, without law or system or order, would present all the horrors of pagan darkness and woe. ”

“ Spain is a dispossessed queen. For two hundred years and more diamonds have been falling from her glittering crown. The source of her wealth, well or ill-gotten, is exhausted forever. Her treasures are lost, her colonies are gone; she is deprived of the prestige of that external opulence which veiled, or, at least dissembled her real and utter poverty. The nation is exhausted to such a degree, and has been so long unhappy, that each individual feels but his own misery. ”

“ Our senses are the means by which we were made competent witnesses. They are the bed-rock of evidence. We know facts and truths, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, by the same means. We are as competent to testify of that which we do not comprehend as we are to testify of the most ordinary fact. As competent to bear testimony to the fact of a sweeping tornado as to the fact of a gentle breeze. As competent to bear testimony to the fact that water freezes and becomes hard as to testify to the truth of its being a fluid. ”

“ Is the poor man mocked in that manner? If he dies in his sins, on account of his not being in possession of a good will, can his future reward be according to the deeds done by himself? No! He was never on trial—he had no ability to try. There is just as much sense in the idea that an ape is on trial. Adam, the first, ruined him; and Adam, the second, did not help him. Can a man be justly condemned because he was not what he never had the power to be? ”

“ Infidels, who are noted leaders in “Free Thought,” as it is termed, are invariably men whose religious education [pg 229] was in the religious literature of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated, and he is, at once, an infidel. ”

“ Wherever immortal truth has started into being, humanity claims and guards the bequest. Each generation gathers together the imperishable children of the past and increases them by the new sons of the light, alike radiant with immortality.—Bancroft. ”

“ When you have got rid of this belief in this priest-begotten God, and when, moreover, you are convinced that your existence, and that of the surrounding world, is due to the conglomeration of atoms, in accordance with the law of gravity and attraction, then, and then only, you will have accomplished the first steps toward liberty, and will experience less difficulty in ridding your minds of that second lie which tyranny has invented. ”

“ If a man reports an uncommon fact that is a plain object of sense, and we do not believe him, it is because we suspect his [pg 213] honesty and not his senses. If we are satisfied that the reporter is sincere, of course we believe. So our case is now in this shape: First, the great facts of the gospel of Christ addressed themselves, as simple facts, to the senses of men; second, no witness could affirm those facts honestly unless they took place; third, the witnesses to those facts gave all the evidences of sincerity and honesty that are possible. ”

“ Such speculative nonsense may be the best that a mind can do while it is in its own ignorance upon the subject of what it takes to constitute personality, and while it is also surrounded with nothing but the darkness of the dark ages, which has been the legitimate accompaniment of “the Catholic and Protestant fatal mistake,” but it is not the best that an intelligent mind, clothed with the sunlight of the gospel of Christ, and intelligently educated upon the subject of personality can do. ”

“ And when you have freed your minds from the fear of a God, and from that childish respect for the fiction of Right, then all the remaining chains which bind you, and which are called science, civilization, property, marriage, morality and justice, will snap asunder like threads. ”

“ Religions have their practical results, and, consequently, bearings upon human society. The Monotheistic idea, which, it is claimed, is to equalize all beings and things throughout this vast universe, in the conception that all are parts of the same grand all-pervading essence, can have only the following results: First, to wipe out all ideas of a future retribution, for want of judge, for want of governor; second, to destroy all distinctions consequent upon the ideas of a divine moral kingdom, or Kingdom of God among men ”

“ To convince yourselves of the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of history, written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long enjoyed unquestionable authority.
The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the Catholic Inquisition. “Spain,” says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, “exterminated them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. ”

“ If they were honest men they told the truth, for they say, We saw, and heard, and our hands have handled. Then the entire Christian religion, with its immortal blessings, stands or falls upon the honesty of the Savior's witnesses. Martyrdom has been universally conceded to be an evidence of sincerity; there may be a few exceptions to this general rule, but even they are not parallel cases. There is a story of a man who endured with great fortitude all the tortures of the rack, denying the fact with which he was charged. ”

“ Let your own happiness be your only law. But in order to get this law recognized, and to bring about the proper relations which should exist between the majority and minority of mankind, you must destroy everything which exists in the shape of state or social organization. So educate yourselves and your children that, when the great moment for constituting [pg 232] the new world arrives, your eyes may not be blinded and deceived by the falsehoods of the tyrants of throne and altar. ”

“ There must be a moral and spiritual system, as well as a physical. As the material system would be unworthy of its creator, were it not for the fact that it is governed by law, which is equivalent to saying, it is a system, so the moral and spiritual must be under law, in order to the accomplishment of the ends of its creation, which is equal to saying, it is God's moral government. ”

“ If it is improper to say that a man can by his own natural strength turn and prepare himself to faith and calling upon God, it is, also, improper to say he is naturally accountable, for where ability ceases, accountability also terminates. But a prop is found in “the grace of God by Christ going before to give a good will, and to work with that good will.” So the grace of God by Christ must go before to displace a bad will by giving “a good one.” But this fails to relieve the doctrine from embarrassment ”

“ It is, in all such cases, love run mad! A man should never get so broad in his religion as to be unfaithful to truth.
The phraseology has also been appropriated by skeptics and semi-infidels to popularize their own semi-infidel philosophy, which they love to denominate “free thought.” Deists, Pantheists and Atheists have seized upon the phrase and appropriated it to their ungodly speculations. It is true that others, in getting away from their old creeds, have run past the standard of truth and right. ”

“ The Vatican decrees declare that the Christian religion came perfect from God's hands; that it is not like a human science, such as medicine or mechanics, which can be improved or altered by the skill of man. In view of [pg 222] this conceded fact we have no kind of use for the decree of Pius the Ninth upon the “miraculous conception”—“Pope Pius decreed it.” Well, well, if Christianity really stood in need of such a decree it would not have been left off until December 8, 1854. It has been a bone for infidels to contend over from that time to the present. ”

“ The idea that the Spirit goes to the unwilling sinner to give him a good will, and then, because the man is not willing already, departs from him, leaving him in his sins to continue in his helpless, wicked condition until, having passed a mock judgment, he is banished to outer darkness, for if the man was never able to do otherwise on account of his helplessness, why should he be condemned? ”

“ As a divine affection, charity or love springs out of union with God, or being made a “partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lusts.” Such being the height of its bed-rock, it is said, “Every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” ”

“ Do we need these to dispel the darkness? “The darkness is past.” Do we need them to give us light? “The true light now shineth.” Do we need them to give us more truth? Jesus said of the Spirit: “He shall guide you into all truth.” The [pg 210] Roman Catholic priest, in his discussion with Mr. Chillingworth, planted himself upon this promise, made by the Savior to his apostles, as the proof of the claim of Romanists to the attribute of infallibility. Said he: “If the attribute of infallibility is not in the possession of the church, the promise of the Savior has failed.” ”

“ To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory, whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. ”