Lectures of Col. R.G. Ingersoll | Page 9

speaking, blaspheme or curse God, or deny
our Savior, Jesus Christ, to be the son of God, or shall deny the Holy
Trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, or the God-head of any of
the three persons, or the unity of the God-head, or shall utter any
profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or the persons thereof and

shall therefore be convicted by verdict, shall, for the first offense, be
bored through the tongue, and fined L20, to be levied on his body. As
for the second offense, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in
the forehead the letter B, and fined L40. And that for the third offense,
the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy."
The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and
was in force in the District of Columbia up to 1875. Laws like this were
in force in most of the colonies and in all countries where the church
had power.
In the Old Testament the death penalty was attached hundreds of
offenses. It has been the same in all Christian countries. Today, in
civilized governments, the death penalty is attached only to murder and
treason; and in some it has been entirely abolished. What a commentary
upon the divine systems of the World!
In the days of Thomas Paine the church was ignorant, bloody, and
relentless. In Scotland the "kirk" was at the summit of its power. It was
a full sister of the Spanish Inquisition. It waged war upon human nature.
It was the enemy of happiness, the hater of joy, and the despiser of
liberty. It taught parents to murder their children rather than to allow
them to propagate error. If the mother held opinions of which the
infamous "kirk" disapproved, her children were taken from her arms,
her babe from her very bosom, and she was not allowed to see them, or
write them a word. It would not allow ship-wrecked sailors to be
rescued from drowning on Sunday.
Oh, you have no idea what a muss it kicks up in heaven to have
anybody swim on Sunday. It fills all the wheeling worlds with sadness
to see a boy in a boat, and the attention of the recording secretary is
called to it. In a voice of thunder they say, "Upset him!" It sought to
annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious
cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious,
heartless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: "The kirk
holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy." And this
same Scotch kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the
moral grandeur to say, "The world is my country, and to do good my
religion." And this same kirk abhorred the man who said, "Any system
of religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a true system."
At that time nothing so delighted the church as the beauties of endless

torment, and listening to the weak wailing of damned infants struggling
in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century a boy by the name of
Thomas Aikenhead was indicted and tried at Edinburgh for having
denied the inspiration of the scriptures, and for having, on several
occasions, when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm.
Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was
found guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of
the scaffold and covered with stones, and though his mother came with
her face covered with tears, begging for the corpse, she was denied and
driven away in the name of charity. That is religion, and in the velvet of
their politeness there lurks the claws of the tiger. Just give them the
power and see how quick I would leave this part of the country. They
know I am going to be burned forever; they know I am going to hell,
but that don't satisfy them. They want to give me a little foretaste here.
Prosecutions and executions like these were common in every Christian
country, and all of them based upon the belief that an intellectual
conviction is a crime. No wonder the church hated and traduced the
author of the "Age of Reason." England was filled with Puritan gloom
and Episcopal ceremony. The ideas of crazy fanatics and extravagant
poets were taken as sober facts. Milton had clothed Christianity in the
soiled and faded finery of the gods--had added to the story of Christ the
fables of mythology. He gave to the Protestant church the most
outrageously material ideas of the Deity. He turned all