Year: 1875

Religion is good and proper thing in its place;
but the business Of making every public occasion
one Of religious observance and public worship is
becoming somewhat monotouous. The din about
God in the Constitution has not ceased, yet We
begin to hear q new clamor in favor Of giving
religious character to the Centennial. There are
some people interested in the Centennial who do
not claim to be religious, and do not take much
stock in the patent religion, as peddled out by
the churches. 1t would be nice thing to make
religious celebration of the centennial anni-
verssry of American Freedom, and place it in
the hands of those who long ago consigned the
authors Of that freedom to hell. For instance,
let priests control the celebration in honor of the
Declaration of Independence, the author of which
was an Infdel, and hated priestcraft with an
honest hatred. Perhaps no man did more for In
dependence, from first to last, than Benjamin
Franklin, o skeptic in religion-how 1T would
please him to come back and see into whose
hands his work had fallen. Old Ethan Allen,
who took Ticonderoga, was an Infidel, and wrote
an Infidel book. His soul has been raked over
in the pit of fire and birthstone many and many
a time from the pulpit; notwithstanding the
fact that he demanded the surrender in the name
of the Great Jebova first.


But the soul of American Independence-the
brain of it-who cheered the desponding hearts
in the darkest hour of gloom; who encouraged
them to try again and again, when they were
about despairing; who. in poverty and want,
wrote encouraging and buring words, and then
shouldered his gun and shared the hardships
which he exhorted others to bear-was Thomas
Paine. Without detracting from the merits and
claims of other glorious patriots it is perhaps safe
to say that but for Thomas Paine the Declara-
tion of Independence would probably never have
been made, nor the freedom of America estab-
lished. Yet no man that ever lived has ever
been so foully abused by the Church and the
Priesthood as has Paine. He has been called
filthy and beastly, yet there is not a filthy or
beastly sentiment in his whole writings. He be-
lieved in God but did not believe that the
Scriptures were inspired by God, or were any
credit to such q being as he believed God
to be. 1t was he who uttered the noble senti-
ment: "Any system of Religion that shocks the
mind of a child cannot be a true system" He
was full of humanity, and love for his race-his
whole life was spent in disinterested labors for
the good of mankind. While he did not believe
in the divinity of Christ he believed that Christ
was a noble and pure man, and spoke of him in
the highest terms of respect, as human being.
But those men who want to give a religious
character to the celebration of Thomas Paine's
work, would take a supreme delight, if in their
power, to make part of the celebration the dig
ging up of Paine's bones, making a bonfire of
them, and scattering the ashes to the four winds
of heaven! Speaking of the hatred of the Church
toward the memory of Paine, the accomplished
and eloquent Robert G. Ingersoll, of Illinois,
says, with burning sarcasm:


Paine denied the authority of Bibles and creeds; this
his crime and for this the world shut the door in his
face and emped its slops upon him from the windows.


challenge the world to show that Thomas Paine
wrote line word in favor of tyrannyn favor Of
immortality; one line word against what he believed
TO be for the highest and best interest of mannd
line word against Justice charity liberty; and yet
he has been pursued though he had been end from
he'll Bis memory has been execrated though he had
murdered some Uriah for his wife; driven Hagar
into the desert tc sarve with his child her BOSOM
dsfed his daughters ripped open with the the sword
the sweet bodies Of loving and innocent advised
one brother TO assassnste snother kept harem with
seven hundred wives and three hundred concubnes
had prosecuted Christians even unto strange cities