EXTRACTS FROM INGERSOLL.

Freethought Review, Volume II, Issue 13, 1 October 1884, Page 14

EXTRACTS FROM INGERSOLL.

1 Tlie home where virtue dwells with love is like a lily with a ueart of lire, —the fairest flower in all the world. Hie time may come in which this thrilled and throbbing earth, shorn of all life, will in its soundless orbit wheel a baiien star on which the light will fall as fruitlessly as tails the gaze of love upon the cold, pathetic face of death. We do not know, we cannot say, whether death is a wall or a door ; the beginning or end of a day; the spreading of pinions to soar or the folding forever of wings ; the rise or the set of a sun ; or an endless life that brings the rapture of love to every one. My heart bleeds when I contemplate the sufferings endured by the millions now dead ; of those who lived when the world appeared to be insane ; when the heavens were filled with an infinite horror, who snatched babes with dimpled hands and rosy cheeks from the white breasts of mothers, and dashed them into an abyss of eternal flame. He (Humboldt) was never found on his knees before the altar of superstition. He stood erect by the grand tranquil column of Reason. He was an admirer, a lover, an adorer of nature ; and at the age of ninety bowed by the weight of nearly a century, covered with the insignia of honor, loved by a nation, respected by a world, with kings for his servants, he laid his weary head upon the bosom of the universal Mother, and with her arms around him sank into that mysterious slumber known as death. More than a century ago, Catholicism, wrapped in robes red with the innocent blood of millions, holding in her frantic clutch crowns and sceptres, honors and gold, the keys of heaven and hell, trampling beneath her feet the liberties of nations, in the proud moment of almost universal dominion felt within her heartless breast the deadly dagger of Voltaire.’ From that blow, the Church never can recover. Livid with hatred, she launched her impotent anathema at the great destroyer; and ignorant Protestants have echoed the curse of Rome. Voltaire was the intellectual autocrat of his time. From his throne at the foot of the Alps, ho pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. Pie was the pioneer of his century. He was the assassin of superstition, Through the shadows of faith and fable, through the darkness of myth and miracle, through the midnight of Christianity, through the blackness of bigotry, past cathedral and dungeon’ past rock and stake, past altar and throne, he carried with chivalric hands, the sacred torch of reason.