"I want nothing; I am looking for nothing but heaven." -Melanethon. "Now let Thy servant depart in peace. Suffer me to come to thee. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”—Bishop Jewell. "I am found in Him who loved me and gave Himself for me. I am swallowed up in God."-Dr. Goodwin, (Puritan Divine). "Glory to Thee, O God.”—Gordon Hall. "The Celestial City is now full in my view."-Payson. "I am taking a fearful leap into the dark.”—Hobbs. "I long to die, that I may be in the place of perdition, that I may know the worst of it. My damnation is sealed." William Pope. "Oh, the insufferable pangs of hell."-Sir Francis Newport. "I must die-abandoned of God and of men."-Voltaire. In a recent rehash of an old lecture on Thomas Paine we find the following paragraph: "You have burned us at the stake; roasted us upon slow fires; torn our flesh with iron; you have covered us with chains; treated us as outcasts; you have filled the world with fear; you have taken our wives and our children from our arms," etc. We ask in the name of simplest truth and common justice who it is that have suffered these things? The answer comes from every page of history, that it is followers of Christ, who have clung to Him through the fires of persecution and the floods of misfortune. They were believers in the Bible who went to the stake; else, why were Bibles burned with them in the flames? Men do not go to the rack, the stake, or the guillotine, rather than renounce their faith when they have no faith to renounce. Men and women do not choose to be placed in red-hot iron chains rather than to deny a Lord on whom they have never believed. Men do not submit to have their tungs cut out, to be thrown to wild beasts, or to perish in slow fires, in preference to recanting from a position they have never assumed. Cellsus was not crucified; Parphry was not banished; Julian did not suffer, save at the hands of his own conscience; Voltaire was not thrown into a caldron of boiling oil; Paine was not burned at the stake, and modern skeptics are not placed in the stocks or whipped in the streets. It was men, women, yes, and children, who clung to the written word when fire and flame and irons and lash were the rewards of their fidelity. They have been driven to mountains and caverns, to wander in sheepskins and goatskins-they of whom the world was not worthy. The same hands burned Christians that burned Bibles. They thought to crush the book and its believers by the same means. But the old book lives on, unmindful of the waves that beat against its unfailing foundations. It is still the "pillar of cloud" by day, and the "pillar of fire in the night time of persecution, and thus it will ever be until the weary feet of God's little ones find rest upon the ever green shores of eternal life. Mrs. H. V. Reed. COL. INGERSOLL'S LECTURE ON THOMAS PAINE. Delivered in Central Music Hall, Chicago, January 29, 1880. (From the Chicago Times, Verbatim Report.) LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It so happened that the first speech-the very first public speech I ever made-I took occasion to defend the memory of Thomas Painé. I did it because I had read a little something of the history of my country. I did it because I felt indebted to him for the liberty I then enjoyed-and whatever religion may be true, ingratitude is the blackest of crimes. And whether there is any God or not, in every star that shines, gratitude is a virtue. The man who will tell the truth about the dead is a good man, and for one, about this man, I intend to tell just as near the truth as I can. Most history consists in giving the details of things that never hap pened-most biography is usually the lie coming from the mouth of flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice, and whoever attacks the religion of a country will, in his turn, be attacked. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by all the meanness of ingenuity. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that there is still one weapon left in the arsenal of Jehovah-slander. I was reading, on yesterday, a poem called the "Light of Asia," and I read in that how a Boodh seeing a tigress perishing of thirst, with her mouth upon the dry stone of a stream, with her two cubs sucking at her dry and empty dugs, this Boodh took pity upon this wild and famishing beast, and, throwing from himself the yellow robe of his order, and stepping naked before this tigress, said: "Here is meat for you and for your cubs." In one moment the crooked daggers of her claws ran riot in his flesh, and in another he was devoured. Such, during nearly all the history of this world, has been the history of every man who has stood in front of superstition. Thomas Paine, as has been so eloquently said by the gentleman who introduced me, was a friend of man, and whoever is a friend of man is also a friend of God-if there is one. But God has had many friends who were the enemies of their fellow-men. There is but one test by which to measure any man who has lived. Did he leave this world better than he found it? Did he leave in this world more liberty? Did he leave in this world more goodness, more humanity, than when he was born? That is the test. And whatever may have been the faults of Thomas Paine, no American who appreciates liberty, no American who believes in true democracy and pure republicanism, should ever breathe one word against his name. Every American, with the divine mantle of charity, should cover all his faults, and with a never-tiring tongue should recount his virtues. He was a common man. He did not belong to the aristocracy. Upon the head of his father God had never poured the divine petroleum of authority. He had not the misfortune to belong to the upper classes. He had the fortune to be born among the poor and to feel against his great heart the throb of the toiling and suffering masses. Neither was it his misfortune to have been educated at Oxford. What little sense he had was not squeezed out at Westminster. He got his education from books. He got his education from contact with his fellow-men, and he thought; and a man is worth just what nature impresses upon him. A man standing by the sea, or in a forest, or looking at a flower, or hearing a poem, or looking into the eyes of the woman he loves, receives all that he is capable of receiving-and if he is a great man the impression is great, and he uses it for the purpose of benefiting his fellow-man. Thomas Paine was not rich; he was poor, and his father before him was poor, and he was raised a sail-maker, a very lowly profession, and yet that man became one of the main-stays of liberty in this world. At one time he was an excise man, like Burns. Burns was once-speak it softly-a gauger-and yet he wrote poems that will wet the cheek of humanity with tears as long as this world travels in its orb around the sun. Poverty was his brother, necessity his master. He had more brains than books; more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He had no veneration for old mistakes, no admiration for ancient lies. He loved the truth for truth's sake and for man's sake. He saw oppression on every hand, injustice everywhere, hypocrisy at the altar, venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne, and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the strong, of the enslaved many against the titled few. In England he was nothing. He belonged to the lower classes-that is, the useful people. England depended for her prosperity upon her |