o crime
that that doctrine has not produced. I think it would be impossible
for the imagination to conceive of a worse religion than orthodox
Christianity--utterly impossible; a doctrine that divides this
world, a doctrine that divides families, a doctrine that teaches
the son that he can be happy, with his mother in perdition; the
husband that he can be happy in heaven while his wife suffers the
agonies of hell. This doctrine is infinite injustice, and tends
to subvert all ideas of justice in the human heart. I think it
would be impossible to conceive of a doctrine better calculated to
make wild beasts of men than that; in fact, that doctrine was born
of all the wild beast there is in man. It was born of infinite
revenge.

Think of preaching that you must believe that a certain being was
the son of God, no matter whether your reason is convinced or not.
Suppose one should meet, we will say on London Bridge, a man clad
in rags, and he should stop us and say, "My friend, I wish to talk
with you a moment. I am the rightful King of Great Britain," and
you should say to him, "Well, my dinner is waiting; I have no time
to bother about who the King of England is," and then he should
meet another and insist on his stopping while the pulled out some
papers to show that he was the rightful King of England, and the
other man should say, "I have got business here, my friend; I am
selling goods, and I have no time to bother my head about who the
King of England is. No doubt you are the King of England, but you
don't look like him." And then suppose he stops another man, and
makes the same statement to him, and the other man should laugh at
him and say, "I don't want to hear anything on this subject; you
are crazy; you ought to go to some insane asylum, or put something
on your head to keep you cool." And suppose, after all, it should
turn out that the man was King of England, and should afterward
make his claim good and be crowned in Westminster. What would we
think of that King if he should hunt up the gentlemen that he met
on London Bridge, and have their heads cut off because they had
no faith that he was the rightful heir? And what would we think
of a God now who would damn a man eighteen hundred years after the
event, because he did not believe that he was God at the time he
was living in Jerusalem; not only damn the fellows that he met and
who did not believe him, but gentlemen who lived eighteen hundred
years af