rom the fanged mouths of wild beasts, and yet it is
the "glad tidings of great joy."

"God so loved the world" He is going to damn most everybody, and, if
this Christian religion be true, some of the greatest, and grandest,
and best who ever lived upon this earth, are suffering its torments
tonight. It don't appear to make much difference, however, with this
church. They go right on enjoying themselves as well as ever. If
their doctrine is true, Benjamin Franklin, one of the wisest, and best
of men, who did so much to give us here a free government, is suffering
the tyranny of God tonight, while he endeavored to establish freedom
among men. If the churches were honest, their preachers would tell
their hearts, "Benjamin Franklin is in hell, and we warn any and all
the youth not to imitate Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson, the
author of the Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident
truths, has been damned these many years." That is what all the
ministers ought to have the courage to say. Talk as you believe. Stand
by your creed or change it. I want to impress it upon your mind,
because the thing I wish to do in this world is to put out the fires of
hell I want to keep at it just as long as there is one little coal red
in the bottomless pit. As long as the ashes are warm, I shall denounce
this infamous doctrine.

I want you to know that the men who founded this great and glorious
government are there. The most of the men who fought in the
Revolutionary War and wrested from the clutch of Great Britain this
continent; have been rewarded by the eternal wrath of God. The old
Revolutionary soldiers are in hell by the thousands. Let the preachers
have the courage to say so. The men who fought in 1812, and gave to
the United States the freedom of the seas, nearly all of them have been
damned since 1815--all that were killed. The greatest of heroes, they
are there. The greatest of poets, the greatest scientists, the men who
have made the world beautiful and grand, they are all, I tell you,
among the damned, if this creed is true. Humboldt, who shed light, and
who added to the intellectual wealth of mankind, Goethe, and Schiller,
and Lessing, who almost created the German language--all gone! All
suffering the wrath of God tonight, and every time an angel thinks of
one of those men he gives his harp an extra twang.

La Place, who read the heaven like an open book--he is there. Robert
Burns, the poet o