m to think when he didn't like people
that he would have the pleasure of looking over and seeing them squirm
upon the gridiron. When any man said he didn't believe there was a
hell this gentleman got up in his pulpit and called him a hyena. That
fellow believed in a devil too; that lowest skull was a devil
factory--he believed in him. He believed he had a long tail adorned
with a fiery dart; he believed he had wings like a bat, and had a
pleasant habit of breathing sulphur; and he believed he had a cloven
foot--such as most of your clergymen think I am blessed with myself.
They are shepherds of the sheep. The people are the sheep--that is all
they are, they have to be watched and guarded by these shepherds and
protected from the wolf who wants to reason with them. That is the
doctrine. Now, all I claim is the same right to improve on that
gentleman's politics, as on the dug-out, and the same right to improve
upon his religion as upon his plough, or the musical instrument known
as the tomtom--that is all.

Now, suppose the king and priest, if there was one, and there probably
was one, as the farther you go back the more ignorant you find mankind
and the thicker you find these gentlemen--suppose the king and priest
had said: "That boat is the best boat that ever can be built; we got
the model of that from Neptune, the god of the seas, and I guess the
god of the water knows how to build a boat, and any man that says he
can improve it by putting a stick in the middle with a rag on the end
of it, and has any talk about the wind blowing this way, and that, he
is a heretic--he is a blasphemer." Honor bright, what, in your
judgment, would have been the effect upon the circumnavigation of the
globe? I think we would have been on the other side yet. Suppose the
king and priests had said: "That plow is the best that ever can be
invented; the model of that was given to a pious farmer in a holy
dream, and that twisted straw is the ne plus ultra of all twisted
things, and any man who says he can out-twist it, we will twist him."
Suppose the king and priests had said: "That tomtom is the finest
instrument of music in the world--that is the kind of music found in
heaven. An angel sat upon the edge of a glorified cloud playing upon
that tomtom and became so entranced with the music that in a kind of
ecstasy she dropped it and that is how we got it, and any man who talks
about putting any improvement on that, he is not fit to