e two great arguments of the church--the great man argument and
the death-bed. They say the religion of your fathers is good enough.
Why should your father object to your inventing a better plow than he
had. They say to one, do you know more than all the theologians dead?
Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to
the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a
bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and
make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children
for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief.
When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do
so and take the consequence like a man. And so I object to paying for
the support of another man's belief. I am in favor of the taxation of
all church property. If that property belongs to God, He is able to
pay the tax. If we exempt anything, let us exempt the home of the widow
and orphan.

[A voice here interrupted the speaker.

Col. Ingersoll--What did the gentleman say? A voice--O, he's drunk.

Col. Ingersoll--I didn't think any Christian ought to get drunk and
come here to disturb us.

The speaker resumed:]

The church has today $600,000,000 or $700,000,000 of property in this
country. It must cost $2,000,000 a week, that is to say $500 a minute,
to run these churches. You give me this money and if I don't do more
good with it than four times as many churches I'll resign. Let them
make the churches attractive and they'll get more hearers. They will
have less empty pews if they have less empty heads in the pulpit. The
time will come when the preacher will become a teacher.

Admitting that the bible is the book of God, is that His only good job?
Will not a man be damned as quick for denying the equator as denying
the bible? Will he not be damned as quick for denying geology as for
denying the scheme of salvation? When the bible was first written it
was not believed. Had they known as much about science as we know now
that bible would not have been written.

Col. Ingersoll next gave his views of the Puritans, declared they left
Holland to escape persecution and came came here to persecute others.
He referred to the persecutions heaped upon those of other religious
belief by the Puritans, paid the Catholics the compliment to say that
Maryland, which they ruled, was the first colony to enact a law
tolerating religious