ce, the priest by fear and by the bible.
The king said to the people: "God made you peasants and me a king; He
clothed you in rags and housed you in hovels; upon me He put robes and
gave me a palace." Such is the justice of God. The priest said to the
people: "God made you ignorant and vile, me holy and wise; obey me, or
God will punish you here and hereafter." Such is the mercy of God.

Infidels are the intellectual discoverers. Infidels have sailed the
unknown sea and have discovered the isles and continents in the vast
realms of thought. What would the world have been had infidels never
existed? What the infidel is in religion the inventor is in mechanics.
What the infidel is in religion the man willing to fight the hosts of
tyranny is in the political world. An infidel is a gentleman who has
discovered a fact and is not afraid to tell about it. There has been
for many thousands of years an idea prevalent that in some way you can
prove whether the theories defended or advanced by a man are right or
wrong by showing what kind of a man he was, what kind of a life he
lived, and what manner of death he died. There is nothing to this. It
makes no difference what the character of the man was who made the
first multiplication table. It is absolutely true, and whenever you
find an absolute fact, it makes no difference who discovered it. The
golden rule would have been just as good if it had first been whispered
by the devil.

It is good for what it contains, not because a certain man said it.
Gold is just as good in the hands of crime as in the hands of virtue.
Whatever it may be, it is gold. A statement made by a great man is not
necessarily true. A man entertains certain opinions, and then he is
proscribed because he refuses to change his mind. He is burned to
ashes, and in the midst of the flames he cries out that he is of the
same opinion still. Hundreds then say that he has sealed his testimony
with his blood, and that his doctrines must be true. All the martyrs
in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the
correctness of any one opinion. Martyrdom as a rule establishes the
sincerity of the martyr, not the correctness of his thought. Things
are true or false independently of the man who entertains them. Truth
cannot be affected by opinion; an error cannot be believed sincerely
enough to make it the truth. No Christian will admit that any amount
of heroism displayed by a Mormon is