eart of a child to fill the insane asylums with that miserable,
infamous lie. I see now and then a little girl--a dear little darling,
with a face like the light, and eyes of joy, a human blossom, and I
think, "is it possible that little girl will ever grow up to be a
Presbyterian?" Is it possible, my goodness, that that flower will
finally believe in the five points of Calvinism or in the eternal
damnation of man? Is it possible that that little fairy will finally
believe that she could be happy in Heaven with her baby in Hell? Think
of it! Think of it! And that is the Christian religion!

We cry out against the Indian mother that throws her child into the
Ganges, to be devoured by the alligator or crocodile, but that is joy
in comparison with the Christian mother's hope, that she may be in
salvation while her brave boy is in Hell.

I tell you I want to kick the doctrine about Hell--I want to kick it
out every time I go by it. I want to get Americans in this country
placed so they will be ashamed to preach it. I want to get the
congregations so that they won't listen to it. We cannot divide the
world off into saints and sinners in that way. There is a little girl,
fair as a flower, and she grows up until she is twelve, thirteen, or
fourteen years old. Are you going to damn her in the fifteenth,
sixteenth or seventeenth year, when the arrow from Cupid's bow touches
her heart and she is glorified--are you going to damn her now? She
marries and loves, and holds in her arms a beautiful child? Are you
going to damn her now? When are you going to damn her? Because she has
listened to some Methodist minister and after all that flood of light
failed to believe? Are you going to damn her then? I tell you God can
not afford to damn such a woman.

A woman in the State of Indiana forty or fifty years ago who carded the
wool and made rolls and spun them, and made the cloth and cut out the
clothes for the children, and nursed them, and sat up with them nights
and--gave them medicine, and held them in her arms and wept over
them--cried for joy and wept for fear, and finally raised ten or eleven
good men and women with the ruddy glow of health upon their cheeks, and
she would have died for any one of them any moment of her life, and
finally she, bowed with age and bent with care and labor, dies, and at
the moment the magical touch of death is upon her face, she looks as
though she never had had a care, and her children