urn me?"

"Because we think a decent man will allow others to think and express
his thought."

"Then the reason you do not persecute me for my thought is that you
believe it would be infamous in you!"

"Yes."

"And yet you worship a God who will, all you declare, punish me
forever."

The next question then is: Can I commit a sin against God by thinking?
If God did not intend I should think, why did He give me a "thinker."
Now, then, we have got what they call the Christian system of religion,
and thousands of people wonder how I can be wicked enough to attack
that system.

There are many good things about it, and I shall never attack anything
that I believe to be good! I shall never fear to attack anything I
honestly believe to be wrong. We have, I say, what they call the
Christian religion, and, I find, just in proportion that nations have
been religious, just in the proportion they have gone back to
barbarism. I find that Spain, Portugal, Italy are the three worst
nations in Europe; I find that the nation nearest infidel is the most
prosperous France. And so I say there can be no danger in the exercise
of absolute intellectual freedom. I find among ourselves the men who
think at least as good as those who do not. We have, I say, a Christian
system, and that is founded upon what they are pleased to call system
the "New Testament." Who wrote the New Testament? I don't know. Who
does know? Nobody!

We have found some fifty-two manuscripts containing portions of the New
Testament. Some of those manuscripts leave out five or six books--many
of them. Others more others less. No two of these manuscripts agree.
Nobody knows who wrote these manuscripts. They are all written in
Greek; the disciples of Christ knew only Hebrew. Nobody ever saw, so
far as we know, one of the original Hebrew manuscripts. Nobody ever saw
anybody who had seen anybody who had heard of anybody that had seen
anybody that had ever seen one of the original Hebrew manuscripts. No
doubt the clergy of your city have told you these facts thousands of
times, and they will be obliged to me for having repeated them once
more. These manuscripts are written in what are called capital Greek
letters. They are called Uncial characters; and the New Testament was
not divided into chapters and verses, even, until the year of grace
1551. Recollect it.

In the original the manuscripts and gospels are signed by nobody. The
epistles are addressed