shed Weekly. Price, $1.00 a year, or 5 cents a single copy, supplied on the most Liberal Terms. The Trade VOL. I. MARCH 5, 1881.' No. 1. LECTURES OF GEORGE CHAINEY, Delivered every Sunday afternoon , at 2.45 P.M., in Paine Memorial Half Boston, Mass. Lessons from tlie Life and Work of Karl Heinzen. 3^=* Published by GEORGE CHAINEV, No. 3 Union Park, Boston. Entered as Second Class Mail Matter. Copyrighted, 188 r. To the Liberal Public Dear Friends, — We have a* great and noble work before us, that is worthy of our i warmest love and most earnest thought and action. We have to persuade men to change the ' livery of servitude for the beautiful garments of liberty, to drive off the deadly malaria of piety with the healthy breezes of humanity, substitute the vagaries of theology for the reali¬ ties of science, to make a clearing in the dense forests' of superstition with the axe of reason, so that the comforts of a higher and richer civilization shall follow, and make the wilderness blossom as a rose. Our work for the present is largely a labor of love. _ We must teach and agitate, destroy and build, protect against wrong and uphold the Right,—and especially, by devoting ourselves to the Right for Right’s sake, show that the morality of the Church, that induces men and women to spend their lives in driving a bargain with a deity, is in itself the mother of all the teeming immoralities of our times. Because of this, let us bear proudly the title of being infidels to the Church, because .she herself is the worst form of infidelity that ever sought to hide the shining stars of truth. In my eighteenth year, following an impulse pf the heart, I entered the ministry, and gave my youthful enthusiasm to what Karl Heinzen called the stony sum total of all vices and all despotism, of all darkness and barbarity,— the Church. After a bondage of ten years, seven in the Methodist and three in the Unitarian ministry, I have broken every fetter and tasted the full blessing of liberty. Inspired by its thrilling joy, I consecrate the remainder of my life to the work of securing the same joy for all. Though recognizing that deeds are better than words, and that you by patiently dping the Right for the Right’s sake are laying the foundations of the Kingdom of Man, there still remains a great work to be done in voicing the hope and work of Liberals. Knowing full well.that this is my portion of our common task, I invite vou all to co-operate with me, so that the words I speak may be made useful by your deeds. ’ . I have arranged to deliver a lecture every Sunday at Paine Memorial Hall, and to publish them in weekly numbers, at $i.co a year.. . This is cheaper than they can be afforded, unless you second my efforts and give me a large circulation; In the fullest confidence that you will only be too glad to do so, I have commenced to issue The Infidel Pulpit. The way to assist is to ask your liberal friends to subscribe for it, or send me their names, so that I can send them sample copies. Some of you can afford to buy a hundred copies occasionally of a . single lecture for general distribution. By sending orders in advance, I can send them to you for $ 1 . 00 . If you cannot afford to subscribe yourself, perhaps you can secure me a list of five subscribers, and then I will send you a free copy. I want you all to become members of my parish, and join with me heart and hand in laying the axe of reason at the root of the dead tree of superstition. Yours, for Liberty or Death, GEORGE CHAINEY. O-A-IR/ID FEOTOGEALFiEIS FOE. SALE. Cabinet size, 25 cents. Card size, 15 cents. foundation stones, a neat volume of Sermons published by the author, when he was a Unitarian minister. Sent, postage paid, for 75 cts. These discourses, though containing some sentiments I now discard, will, I think, still be found of service to most Liberals, through revealing the path over which I struggled into light and liberty. Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Heinzen, I feel as though it was my duty to com¬ mence this lecture with an explanation, if not an apology. I do not wish any one to think for a moment that I feel adequate to draw the full lesson that is to be learned from the life and work of Karl Heinzen. That can be done only by one who knew him personally, and to whom is open the rich storehouse of his thought, locked to me in the German language. The resolution to speak on this subject was born far more of feeling than of knowledge. It was an im¬ pulse of the heart, springing from the grate¬ ful remembrance of the service he had been to me. Such emotions often lead us to essay tasks which, though lying beyond our strength to accomplish, yet prove of infinite service to us, owing to the inspiration that must always flow forth from our striving to be true to our best instincts. He who never attempts to do anything that reason says lies beyond his reach will never do what is within the compass of attainment. All prog¬ ress is made by striving to grasp more than we can hold. The results of human life are far more in what we become than in what we achieve. If it were otherwise, it were a mad world indeed. The last ten years of my life have been spent in learning things that have now to be set aside as worse than useless. When eighteen years of age, through following the impulse of my heart, I entered the service of the ministry, and gave my youthful enthusiasm to what Karl Heinzen called “the stony sum total of all vices and all despotism, of all darkness and barbarity, the Church.” While if I could have been, through proper and early education, led to give the devotion I gave to the shadows and falsi¬ ties of superstition to the realities and truths of nature, it would have been great gain, and saved me much mental and heart pain. Still, I cannot but acknowledge that, through being true to myself, even, that service was by no means lost. So, though I cannot paint for you the full life-picture of this great man, you will at least permit me, without blame, to cluster around his name a few flowers of truth, springing forth largely from my own heart, but watered and re¬ freshed with the healthful light and rain of this man’s thought and feeling. To some of you, he was doubtless an entire stranger. Perhaps you hardly knew that such a man lived and died among you. If you heard his name, it never thrilled you to the inner¬ most recesses of your being, as it would if you had ever felt the sublime heroism of his moral and mental life. His name was never hurrahed by the crowd. The demagogues of our time never thought of asking him to lead them in a campaign, the almost sole aim of which is to gain the spoils of office. He seldom fig¬ ured in the newspaper lists of notable per¬ sonages. Still, that is no reason why he should be considered unworthy of your in¬ terest. These cheap notorieties are no cri¬ terion of real worth. The most potent 2 Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Ileinzen. influences of nature are those that work silently. The light, the persistence of force, the law of gravitation, are mightier far than howling wind, noisy thunder, or roaring seas. We are awed by the strength of the thunder-bolt that shatters a mighty oak into splinters; but it was a far mightier task for the silent forces of nature that had wooed it out of the earth, and built it up patiently through the long years, until it stood there, firm-rooted in the ground, and spreading its broad limbs as if to caress at once the earth and skies in its glad embrace. Our life is like the earth reaching out into the infini¬ ties. If our world was not held from the sun by other planets, we would fall into the sun; and, if they were not held from us by still other stars, they would fall into us. And so on forever. So that beyond all the stars we see in a clear night — so far removed from us that their light, always travelling toward us, yet never reaches us — there are no doubt worlds that are still part of that incomprehensible, because end¬ less, chain that binds us so firm and safe amid the Titanic and infinite forces of nature. So is it in the moral world. Our life is in some real way bound up with every other life. Each great and noble soul that has breathed forth sentiments of justice, truth, or liberty, has contributed to the moral atmosphere that goes to the making of our character, as truly as the physical atmos¬ phere goes into the building of our bodies. Hence, in this lecture, I shall lay but little importance on the historical events of its subject’s life. It scarcely matters where such a man was born and lived, so long as we know the quality of the work he performed. That is the thing that abides when names of places and dates carved on the most en¬ during granite or marble have crumbled into dust. My desire is not to train your mem¬ ory, or even to eulogize, but simply to make you feel a little of - the moral force of Karl Heinzen’s life. This is the worship of the true Liberal. Worship means the recogni¬ tion of worthship, and the heart and mind hungering to be blessed with the same. Many have bent the knee this day to gods, creations of the imagination in the skies, hungering and thirsting to become more like those to whom they ascribe every excellence. The fears of ignorance and the craft of priests have mingled so much that is ut¬ terly unworthy with what is worthy in these ideals that the worshipper is degraded and cursed instead of elevated and blessed. While we abhor the object of worship, pity \ and respect the worshipper, still we cannot \ but reverence that inward hunger of the heart that leads them to look above them, craving goodness, as the flowers turn hunger¬ ing and thirsting toward the light and dew of heaven. But for us the skies are depopu¬ lated. We no longer strain our eyes to see gods, any more than we think of looking for fairies when we take a walk in the woods. But that does not keep us from looking for the sweet wild-flowers that fill the air with fragrance, or for some new vista of beauty through the leafy avenues. Yea, the absence of all belief in these mystical beings has only prepared us the better to discern the worth U of Nature, and to drink deeper draughts of I inspiration from he* perennial springs of \J beauty and truth. So, though we bend not the knee of craven fear in this temple of lib¬ erty, utter no fulsome eulogy to unseen and supernatural beings, yet our hearts and minds turn, hungering and thirsting, like the flowers to the sun, toward all worth, truth, justice, or beauty in man or nature. Though denying all religions, yet we are more than religious. Though scorning every form of prayer, yet we are more than prayerful. Though chanting no psalms, yet the sentiments that here exhale their fra¬ grance should lift us on their wings into the spirit and harmony of the blending music of wisdom and love. Though blinded not with the dazzling glory of gods nor of supernat¬ ural saviors, yet every strong and true man or woman is for us a savior, and every prin¬ ciple that underlies the rights and joys of all the race worthy of the supreme loyalty of our hearts and minds. To reverence, to love, and to understand the worth of another, Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Heinzen. 3 whether living or dead, is not to flatter. No one can truly honor the worth of man but the Liberal. Every church is founded on the degradation of man. Every one who enters a church to join in the worship must leave his manhood at the door. Though he have walked uprightly among men, been a loving husband, a faithful father, a kind friend, divided his bread with the hungry, and com- (forted the afflicted, yet all that must be re¬ nounced, that he may give a jealous God all the glory, and say, “We beseech thee, good Lord, have mercy upon us, most miserable sinners.” But here we claim all that we claim for ourselves on the street or at home. Here we honor and respect ourselves. Be¬ neath this roof, erected to the memory of a true patriot and reformer, whose country was the world, and to do good his religion, we can unite to honor every other patriot and reformer whose life has been consecrated to the great and divine service of humanity, j among whom there ranks none more worthy of our most sincere admiration and emula- r‘ tion than Karl Heinzen. ^ In his own words, we can say: — “ ’Twas Freedom that my spirit 4ired and strengthened, ’Twas Truth that my heart’s springtime kept and lengthened. And Nature fed me silently my fill. , Not by base arts and flatteries sought I favor, My speech ne’er of hypocrisy did savor, Nor open truth held I as contraband. The torch of thought I have kept brightly flaming; Toward high endeavor have kept boldly aiming, And never thought it shame to be a man.” It was only about a year ago since I was first introduced to the writings of Karl Heinzen, by one of his ardent admirers, Dr. Ludwig Fritch, of Evansville, Ind. It was at a critical time in my life. I had just made the acquaintance of Robert G. Inger- soll, and found that the highest intellectual power and the most Titanic affectional nature could live and flourish without any doctrine of religion. For three years, I had been steadily drifting away from supernat¬ uralism. Christianity had become to me the embodiment of falsehood. The very idea of the Church was daily growing more and more repugnant to my sense of right. As I turned page after page of the history of the past, I found that, in spite of all it boasts to have done for mankind, our art, our literature, our science, our education, our liberties, have all been torn from its covetous grasp from time to time in mo¬ ments of sheer desperation, as starving meis have sometimes snatched something to eat from the jaws of a cruel tiger. I was ex¬ pected by my church to say God, to read hymns of fulsome eulogy, to open my lips in supplication, and compelled by my posi¬ tion to profess to be a Christian. I went to my task on Sundays like a whipped slave. I knew not what to do. To leave the Church was renouncing the only certain means I had of gaining a livelihood for myself and family. I had done it once before, and fortune favored me. But the pain of it, in the loss of love and friend¬ ship, had been so bitter that I constantly wondered how I endured it. In moments of enthusiasm, we often do things we can never repeat, because the retrospective glance pal¬ sies us with fear. Love and friendship are too precious to be lightly thrown away, especially when you know that all your honor will be treated with contempt, and you, who have been loyal at so great a cost, denounced as a traitor. Perhaps, after all, I was deceived. Surely there must be some remnant of truth in these things before which the world had so long bowed. It was not much that was ex¬ pected of me. I was already an infidel to every .other church, and in this one I was supposed to be perfectly free. In this frame of mind, I took up carelessly for the first time a work of Karl Heinzen. On the fourth page, I read: “ Religion, which pretends to be pre-eminently the teacher or even the creator of humanity, forms a direct contra¬ diction of it, even should she prescribe many actions which in their special operation can be human. Robbing the human being of self-sovereignty, she thus robs him of his own motives, as well as his own aims ; she crushes out this instinct of honor which makes him responsible to himself; she condemns his 4 Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Keinzen. highest power—reason—to suicide, in order to set faith above its grave; she makes his own nature an object of fear to him; she turns him away from real life, the only field for his human tasks, in order, in an imagin¬ ary life, to make him either a blessed angel who no longer needs humanity, or a con¬ demned sinner whom she can help no more ; she leaves him no free choice, but makes his will and his acts only the practice of obedi¬ ence to an external law ; and, where self-sat¬ isfaction should be his sole aim, she presses upon him as motive either the fear or the approval of a so-called higher authority. The religious believer is man denied and renounced: the free human being is man recognized and restored. In other words, man begins where ceases the believer; and the intelligent liberation from religion is the real development into manhood.” To de¬ scribe my feelings is not possible. Every word was backed with my complete self-con¬ sciousness. I said to myself: Here is a man indeed from whose gaze no sham can hide the truth. This man not only speaks the truth, but is the truth. I read on through the pamphlet, intoxicated with a wild delight. Every line was as bright and luminous as the noonday sun, every word charged with jus tice and conscience. To break from the Church into the world where such a moral giant lived and toiled for truth and liberty became at once the noblest aim of life. To stand in company with such a mind seemed more desirable than the fellowship of all the timid, compromising sentimentalists ..whose communion I enjoyed in the Unitarian Church. Through the long vistas his pro¬ phetic mind opened before me, I saw grander ideals and possibilities of a noble, service¬ able life than I had ever dreamed of be¬ fore. From that day to this, I have never heard his name mentioned without its thrill¬ ing my whole being. One of the lessons he helped me to learn is that manhood, real humanity, is impossible without the total sur¬ render of religion. He or she who makes any compromise with it does to that degree become inhuman. To be a man, one must give to every other man every right he claims for himself. The supreme right of life is to be and belong to one’s self, and whoever ac¬ knowledges any authority above man and the rights of man must regard his fellow-being in the light of a slave. He can neither be¬ long to himself nor extend that right to any¬ one else. One may not love every one else. The command of Christianity to do so is un¬ natural. But it is always possible to be per¬ fectly just toward and grant every right to the person who is for us the most disagree¬ able. What good does a profession of love do me from the man who picks my pocket or poisons the minds of my children with base principles ? That is what the Christian Church is doing every moment of its exist¬ ence. What has this boasted love done for humanity? It preaches submission to our enemies. We are to give to Csesar the things that be Caesar’s, though his foot is on our necks. Its only comfort for the miseraole and oppressed is the promise of future bliss. J It feeds thousands with a few loaves and! fishes; it keeps the slave a slave, and theV beggar a beggar; it offers prayers in church ^ for God’s blessing on tyrants; it puts into the mouths of those who daily wrong us hypocritical professions, that disarm our just wrath and keep us helpless and dependent; it leads man to look for help from without, when his dependence should be upon him¬ self ; it throws the responsibilities of wrongs upon supernatural and absent parties whom we can bring neither to trial nor reforma¬ tion. If we could get God and the devil into school or a court of justice, we might induce them, as Burns advised one of them., to take a thought and mend. It keeps the head at war with the heart. The kingdom divided against itself or built on a compromise can¬ not stand. No more can the individual. Love cannot be commanded nor entreated. It must spring spontaneously out of the heart. There must be the outward condi¬ tions that produce it, just as much as there must be soil, light, and warmth to cause a plant to grow and blossom into beauty. Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Heinzen. 5 When violets grow on icebergs and snow¬ drifts, you may perhaps find a Christian, but not before. No law of man or of God, if there is one, can compel love. There is nothing in life that yields such bliss or out of which so many other blessings spring. But to endeavor to force it into existence generally drives it away. But right is the pure perception of reason. It need not be suspended by any one for an instant or on a single doubt. Let the mind be once free from the distortions and falsities of theol¬ ogy, and it at once perceives the fundamen¬ tal law of the equality of human rights. Religion, from first to last, cultivates injus¬ tice and crime. Freethought and unbelief uphold right and justice, from first to last, for their own salves. Every organized wrong and injustice can be traced to the influence of the Church in authorizing and maintain¬ ing standards of authority outside of the individual man. Every advance made by the world in the right adjustment of our social relations has been through the tri¬ umph of the spirit of humanity over external standards. Karl Heinzen saw clearly that all titles and honors of kingship and aristoc¬ racy, saintship and priesthood, and all obedi¬ ence to any authority higher than the per¬ ception of human reason concerning what is right and just between man and man, is the surrender of our manhood. However much good desire there may be in the heart of the religious devotee, the giving up the right to think for himself, the loss of his own self-respect, the acknowledgment of an allegiance to a God, make him a criminal against humanity. He deepens the cloud of our ignorance, casts a stain upon our honor, and drags us deeper by all the weight of his character into the mire of degradation. Another most valuable lesson I learned from Karl Heinzen was that the new idea of evolution and organic development is by no means to be worshipped as a god. There is a great tendency in our times to say that there is a stream of tendency, a law of growth, going on, and bearing us onward steadily to perfection. Because so much has been accomplished in nature by evolu¬ tion, thousands are so dazzled by this prin¬ ciple that they fail to see that revolution, or resistance to the tendency of things, is the highest prerogative of man. The ideal state, or justice, is perceived by pure reason ; and, whatever may be the present condition of things, it is the duty of him who per¬ ceives this ideal to labor for its immediate realization. Though Heinzen applied this to the political world, I found it of great service in a serious solution, in the final settlement of my relation to religion. Lib¬ eralism has its isms, as you know, as well as Orthodoxy. One party believes in destruc¬ tion, another in construction. There is quite a tendency among many to be fright¬ ened at any sign of hostility toward the Church. If you open your mouth against it, they insist upon it that you must be sweet as sugar and gentle as a zephyr. They seem to think that a pioneer can work with kid gloves on his hands, and that the Church’s dungeons of despair and high, thick walls of sectarianism can be battered down by pelting them with roses. They talk a great deal about the orderly sequence of re¬ ligious ideas, and the work of a cultured Liberalism. Now, while I believe in cult¬ ure, and strive each day to gain some, yet I am sure that to many this word means moral cowardliness and sentimental aristoc¬ racy. They shrink from the rough work demanded of the pioneer ; and so, instead of going bravely to work, and by dint of hard blows making a clearing in the forests of su¬ perstition, they sow their seed beneath its deep and dark shade, and then wonder why it doesn’t grow. The excuse given for let¬ ting the Church alone is that it is not so objectionable as it used to be. But this is by no means so certain as many think. It is true that the lake of real fire and brimstone has been changed into a figure of rhetoric, illustrating the torments of conscience and moral despair. But, according to their own confession, spiritual joys and pains are more intense than physical; and so you see that this new charitable hell is a great deal worse 6 Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Heinzen. than the old one. They no longer torment the unbeliever with fire and sword. Still, they socially ostracize him, put him under a ban, whisper slander against him, warn young people to keep away from him as from a pest-house, rob him of his friends, and insult his memory after he is dead, all of which, to a sensitive soul, is worse than martyrdom. Karl Heinzen was never deceived by any of these shams. He scorned to be tolerated or to tolerate. Open warfare was to him a thousand times preferable to peace by com¬ promise. To him, the Church was the sum of all villany, and Christianity, in spite of its profession of universal love, a standing crime against humanity. He saw that, while it was allowed to exist, man must be less than man, service that ought to be given to suffer¬ ing flesh and blood wasted on phantoms, nature dishonored, science obstructed, art debauched, and foul injustice in the social order be maintained. For his clear vision here, I owe him a debt of gratitude I can never repay. When I think of him in com¬ parison with most liberal writers, who, in¬ stead of making truth clear, darken it with their scholarly refinements and mush of concessions to the Church, he seems to out¬ shine them as the sun to a farthing candle. I know that there is a great deal of crudity among those that are in the radical camp : still, the crudest, most vulgar radicalism, if there be in it nothing but denial, is far better than the timid, over-refined, sentimen¬ tal, compromising spirit of those who sit with folded hands, dreaming and taking their ease upon the sunny banks of the stream of tendency. The light of reason, when its flame burns clear and bright, dis¬ perses even the lingering fogs of supersti¬ tion. It has no more parley with the man who says, “ I feel that after all there is a kind of a something in the universe which I must call God and worship,” than with the most ignorant, who says he has experienced a change of heart and feels the presence of God in his soul. Each alike is seen to be an unhealthy and a disturbing influence in the moral life of humanity. ' f i Another lesson I learn from the life of this man is one of courage. When but a young man, he dared to speak words of truth and justice against oppression that endan¬ gered his life. Though for years he had to live abroad and flee from place to place, yet he continued to labor for the emancipation of his country from the yoke of despotism. Though in Europe and America much of his time was given to journalism, he never sought, as most do in that profession, to set his sails to catch the favoring breeze, but always steered right in the teeth of the wind and face of the storm, in order to rescue the distressed. He had , the courage of his convictions, and followed them to their farthest command, though it ever led him to the post of danger, into the very heart of the conflict. Possessing powers of leadership which, Wendell Phillips says, made the highest positions within his reach, yet he lived in comparative seclusion and sometimes want rather than betray a princi- pie on which his clear intellect saw depended 1 the rights and joys of humanity. He be- lieved in a perfect and just State, to be real- j ized by perfect democracy. He had faith in the heart of the people. He was willing to trust all to the will of the majority,— not of the rich, or of the white race, or of the male element, but of every man and woman. Now there are many who profess to believe in democracy, pure and simple, who are afraid to carry it out to its logical results. Some wish to limit it with a property quali¬ fication, others with an educational one; and many think that, if woman has the ballot, she will enact prohibitory laws, banish tobacco, put God in the Constitution, a bishop at the White House, a majority of preachers in Congress, the Bible and prayer in all the schools, and in every way turn the shadow on the dial of progress backward. But Karl Heinzen feared none of these things. He believed in right, and the power of right. Woman might put God in the Constitution, but let this perfect equality be enshrined above all, and under its illuminar tion he would soon come out again, and not Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Ileinzen. 7 only out of the Constitution, but also out of human life. Justice begets justice, and in¬ justice breeds injustice. Reason sees that pure and perfect democracy is the only just government, and therefore expects all things that are just will follow its realization. Let the will of the majority rule, and education and opportunity for all will be thrown wide open to all. It is thought by some that our government is already purely republican in principle, when it is really very far from it. Our Constitution is modelled after that of Great Britain. We have almost all of its defects, and lack many of its virtues. Our king is deposed every four years ; but he has greater power, and is under far more temptation to use it for selfish purposes. Our Senate is as truly an aristocracy as the House of Lords. Our people think that they are the sovereign power; but they abandon their sovereignty the moment they elect a representative, and do not take it again until his time expires. Under the debasing principle that to the “victor belong the spoils,” and the vast power placed in the hands of the President, our politics have degenerated into the foulest slums of partisanship. Our press is vile, false, and malicious all through a campaign. Every election rends the community into warring factions, paralyzes business, and fills the air with slanderous lies concerning the candidates. The party press stoops to every vile and dirty machination, in order to conquer. Corruption of the public conscience in the buying of votes and the selling of office is openly practised. Almost every paper claims every virtue for its own party, and every vice as the stock in trade of the oppo¬ sition. Nothing is too mean and malicious to be printed. To use an expression of Col. Ingersoll, “You would think that every editor had a private sewer of his own, into which had been emptied all the slops of hell.” The nightly meetings, hot-headed speeches, appeals to the lowest passions, parades, and party malice fill the air with more obscenity than ever Comstock caught, breeding the unhealthy children of hate and jealousy. Old and young, down to the very infants, are infected with the poisonous contagion. I was away from home during the last cam¬ paign, and when I returned I found even my little boys divided, and their minds filled with foul words, of which they knew not the meaning, but could not keep from learning, because the air was full of them. Occasion¬ ally, some one says this ought to be reformed. Something must be done, or we shall be ruined. Here and there, a pulpit feebly says the church members should reform politics, and then never says a word how, for fear of losing a pew-holder. After election, a few editors, with a slight flavor of conscience left, apologize in a witty way for the slander and stupid insanity that has reigned riot in their columns for months; and that is the last that is said or done until the old story is com¬ menced again. Not so Karl Heinzen. He never shirked a duty because it failed to be popular. He always took the bull by the horns, though it threatened to kill him. To him, all this evil was the result of a compro¬ mise in our Constitution between monarchy and republicanism, aristocracy with democ¬ racy, just as the war of the Rebellion, with its enormous cost of life and treasure, was the result of a compromise between slavery and freedom. And, if we do not ere long remedy this, the days of the republic are numbered. No candid person can read his clear and forcible arguments without being impressed that they are almost, if not altogether, true. Here it is he resists the idea that things must be left to take their course, according to the principle of evolution. Reason can discern the perfect State, and should set about at once establishing and working for its construction by a revision of the Consti¬ tution. He would have the President and Senate annihilated, the legislative body to be in permanent session, and the executive power consist of a council elected from their number, and changed every year. All im¬ portant laws should be settled by the final vote of the people, and no law be legal that could be found in any way opposed to the fundamental principles of human rights. 8 Lessons from, the IAfe and Work of Karl Heinzen . Each member of the Legislature to be liable to be recalled at any time by vote of the people, if he should fail to do their will. This would annihilate parties and party enmity; and elections would be divided only by a choice between individuals. The law-maker being only a servant, selfish and corrupt men would find no attractions i n the service; and so the men of self-sacrifice, pure patriot¬ ism, and enthusiastic devotion to humanity would be chosen, and often unanimously, by their respective communities. These ideas, my friends, are not to be despised. Karl Heinzen spoke more understandingly on this subject than all our frothy party newspapers and ignorant, canting pulpiteers put together. His whole life was a battle for liberty and the rights of humanity. Ilis activities cov¬ ered half a century, and were divided be¬ tween two continents. On the soil of Germany, in Switzerland, in Paris, and at the centre of American in¬ tellectual life, he gave the constant service of his Titanic intellect to the understanding of this subject; and no man, living or dead, deserves to be more reverently studied by the champions of truth, justice, and liberty. What grander, nobler idea can interest any one than that of a perfect State, a social order in which the rights of all shall be assured! We, as Liberals, have no church or private circle, dividing us from the rest of mankind, and want none. We have no God to glorify, nor never-dyipg soul to save and fit it for the sky. But we have Truth, Right, Liberty, and Justice to contend for. We have countless wrongs to redress. Though the church goes, home remains, with all its infinite loves and joys. And then, above all, because including all, we have the ideal State, the commonweal, to make a reality. The trembling monarchs of Europe endeavor to frighten back the encroachments of radicalism there by point¬ ing to the corruption, and what they are pleased to call the failure, of republican in¬ stitutions in America. Not so. They have never been fully tried. We have but the groundwork on which a just State may be built. While in Europe the red sword of war must be unloosed before the flag of lib¬ erty can make beautiful the common air, here we can reform through the agency of free speech, a free press, and the ballot-box. Many, in reading the writings of Heinzen, would call him a socialist, and perhaps a communist. In one sense he was, but in another he was not. He was too jealous of the inestimable prize of personal liberty to. associate himself with those who would bring things to a level by force. No man believed more forcibly in the equality of human rights. He also saw before him an ideal of society infinitely superior to the present order. But his mind was too large and his heart too generous to allow him to confine his sympa¬ thies to one class, even though that class were oppressed. Liberty, perfect liberty, is too rich a boon to be sacrificed to any tem¬ porary suffering. Hence he saw that all ap¬ proaches to a more equitable adjustment of the relation of labor and capital, rich and y poor, weak and strong, would have to be brought about by the elevation of all classes ^ morally. He believed that, if the State could > be perfect in its justice, beneath such a sun¬ lit and healthful climate, the social amenities of life would bud and biossom into beauty. Another lesson to be learned from Heinzen’s life is the moral power of devotion to a principle. The Church says that, without faith in God and immortality, life is destitute of all noble incentive. And yet this man’s life, though rejecting every part and particle of supernaturalism, was one moral act,— a complete devotion to the well-being of hu¬ manity. I acknowledge that there are many that have cast off the yoke of religion who are no better than they should be. Still, I might ask, Who are the swindlers and defaulters ? Sunday-school superintendents and members of the Young Men’s Chris¬ tian Association. Who are the adulterers? Often clergymen. Who fill our jails and adorn our gallows? Pious men,—men who have a chaplain to attend them on State pay, and die trusting in the blood of Jesus, ex- Lessons from the JAfe and Work of Karl Heinzen. 9 pecting to be psalm-singing saints, while their victims, cut off without time to send for the chaplain, are weeping and gnashing their teeth in eternal torment. Unbelief, they claim, produces immorality. We are ready for the test. We invite an examina¬ tion. We know that the facts will prove this to be an infamous slander, and one more immorality to be laid at the door of the Church. Morality is the practice of good¬ ness. Good is whatever contributes to the happiness of mankind. Evil is whatever produces misery. To make the world hap¬ pier is our religion. The fact is, there is no real, true morality that is not founded on intelligent unbelief. The morality of belief is simply that of hire and barter. It savors of the shop. It says, I do this for you, God, and you give me a crown and a harp. The morality of freethought is right for right’s sake; nor does it demand, as the believer does, a wave of feeling or an impulse of love. It is devotion to a prin¬ ciple on which reason sees the happiness of mankind depends. There never was a greater falsehood seeking to hide the shining stars of truth than this outcry of the Church against the immorality of unbelief. There is more morality in such a life as that of Karl Heinzen’s than,in the whole Church. To make men moral, to cleanse them of the foul hypocrisy of saintship, to take them out of the vile, haggling, cheating, huck¬ stering stalls of the Church, in which men and women waste their lives trying to drive a good bargain with God, is our mission. What an infinite lie and absurdity the whole mockery of the Church is in the presence of one real, just man ! No wonder that the instinct of self-preservation drives them to traduce and.endeavor to cast mud upon him. But this cannot last. In every community there are rising up men and women who hate and detest the Church as a loathsome sepulchre, full of death and corruption, who yet live so ungtained in word and deed that their light shines clear and bright above all dim, murky, flickering lamps of grace divine. But I am nearing the end of my task, or rather coming to the end, without having achieved the task I set myself to perform. The ideal or vision of this man’s heart and mind that I wished to bring for your inspi¬ ration soars far above my reach. The glow at my heart seems to freeze when it falls from my lips in words. I feel like one who has gone out in the morning and gathered a bouquet of flowers all sparkling with dew, but before reaching those to whom he would give them finds that they have lost all their pearly beauty. So you must even take the will for the deed, and trust that there is more in what I have said than there seems. The life of such a man is in itself a proph¬ ecy that can only be told in words that seem like riddles. Because such men live, hope.flames brighter above us, love glows warmer in our breasts, the dark, dank shadows of superstition are lifted from our lives : we cease to be a discord to ourselves; wisdom and love blend together in sweetest harmony. To live and be a man is greater than to be crowned king, or think ourselves sons of God. We gladly cast from us the livery of divine servitude, and clothe our¬ selves in the beautiful garments of hu¬ manity. Reason’s brightening lamp leads us to higher and nobler paths. No longer quenching wonder in a name or darkening truth with senseless omnipotence, Nature feeds us silently our fill. O my friends, learn w r hat you can of this man’s life, and of all men. To live beneath the sun by day and the moon and stars by night; to tread this green earth so thickly strewn with wonders; to stand related to our fel¬ low-men in all the unspeakable joys and sorrows of life,— how dull and stupid must be the mind that needs a voice from the skies to instruct him to walk worthy of so high a calling, to so live and labor that when his place is filled by others they shall find it easier to find their way through the forest, or shall pluck the fruit of joy from some tree he has planted in the garden of sorrow! Karl Heinzen sleeps the dreamless sleep 10 Lessons from the Life and Work of Karl Heinzen. of eternal rest. He lies to-day beneath the forest trees he loved. Shall I say he ? Nay. He is not there. He, like one of old, has risen, not in the flesh, nor that I know of into spiritual'consciousness. I do not say he has not, because I know not all the secrets of life, much more of death. But he is not hidden within the tomb. Friends may plant flowers there and water them with tears, a marble monument may mark the place of his rest; but when the flowers are all dead, when the trees have fallen be¬ neath the axe or the hand of time, when the marble has crumbled back into dust and the very place is blotted from the memory of man, Karl Heinzen will live on with an ever-widening influence in the thoughts and loves of men. It matters but little whether his name live or die: the work for truth and humanity he wrought shall en¬ dure while men exist. Things are not what they seem. The great men of this age are not those who are feasted, toasted, and run after by the crowd, but the patient pioneers who with giant blows are making a clearing in the forests of superstition, causing the wilderness to blossom as a rose, and for the sickening, deadly malaria of piety that saps the manhood of our age bringing the health of self-reliance and the joy of self- respect. They are the men and women who through the long night-watches of the world’s ignorance keep brightly flaming the torch of thought, and so are constantly widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. When man comes to his own; when each child born into the world finds all the avenues of truth open to his exploring mind; when art gladdens every eye with its cheering ray; when right and justice between man and man are the only gods; when the State in its devotion to the happiness of all is but the outward expression of the best instincts of humanity; when the heaven men strive to win is on the earth and the highest honor known is to be a man,— then, but not be¬ fore, will be learned the full life and lesson of Karl Heinzen. All books sent to my address will be announced on this page. Any farther notice will be voluntary. JUST OUT! “What Must We Do to be Saved?” 12mo, paper, 25 cents. By ROBT. G. INGERSOLL. INCERSOLL’S LECTURES. Vol. I.— “The Gods, and other Lectures.” Contents: “The Gods,” “Humboldt,” “Thomas Paine,” “Individuality,” “Heretics and Heresies.” i2mo, cloth, $1.25; paper, 50‘cents. Vol. II.— “ The Ghosts, and other Lectures.” Contents: “The Ghosts,” “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” “The Declaration of Independence,” “About Farming in Illinois,” “ Cincinnati Speech,” “The Past Rises before Me like a Dream.” i2mo, cloth, $1.25 ; paper, 50 cents. Vol. III.— “ Some Mistakes of Moses.” i2mo, 278 pp., cloth, $1.25. This book contains the principal points that Mr. Ingersoll has made against the Pentateuch in all his lectures on that subject. The pamphlets that have been surreptitiously issued are incorrect, filled with mistakes.and consist of only about fourteen or fifteed pages, while there are two hundred and seventy-five pages in the book lust issued. The book is unanswerable in its facts and logic, inimitable in its style, and filled with wit, satire, eloquence, and pathos. “ The Gods and Ghosts,” in one volume. Paper edition, $1.00. “ “ “ Turkey Morocco, gilt edges, $5.00,— very fine. ( A Vindication of Thomas Paine, by Robert G. Ingersoll. I Thomas Paine: a Criticism, - by Moncure D. Conway. 2mo ’ P a P er > 2 5 cen s * BUSTS OF R. G. INGERSOLL. By Clark Mills. Cabinet size, price, $2.50. Every admirer of this great Apostle of Liberty should have one. PHOTOGRAPHS OF MR. INGERSOLL. Imperial or large size, 40 cts.; Photo or card size, 20 cts.; Life size Lithograph, 21x27, 50Cts. Life-Size Lithograph of Thomas Paine, very fine. Price $1.00. COL. INGERSOLL'S NOTE TO THE PUBLIC . . Washington, D.C., July 19, 1880. I wish to notify the public that all books and pamphlets purporting to contain my lectures, and not containing the imprint of C. P. Farrell as publisher, are spurious, grossly inaccurate, filled with mistakes, horribly printed, and outrageously unjust to me. The publishers of all such are simply literary thieves and pirates, and are obtaining money from the public under false pretences. These wretches have published one lecture under four titles, and several others under two and three. I take this course to warn the-public that these publications are fraudulent, the only correct editions being those published by Mr. C. P. Farrell. Robert G. Ingersoll. Order any Liberal or Scientific Books you may desire, and your orders will be promptly filled at the lowest prices. Send stamp for Catalogue. Address all letters to C. P. FARRELL, Publisher and Bookseller, 421 New York Ave., Washington, T>.C. THE INFIDEL PULPIT. No. 1. Lessons from the Life and Work of No. 3. Moral Objections to the God Idea. Karl Heinzen. No . 4. Nature and Decline of Unitarianism. No. 2. Minot Savage’s Talks about God. No. 5. A Study of Ingersoll. No. 6. Assassination of the Czar. Each Number of “ The Pulpit” being stereotyped, all orders for any of the Lectures will be promptly filled. Back numbers, 2 cts. a copy; $1.50 per hundred. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS - URBANA N30112083777414A Liberal Papers. 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JAN. 21. 1908 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 2 083777414