e must be to make amends for
the horrors and misery which religions, especially the Christian and
Mohammedan religions, have occasioned and spread over the earth! Think
of the fanaticism, of the endless persecutions, the religious wars, that
sanguinary frenzy of which the ancients had no idea; then, think of the
Crusades, a massacre lasting two hundred years, and perfectly
unwarrantable, with its war-cry, _It is God's will_, so that it might
get into its possession the grave of one who had preached love and
endurance; think of the cruel expulsion and extermination of the Moors
and Jews from Spain; think of the massacres, of the inquisitions and
other heretical tribunals, the bloody and terrible conquests of the
Mohammedans in three different parts of the world, and the conquest of
the Christians in America, whose inhabitants were for the most part, and
in Cuba entirely, exterminated; according to Las Casas, within forty
years twelve million persons were murdered--of course, all _in majorem
Dei gloriam_, and for the spreading of the Gospel, and because,
moreover, what was not Christian was not looked upon as human. It is
true I have already touched upon these matters; but when in our day "the
Latest News from the Kingdom of God" is printed, we shall not be tired
of bringing older news to mind. And in particular, let us not forget
India, that sacred soil, that cradle of the human race, at any rate of
the race to which we belong, where first Mohammedans, and later
Christians, were most cruelly infuriated against the followers of the
original belief of mankind; and the eternally lamentable, wanton, and
cruel destruction and disfigurement of the most ancient temples and
images, still show traces of the monotheistic rage of the Mohammedans,
as it was carried on from Marmud the Ghaznevid of accursed memory, down
to Aureng Zeb, the fratricide, whom later the Portuguese Christians
faithfully tried to imitate by destroying the temples and the _auto da
fe_ of the inquisition at Goa. Let us also not forget the chosen people
of God, who, after they had, by Jehovah's express and special command,
stolen from their old and faithful friends in Egypt the gold and silver
vessels which had been lent to them, made a murderous and predatory
excursion into the Promised Land, with Moses at their head, in order to
tear it from the rightful owners, also at Jehovah's express and repeated
commands, knowing no compassion, and relentlessly murdering a