back to savage and
barbaric night. I would rather that every planet would in its orbit
wheel a barren star rather than that the Christian religion should be
true.

I think it is better to love your children than to love God, a thousand
times better, because you can help them, and I am inclined to think
that God can get along without you. I believe in the religion of the
family. I believe that the roof-tree is sacred from the smallest fibre
held in the soft, moist clasp of the earth to the little blossom on the
topmost bough that gives its fragrance to the happy air. The family
where virtue dwells with love is like a lily with a heart of fire--the
fairest flower in all this world. And I tell you God cannot afford to
damn a man in the next world who has made a happy family in this. God
cannot afford to cast over the battlements of heaven the man who has
built a happy home here. God cannot afford to be unpitying to a human
heart capable of pity. God cannot clothe with fire the man who has
clothed the naked here; and God cannot send to eternal pain a man who
has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man.
If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep the company
of such a God.

They tell me the next terrible thing I do is to take away the hope of
immortality. I do not, I would not, I could not. Immortality was first
dreamed of by human love, and yet the church is going to take human
love out of immortality. We love it; therefore we wish to love. A
loved ones dies, and we wish to meet again, and from the affection of
the human heart grew the great oak of the hope of immortality. And
around that oak has climbed the poisonous vine, superstition.
Theologians, pretenders, soothsayers, parsons, priests, popes, bishops,
have taken all that hope, and they have had the impudence to stand by
the grave and prophesy a future of pain. They have erected their
toll-gates on the highway to the other world, and have collected money
from the poor people on the way, and they have collected it from their
fear. The church did not give us the idea of immortality; the bible
did not give us the idea of immortality. Let me tell you now that the
old testament tells you how you lost immortality; it does not say
another word about another world from the first mistake in Genesis to
the last curse in Malachi. There is not in the old testament one burial
service.

No man in the old testament stands by the