ing
a courtesan with a troop of her associates." He lifted her veil, and said,
"Mortals! recognize no other divinity than Reason, of which I present to
you the loveliest and purest personification." The president bowed and
rendered devout adoration. The same scene was reenacted in the cathedral
of Notre Dame, with increased outrages upon God and common-sense. Wrong
was reputed right, and the distinction between vice and virtue was
banished.

From this time, and onward, the test of attachment to the government was
contempt for religion and decency. Those suspected of disloyalty were
gathered; one thousand and five hundred women and children were shut up in
one prison, without fire, bed, cover, or provisions, for two days. Men
escaped by giving up their fortunes, and women escaped by parting with
their virtue.

Seventeen thousand perished in Paris during this reign of infidel terror.
This ungodly abrogation of religion in France cost the nation three
million of lives--_think of it!_ France's most dark and damning record was
the fruit of the tenets of the men that Col. Ingersoll lauds to the
heavens. They were the fruits of the labors of the men with whom Tom Paine
sat, and believed, and voted. "His faith was their faith."

"It was the Quaker Paine who worked for our independence, and not the
infidel Paine. He did nothing in the interests of our national liberty
after he avowed his irreligious principles." Neither was he the first to
raise the voice in favor of national liberty. Ten years before he wrote
his work entitled "Common Sense," at the suggestion of Franklin and Dr.
Benjamin Rush, which was in 1776, Patrick Henry's voice was heard amid the
assembled colonists in Virginia. He said: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles
I. his Cromwell, and George III.--" Just then some one cried out,
"Treason!" After a pause, Henry added,--"may profit by their example."
Years before Tom Paine came to America, even in 1748, it went to record
that American legislatures were tending to independence. "They were
charged with presumption in declaring their own rights and privileges."
Our independence was predicted near at hand from 1758 and onwards. In
1774, before Paine came from England, the word freedom was ringing out
upon the air. "James Otis was hailing the dawn of a new empire" in 1765.
In this year there were utterances of such sentiments as tended to evolve
the declaration of 1776, and these were heard all over the land from
Boston