rom his soul; and
he delayed not a day to repair the walls of his own prison; and from
the garden of the human heart they plucked and trampled into the bloody
dust the flowers and blossoms; they denounced man as totally depraved;
they made reason blasphemy; they made pity a crime; nothing so
delighted them as painting the torments and tortures of the damned.
Over the worm that never dies they grew poetic. According to them, the
cries ascending from hell were the perfume of heaven.

They divided the world into saints and sinners, and all the saints were
going to heaven, and all the sinners yonder. Now, then, you stand in
the presence of a great disaster. A house is on fire, and there is
seen at a window the frightened face of a woman with a babe in her
arms, appealing for help; humanity cries out: "Will someone go to the
rescue?" They do not ask for a Methodist, a Baptist, or a Catholic;
they ask for a man; all at once there starts from the crowd one that
nobody ever suspected of being a saint; one may be, with a bad
reputation; but he goes up the ladder and is lost in the smoke and
flame; and a moment after he emerges, and the great circles of flame
hiss around him; in a moment more he has reached the window; in another
moment, with the woman and child in his arms, he reaches the ground and
gives his fainting burden to the bystanders and the people all stand
hushed for a moment, as they always do at such times, and then the air
is rent with acclamations. Tell me that that man is going to be sent
to hell, to eternal flames, who is willing to risk his life rather than
a woman and child should suffer from the fire one moment! I despise
that doctrine of hell! Any man that believes in eternal hell is
afflicted with at least two diseases--petrifaction of the heart and
petrifaction of the brain.

I have seen upon the field of battle a boy sixteen years of age struck
by a fragment of a shell; I have seen him fall; I have seen him die
with a curse upon his lips and the face of his mother in his heart.
Tell me that his soul will be hurled from the field of battle where he
lost his life that his country might live--where he lost his life for
the liberties of man--tell me that he will be hurled from that field to
eternal torment! I pronounce it an infamous lie. And yet, according
to these gentlemen, that is to be the fate of nearly all the splendid
fellows in this world.

I had in my possession a little while ago a piec