He revolted at the idea of transubstantiation; he revolted at the idea
that the eternal God could be in a wafer. He revolted at the idea that
you could make the Trinity out of dough--bake God in an oven as you
would a biscuit. I should think he would have revolted. The idea of a
man devouring the creator of the universe by swallowing a piece of
bread. And yet that is just as sensible as any of it. Those who, when
smitten on one cheek turn the other, threatened to kill this man. He
fled from his native land and was a vagabond in nearly every nation of
Europe. He declared that he fought not what men really believed, but
what they pretended to believe. And, do you know, that is the business
I am in? I am simply saying what other people think; I am furnishing
clothes for their children, I am putting on exhibition their offspring,
and they like to hear it, they like to see it. We have passed midnight
in the history of the world. Bruno was driven from his native country
because he taught the rotation of the earth; you can see what a
dangerous man he must have been in a well regulated monarchy. You see
he had found a fact, and a fact has the same effect upon religion that
dynamite has upon a Russian czar. A fellow with a new fact was
suspected and arrested, and they always thought they could destroy it
by burning him, but they never did. All the fires of martyrdom never
destroyed one truth; all the churches of the world have never made one
lie true. Germany and France would not tolerate Bruno. According to
the Christian system, this world was the center of everything. The
stars were made out of what little God happened to have left when He
got the world done. God lived up in the sky, and they said this earth
must rest upon something, and finally science passed its hand clear
under, and there was nothing. It was self-existent in infinite space.
Then the church began to say they didn't say it was flat--not so awful
flat--it was kind of rounding. According to the ancient Christians God
lived from all eternity, and never worked but six days in His whole
life, and then had the impudence to tell us to be industrious. I heard
of a man going to California over the plains, and, there was a
clergyman on board, and he had a great deal to say, and finally he fell
in conversation with the '49-er, and the latter said to the clergyman:
"Do you believe that God made this world in six days?" "Yes, I do."
They were then going al