wondrous lines, her touching poems,
will be read hundreds of years after every sermon in which a priest has
sought to stain her name shall have vanished utterly from human speech.
How appropriate here, with some slight change, the words of Laertes at
Ophelia's grave:

Lay her in the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May
violets spring; I tell thee, priest and minister, A ministering angel
shall this woman be When thou liest howling.

I have no words with which to express my loathing hatred and
condemnation of the man who will stain a noble woman's grave.

The next argument in favor of the "sacred scriptures" is the argument
of numbers; and this minister congratulates himself that the infidels
could not carry a precinct, or a county, or a state in the United
States. Well, I tell you, they can come proportionately near it--just
in proportion that that part of the country is educated. The whole
world doesn't move together in one life. There has to be some man to
take a step forward and the people follow; and when they get where that
man was, some other Titan has taken another step, and you can see him
there on the great mountain of progress. That is why the world moves.
There must be pioneers, and if nobody is right except he who is with
the majority, then we must turn and walk toward the setting sun. He
says "We will settle this by suffrage." The Christian religion was
submitted to a popular vote in Jerusalem, and what was the result?
"Crucify Him "--an infamous result, showing that you can't depend on
the vote of barbarians. But I am told that there are 300,000,000
Christians in the world. Well, what of it? There are more Buddhists.
And they say, what a number of bibles are printed!--more bibles than
any other book. Does this prove anything? True, because more of them.
Suppose you should find published in the New York Herald something
about you, and you should go to the editor and tell him: "That is a
lie;" and he should say: "That can't be; the Herald has the largest
circulation of any paper in the world." Three hundred millions of
Christians, and here are the nations that prove the truth of
Christianity: Russia 80,000,000 Christians. I am willing to admit it;
a country without freedom of speech, without freedom of press--a
country in which every mouth is a Bastille and every tongue a prisoner
for life--a country in which assassins are the best men in it. They
call that Christian. Girls sixt