times,"--and the best that I can say of
the "good old times" is that they are gone, and the best I can say of
the good old people that lived in them is that they are gone,
too--believed that you made a man think your way by force. Well, you
can't do it. There is a splendid something in man that says: "I won't;
I won't be driven." But our fathers thought men could be driven. They
tried it in the "good old times." I used to read about the manner in
which the early Christians made converts--how they impressed upon the
world the idea that God loved them. I have read it, but it didn't burn
into my soul. I didn't think much about it--I heard so much about
being fried forever in Hell that it didn't seem so bad to burn a few
minutes. I love liberty and I hate all persecutions in the name of
God. I never appreciated the infamies that have been committed in the
name of religion until I saw the iron arguments that Christians used.
I saw, for instance, the thumb-screw, two little innocent looking
pieces of iron, armed with some little protuberances on the inner side
to keep it from slipping down, and through each end a screw, and when
some man had made some trifling remark, for instance, that he never
believed that God made a fish swallow a man to keep him from drowning,
or something like that, or, for instance, that he didn't believe in
baptism. You know that is very wrong. You can see for yourself the
justice of damning a man if his parents happened to baptize him in the
wrong way--God cannot afford to break a rule or two to save all the men
in the world. I happened to be in the company of some Baptist
ministers once--you may wonder how I happened to be in such company as
that--and one of them asked me what I thought about baptism. Well, I
told them I hadn't thought much about it--that I had never sat up
nights on that question. I said: "Baptism--with soap--is a good
institution." Now, when some man had said some trifling thing like
that, they put this thumb-screw on him, and in the name of universal
benevolence and for the love of God--man has never persecuted man for
the love of man; man has never persecuted another for the love of
charity--it is always for the love of something he calls God, and every
man's idea of God is his own idea. If there is an infinite God, and
there may be--I don't know--there may be a million for all I know--I
hope there is more than one--one seems so lonesome. They kept turning
this down