The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 4 (of 12)

aith, the wickedness of pleasure, the degrading consequences of love, and the impossibility of getting to heaven by being honest and generous, a

of original sin. Here was a man who plucked joy from the mire, made goddesses of peasant girls, and enthroned the honest man. One whose sympathy, with loving arms, embraced all forms of suffering life, who hated slavery of every kind, who was as natural as heave

tears and smiles, feeling that a gre

l poets were forgotten or remained only as the fragments, t

nd was brave and sensible enough to say: "All religions are auld wives' fables,

vinism and through its bloodless heart thrust the spear of common sense-a poem

the "Judgment Seat" drunk, and be able to say that I was the author of "A man's a man for '

god-read his beautiful, sublime and bitter lines-read his Prisoner of Chillon-his best-a p

and scorn, in which a brave soul tears down the prison walls and floods the cells with l

s changed to fairy land-the Grecian Urn, that fills the soul with ever eager love, with all the rapture of imagined song-the Nightin

and fears, the loves and hatreds, the vices and the virtues of the human race; whose imagination read the tear-blurred records, the blood-stained pages of all the past,

d the art of speech. I compared Shakespeare's women-his perfect women-with the women of the Bible. I found that Jehovah was not a sculptor, not a painter-not an artist-that he lack

ess dross and common stones compared with Sh