has existed for millions of years longer than the churches admit we have existed.  The idolatry practiced by the Catholic church repulses me, and yet its stability has strongly appealed to me.  You will remember what Macaulay, in reviewing Ranke’s History of the Popes, said of this church.  After reviewing its history, its defeats and its triumphs, he added:  ’And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul.’  And yet, neither the age of the church nor its stability is conclusive to my mind of its divine origin.  I am rather convinced from these facts that it has been governed by a skillful set of men, who were able politicians and financiers, as well as religious enthusiasts.  Certainly no protestant church can lay claim to divine origin.  We know too well that the Episcopal church was founded by an English King, because the Pope of Rome refused him a divorce.  Luther quarreled with his church and broke away from its restraints.  Wesley founded the Methodist church, Calvin the Presbyterian church.  The more I study the religious history of the world, the more I am convinced that religion is founded on fear.  The immortal bard, from whom nothing seems to have been hidden, lays down the foundation of all religion in those words from ‘Hamlet,’ where he makes the melancholy Dane exclaim: 

“To die:—­to sleep,—­To sleep! perchance to dream:—­ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have, shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.”

“Do you realize that Ingersoll, by his teachings and his denunciations of what he termed the ‘absurdities of orthodox religious beliefs,’ has done more toward shaking faith in many church doctrines than any man of this age’?  And, after all, is not his doctrine a sane one?  He says, in effect:  ’I can not believe these things.  My reason revolts at them.  They are repugnant to my intellect.  I can not believe that a just God will punish one of His creatures for an honest opinion.’  He denies that there is such a God as the churches hold out to us.  He denies that the world was created in six days; that man was created in the manner described in the Bible, and that woman was created from man’s rib.  He denies that miracles were ever performed, or that there was any evidence, reliable or authoritative, that they were ever performed.  And yet he does not deny the existence of a future life.  His doctrine on this point is, ’I know only the history of the past and the happenings of the present.  I do not know, nor does any man know, anything of the future.  Let us hope there is a life beyond the grave.’

“The old poet, Omar, argues against a future life.  You will recall these lines: 

“’Strange, is it not, that of the multitudes who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel, too.’”