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     AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.                      1
     SECULARISM.                                            6
     "SOWING AND REAPING."                                  7

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          This file, its printout, or copies of either
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          Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201

                The Works of ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

                          ****    ****

     An address delivered to the colored people at Galesburg,
Illinois, 1867.

                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

     Fellow-Citizens: Slavery has in a thousand forms existed in
all ages, and among all people. It is as old as theft and robbery.

     Every nation has enslaved its own people, and sold its own
flesh and blood. Most of the white race are in slavery to-day. It
has often been said that any man who ought to be free, will be. The
men who say this should remember that their own ancestors were once
cringing, frightened, helpless slaves.

     When they became sufficiently educated to cease enslaving
their own people, they then enslaved the first race they could
conquer. If they differed in religion, they enslaved them. If they
differed in color, that was sufficient. If they differed even in
language, it was enough. If they were captured, they then pretended
that having spared their lives, they had the right to enslave them.
This argument was worthless. If they were captured, then there was
no necessity for killing them. If there was no necessity for
killing them, then they had no right to kill them. If they had no
right to kill them, then they had no right to enslave them under
the pretence that they had saved their lives.

     Every excuse that the ingenuity of avarice could devise was
believed to be a complete justification, and the great argument of
slave-holders in all countries has been that slavery is a divine
institution, and thus stealing human beings has always been
fortified with a "Thus saith the Lord."

     Slavery has been upheld by law and religion in every country.
The word Liberty is not in any creed in the world. Slavery is right
according to the law of man, shouted the judge. It is right
according to the law of God, shouted the priest. Thus sustained by
what they were pleased to call the law of God and man, slave-
holders never voluntarily freed the slaves, with the exception of
the Quakers. The institution has in all ages been clung to with the
tenacity of death; clung to until it sapped and destroyed the
foundations of society; clung to until all law became violence; 

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                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

clung to until virtue was a thing only of history; clung to until
industry folded its arms -- until commerce reefed every sail --
until the fields were desolate and the cities silent, except where
the poor free asked for bread, and the slave for mercy; clung to
until the slave forging the sword of civil war from his fetters
drenched the land in the master's blood. Civil war has been the
great liberator of the world.

     Slavery has destroyed every nation that has gone down to
death. It caused the last vestige of Grecian civilization to
disappear forever, and it caused Rome to fall with a crash that
shook the world. After the disappearance of slavery in its grossest
forms in Europe, Gonzales pointed out to his countrymen, the
Portuguese, the immense profits that they could make by stealing
Africans, and thus commenced the modern slave trade -- that
aggregation of all horror -- that infinite of all cruelty,
prosecuted only by demons, and defended only by fiends. And yet the
slave trade has been defended and sustained by every civilized
nation, and by each and all has been baptized "Legitimate
commerce," in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

     It was even justified upon the ground that it tended to
Christianize the negro.

     It was of the poor hypocrites who had used this argument that
Whittier said,

     "They bade the slave-ship speed from coast to coast,
     Fanned by the wings of the Holy Ghost."

     Backed and supported by such Christian and humane arguments
slavery was planted upon our soil in 1620, and from that day to
this it has been the cause of all our woes, of all the bloodshed --
of all the heart-burnings -- hatred and horrors of more than two
hundred years, and yet we hated to part with the beloved
institution. Like Pharaoh we would not let the people go. He was
afflicted with vermin, with frogs -- with water turned to blood --
with several kinds of lice, and yet would not let the people go. We
were afflicted with worse than all these combined -- the Northern
Democracy -- before we became grand enough to say, "Slavery shall
be eradicated from the soil of the Republic." When we reached this
sublime moral height we were successful. The Rebellion was crushed
and liberty established.

     A majority of the civilized world is for freedom -- nearly all
the Christian denominations are for liberty. The world has changed
-- the people are nobler, better and purer than ever.

     Every great movement must be led by heroic and self-
sacrificing pioneers. In England, in Christian England, the soul of
the abolition cause was Thomas Clarkson. To the great cause of
human freedom he devoted his; life. He won over the eloquent and
glorious Wilberforce, the great Pitt, the magnificent orator,
Burke, and that far-seeing and humane statesman, Charles James Fox.

     In 1788 a resolution was introduced in the House of Commons
declaring that the slave trade ought to be abolished. It was 


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                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

defeated. Learned lords opposed it. They said that too much capital
was invested by British merchants in the slave trade. That if it
was abolished the ships would rot at the wharves, and that English
commerce would be swept from the seas. Sanctified Bishops -- lords
spiritual -- thought the scheme fanatical, and various resolutions
to the same effect were defeated.

     The struggle lasted twenty years, and yet during all those
years in which England refused to abolish the hellish trade, that
nation had the impudence to send missionaries all over the world to
make converts to a religion that in their opinion, at least,
allowed man to steal his brother man -- that allowed one Christian
to rob another of his wife, his child, and of that greatest of all
blessings -- his liberty. It was not until the year 1808 that
England was grand and just enough to abolish the slave trade, and
not until 1833 that slavery was abolished in all her colonies.

     The name of Thomas Clarkson should be remembered and honored
through all coming time by every black man, and by every white man
who loves liberty and hates cruelty and injustice.

     Clarkson, Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, Burke, were the Titans that
swept the accursed slaver from that high-way -- the sea.

     In St. Domingo the pioneers were Oge and Chevannes; they
headed a revolt; they were unsuccessful, but they roused the slaves
to resistance. They were captured, tried, condemned and executed.
They were made to ask forgiveness of God, and of the King, for
having attempted to give freedom to their own flesh and blood. They
were broken alive on the wheel, and left to die of hunger and pain,
The blood of these martyrs became the seed of liberty; and
afterwards in the midnight assault, in the massacre and pillage,
the infuriated slaves shouted their names as their battle cry,
until Toussaint, the greatest of the blacks, gave freedom to them
all.

     In the United States, among the Revolutionary fathers, such
men as John Adams, and his son John Quincy -- such men as Franklin
and John Jay were opposed to the institution of slavery. Thomas
Jefferson said, speaking of the slaves, "When the measure of their
tears shall be full -- when their groans shall have involved heaven
itself in darkness -- doubtless a God of justice will awaken to
their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their
oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder manifest his
attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left
to the guidance of a blind fatality."

     Thomas Paine said, "No man can be happy surrounded by those
whose happiness he has destroyed." And a more self-evident
proposition was never uttered.

     These and many more Revolutionary heroes were opposed to
slavery and did what they could to prevent the establishment and
spread of this most wicked and terrible of all institutions.

     You owe gratitude to those who were for liberty as a principle
and not from mere necessity. You should remember with more than 


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

gratitude that firm, consistent and faithful friend of your
downtrodden race, Wm. Lloyd Garrison. He has devoted his life to
your cause. Many years ago in Boston he commenced the publication
of a paper devoted to liberty. Poor and despised -- friendless and
almost alone, he persevered in that grandest and holiest of all
possible undertakings. He never stopped, nor stayed, nor paused
until the chain was broken and the last slave could lift his
toil-worn face to heaven with the light of freedom shining down
upon him, and Say, I AM A FREE MAN.

     You should not forget that noble philanthropist, Wendell
Phillips, and your most teamed and eloquent defender, Charles
Sumner.

     But the real pioneer in America was old John Brown. Moved not
by prejudice, not by love of his blood, or his color, but by an
infinite love of Liberty, of Right, of justice, almost single-
handed, he attacked the monster, with thirty million people against
him. His head was wrong. He miscalculated his forces; but his heart
was right. He struck the sublimest blow of the age for freedom. It
was said of him that he stepped from the gallows to the throne of
God. It was said that he had made the scaffold to Liberty what
Christ had made the cross to Christianity. The sublime Victor Hugo
declared that John Brown was greater than Washington, and that his
name would live forever.

     I say, that no man can be greater than the man who bravely and
heroically sacrifices his life for the good of others. No man can
be greater than the one who meets death face to face, and yet will
not shrink from what he believes to be his highest duty. If the
black people want a patron saint, let them take the brave old John
Brown. And as the gentleman who preceded me said, at all your
meetings, never separate until you have sung the grand song,

          "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
          "But his soul goes marching on."

     You do not, in my opinion, owe a great debt of gratitude to
many of the white people.

     Only a few years ago both parties agreed to carry out the
Fugitive Slave Law. If a woman ninety-nine one-hundredths white had
fled from slavery -- had traveled through forests, crossed rivers,
and through countless sufferings had got within one step of Canada
-- of free soil -- with the light of the North star shining in her
eyes, and her babe pressed to her withered breast, both parties
agreed to clutch her and hand her back to the dominion of the hound
and lash. Both parties, as parties, were willing to do this when
the Rebellion commenced.

     The truth is, we had to give you your liberty. There came a
time in the history of the war when, defeated at the ballot box and
in the field -- when driven to the shattered gates of eternal
chaos, we were forced to make you free, and on the first day of
January, 1863, the justice so long delayed was done, and four
million of people were lifted from the condition of beasts of
burden to the sublime heights of freedom. Lincoln, the immortal, 
issued, and the men of the North sustained the great proclamation.

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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

     As in the war there came a time when we were forced to make
you free, so in the history of reconstruction came a time when we
were forced to make you citizens; when we were forced to say that
you should vote, and that you should have and exercise all the
rights that we claim for ourselves.

     And to-day I am in favor of giving you every right that I
claim for myself.

     In reconstructing the Southern States, we could take our
choice, either give the ballot to the negro, or allow the rebels to
rule. We preferred loyal blacks to disloyal whites, because we
believed liberty safer in the hands of its friends than in those of
its foes.

     We must be for freedom everywhere. Freedom is progress --
slavery is desolation, cruelty and want.

     Freedom invents -- slavery forgets. The problem of the slave
is to do the least work in the longest space of time. The problem
of freemen is to do the greatest amount of work in the shortest
space of time. The freeman, working for wife and children, gets his
head and his hands in partnership.

     Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to
the highest, from the simplest to the most complex. Freedom
believes in education -- the salvation of slavery is ignorance.

     The South always dreaded the alphabet. They looked upon each
letter as an abolitionist, and well they might. With a scent keener
than their own blood-hounds they detected everything that could,
directly or indirectly, interfere with slavery. They knew that when
slaves begin to think, masters begin to tremble. They knew that
free thought would destroy them; that discussion could not be
endured; that a free press would liberate every slave; and so they
mobbed free thought, and put an end to free discussion and
abolished a free press, and in fact did all the mean and infamous
things they could, that slavery might live, and that liberty might
perish from among men.

     You are now citizens of many of the States, and in time you
will be of all. I am astonished when I think how long it took to
abolish the slave, how long it took to abolish slavery in this
country. I am also astonished to think that a few years ago
magnificent steamers went down the Mississippi freighted with your
fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, and may be some of you,
bound like criminals, separated from wives, from husbands, every
human feeling laughed at and outraged, sold like beasts, carried
away from homes to work for another, receiving for pay only the
marks of the lash upon the naked bark. I am astonished at these
things. I hate to think that all this was done under the
Constitution of the United States, under the flag of my country,
under the wings of the eagle.

     The flag was not then what it is now. It was a mere rag in
comparison. The eagle was a buzzard; and the Constitution
sanctioned the greatest crime of the world.


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                AN ADDRESS TO THE COLORED PEOPLE.

     I wonder that you -- the black people -- have forgotten all
this. -- I wonder that you ask a white man to address you on this
occasion, when the history of your connection with the white race
is written in your blood and tears -- is still upon your flesh, put
there by the branding-iron and the lash.

     I feel like asking your forgiveness for the wrongs that my
race has inflicted upon yours. If, in the future, the wheel of
fortune should take a turn, and you should in any country have
white men in your power, I pray you not to execute the villainy we
have taught you.

     One word in conclusion. You have your liberty -- use it to
benefit your race. Educate yourselves, educate your children, send
teachers to the South. Let your brethren there be educated. Let
them know something of art and science. Improve yourselves, stand
by each other, and above all be in favor of liberty the world over.

     The time is coming when you will be allowed to be good and
useful citizens of the Great Republic. This is your country as much
as it is mine. You have the same rights here that I have -- the
same interest that I have. The avenues of distinction will be open
to you and your children. Great advances have been made. The rebels
are now opposed to slavery -- the Democratic party is opposed to
slavery, as they say. There is going to be no war of races. Both
parties want your votes in the South, and there will be just enough
negroes without principle to join the rebels to make them think
they will get more, and so the rebels will treat the negroes well.
And the Republicans will be sure to treat them well in order to
prevent any more joining the rebels.

     The great problem is solved. Liberty has solved it -- and
there will be no more slavery. On the old flag, on every fold and
on every star will be liberty for all, equality before the law. The
grand people are marching forward, and they will not pause until
the earth is without a chain, and without a throne.

                               END

                          ****     ****

                           SECULARISM.

     SEVERAL people have asked me the meaning of this term.

     Secularism is the religion of humanity; it embraces the
affairs of this world; it is interested in everything that touches
the welfare of a sentient being; it advocates attention to the
particular planet in which we happen to live; it means that each
individual counts for something; it is a declaration of
intellectual independence; it means that the pew is superior to the
pulpit, that those who bear the burdens shall have the profits and
that they who fill the purse shall hold the strings. It is a
protest against theological oppression, against ecclesiastical 





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                           SECULARISM.

tyranny, against being the serf, subject or slave of any phantom,
or of the priest of any phantom. It is a protest against wasting
this life for the sake of one that we know not of. It proposes to
let the gods take care of themselves. It is another name for common
sense; that is to say, the adaptation of means to such ends as are
desired and understood.

     Secularism believes in building a home here, in this world. It
trusts to individual effort, to energy, to intelligence, to
observation and experience rather than to the unknown and the
supernatural. It desires to be happy on this side of the grave.

     Secularism means food and fireside, roof and raiment,
reasonable work and reasonable leisure, the cultivation of the
tastes, the acquisition of knowledge, the enjoyment of the arts,
and it promises for the human race comfort, independence,
intelligence, and above all liberty. It means the abolition of
sectarian feuds, of theological hatreds. It means the cultivation
of friendship and intellectual hospitality. It means the living for
ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for
this world rather than for another. It means the right to express
your thought in spite of popes, priests, and gods. It means that
impudent idleness shall no longer live upon the labor of honest
men. It means the destruction of the business of those who trade in
fear. It proposes to give serenity and content to the human soul.
It will put out the fires of eternal pain. It is striving to do
away with violence and vice, with ignorance, poverty and disease.
It lives for the ever present to-day, and the ever coming to-
morrow. It does not believe in praying and receiving, but in
earning and deserving. It regards work as worship, labor as prayer,
and wisdom as the savior of mankind. It says to every human being,
Take care of yourself so that you may be able to help others; adorn
your life with the gems called good deeds; illumine your path with
the sunlight called friendship and love.

     Secularism is a religion, a religion that is understood. It
has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no
falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions. It considers the
lilies of the field, and takes thought for the morrow. It says to
the whole world, Work that you may eat, drink, and be clothed; work
that you may enjoy; work that you may not want; work that you may
give and never need.

                         The Independent Pulpit, Waco, Texas, 1887.

                          ****     ****

                      "SOWING AND REAPING."

     I HAVE read the sermon on "Sowing and Reaping," and I now
understand Mr. Moody better than I did before. The other day, in
New York, Mr. Moody said that he implicitly believed the story of
Jonah and really thought that he was in the fish for three days.

     When I read it I was surprised that a man living in the
century of Humboldt, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and Haeckel, should 
believe such an absurd and idiotic story.


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                      "SOWING AND REAPING."

     Now I understand the whole thing. I can account for the
amazing credulity of this man. Mr. Moody never read one of my
lectures, That accounts for it all, and no wonder that he is a
hundred years behind the times. He never read one of my lectures;
that is a perfect explanation.

     Poor man! He has no idea of what he has lost. He has been
living on miracles and mistakes, on falsehood and foolishness,
stuffing his mind with absurdities when he could have had truth,
facts and good, sound sense.

     Poor man!

     Probably Mr. Moody has never read one word of Darwin and so he
still believes in the Garden of Eden and the talking snake and
really thinks that Jehovah took some mud, molded the form of a man,
breathed in its nostrils, stood it up and called it Adam, and that
he then took one of Adam's ribs and some more mad and manufactured
Eve. Probably he has never read a word written by any great
geologist and consequently still believes in the story of the
flood. Knowing nothing of astronomy. he still thinks that Joshua
stopped the sun.

     Poor man! He has neglected Spencer and has no idea of
evolution. He thinks that man has, through all the ages, 
degenerated, the first pair having been perfect. He does not
believe that man came from lower forms and has gradually journeyed
upward.

     He really thinks that the Devil outwitted God and vaccinated
the human race with the virus of total depravity.

     Poor man!

     He knows nothing of the great scientists -- of the great
thinkers, of the emancipators of the human race; knows nothing of
Spinoza, of Voltaire, of Draper, Buckle, of Paine or Renan.

     Mr. Moody ought to read something besides the Bible -- ought
to find out what the really intelligent have thought. He ought to
get some new ideas -- a few facts -- and I think that, after he did
so, he would be astonished to find how ignorant and foolish he had
been. He is a good man. His heart is fairly good, but his head is
almost useless.

     The trouble with this sermon, "Sowing and Reaping," is that he
contradicts it. I believe that a man must reap what he sows, that
every human being must bear the natural consequences of his acts.
Actions are good or bad according to their consequences. That is my
doctrine.

     There is no forgiveness in nature. But Mr. Moody tells us that
a man may sow thistles and gather figs, that having acted like a
fiend for seventy years, he can, between his last dose of medicine
and his last breath, repent; that he can be washed clean by the
blood of the lamb, and that myriads of angels will carry his soul
to heaven -- in other words, that this man will not reap what he 
sowed, but what Christ sowed, that this man's thistles will be
changed to figs.
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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      "SOWING AND REAPING."

     This doctrine, to my mind, is not only absurd. but dishonest
and corrupting.

     This is one of the absurdities in Mr. Moody's theology. The
other is that a man can justly be damned for the sin of another.

     Nothing can exceed the foolishness of these two ideas --
first: "Man can be justly punished forever for the sin of Adam."
Second: "Man can be justly rewarded with eternal joy for the
goodness of Christ."

     Yet the man who believes this, preaches a sermon in which he
says that a man must reap what he sows. Orthodox Christians teach
exactly the opposite. They teach that no matter what a man sows, no
matter how wicked his life has been, that he can by repentance
change the crop. That all his sins shall be forgotten and that only
the goodness of Christ will be remembered.

     Let us see how this works:

     Mr. A. has lived a good and useful life, kept his contracts,
paid his debts, educated his children, loved his wife and made his 
home a heaven, but he did not believe in the inspiration of Mr.
Moody's Bible. He died and his soul was sent to hell. Mr. Moody
says that as a man sows so shall he reap.

     Mr. B. lived a useless and wicked life. By his cruelty he
drove his wife to insanity, his children became vagrants and
beggars, his home was a perfect hell, he committed many crimes, he
was a thief, a burglar, a murderer. A few minutes before he was
hanged he got religion and his soul went from the scaffold to
heaven. And yet Mr. Moody says that as a man sows so shall he reap.

     Mr. Moody ought to have a little philosophy -- a little good
sense.

     So Mr. Moody says that only in this life can a man secure the
reward of repentance.

     Just before a man dies, God loves him -- loves him as a ,other
loves her baby -- but a moment after he dies, he sends his soul to
hell. In other words nothing can be done to reform him. The society
of God and the angels can have no good effect. Nobody can be made
better in heaven. This world is the only place where reform is
possible. Here, surrounded by the wicked in the midst of
temptations, in the darkness of ignorance, a human being may reform
if he is fortunate enough to hear the words of some revival
preacher, but when he goes before his maker -- before the Trinity
-- he has no chance. God can do nothing for his soul except to send
it to hell.

     This shows that the power for good is confined to people in
this world and that in the next world God can do nothing to reform
his children. This is theology. This is what they call "Tidings of 
great joy."

     Every orthodox creed is savage, ignorant and idiotic.


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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                      "SOWING AND REAPING."

     In the orthodox heaven there is no mercy, no pity. In the
orthodox hell there is no hope, no reform. God is an
eternal jailer, an everlasting turnkey.

     And yet Christians now say that while there may be no fire in
hell -- no actual flames -- yet the lost souls feel forever the
tortures of conscience.

     What will conscience trouble the people in hell about? They
tell us that they will remember their sins.

     Well, what about the souls in heaven? They committed awful
sins, they made their fellow-men unhappy. They took the lives of
others -- sent many to eternal torment. Will they have no
conscience? Is hell the only place where souls regret the evil they
have done? Have the angels no regret, no remorse, no conscience?

     If this be so, heaven must be somewhat worse than hell.

     In old times, if people wanted to know anything they
asked the preacher. Now they do if they don't.

     The Bible has, with intelligent men, lost its authority.

     The miracles are now regarded by sensible people as the spawn
of ignorance and credulity. On every hand people are looking for
facts -- for truth -- and all religions are taking their places in
the museum of myths.

     Yes, the people are becoming civilized, and so they are
putting out the fires of hell. They are ceasing to believe in a God
who seeks eternal revenge.

     The people are becoming sensible. They are asking for
evidence. They care but little for the winged phantoms of the air
-- for the ghosts and devils and supposed gods. The people are
anxious to be happy here and they want a little heaven in this
life.

     Theology is a curse. Science is a blessing. We do not need
preachers, but teachers; not priests, but thinkers; not churches,
but schools; not steeples, but observatories. We want knowledge.

     Let us hope that Mr. Moody will read some really useful books.

                          ****     ****

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