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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 48

About How Long Will it Take

About How Long Will it Take

for that doctrine to save this world? (Laughter.) Good, honest people; they are mistaken. In old times they were very simple. Their churches used to be like barns. They used to have them divided—the men on this side, the women on that—a little fortress. They have advanced since then, and they now find as a fact demonstrated by experience that a man sitting by the woman he loves can thank God as heartily as though sitting between two men that he has never been introduced to. (Applause and laughter.) There is another thing the Methodists ought to remember, and that is that the Episcopalians were the greatest enemies they ever had. And they should remember that the Free-thinkers have always treated them kindly and well. There is one thing about the Methodist Church in the North that I like, but I find that it is not Methodism that does it. I find that the Methodist Church in the South is as much opposed to liberty as the Methodist Church North is in favour of liberty. So it is not Methodism that is in favour of liberty or slavery. They vary a little in their creed from the rest. They don't believe that God does every thing. They believe that He does His part, and that you must do the rest, and that getting to Heaven is a partnership business.

The next Church, the Presbyterian, in my judgment, is the worst of all (laughter and applause), so far as creed is concerned. This Church was founded by John Calvin, a murderer. (Sensation.) John Calvin, having power in Geneva, inaugurated human torture. Voltaire abolished torture in France. (Applause.) The man who abolished torture, if the Christian religion is true, God is now torturing in Hell; and the man who inaugurated torture, he is now a glorified angel in Heaven. (Laughter.) It won't do. (Renewed laughter.) John Knox started this doctrine in Scotland; and this is the peculiarity about Presbyterianism: It grows best where the soil is poorest. (Laughter.) I read the other day an account of a meeting between John Knox and John Calvin. Imagine a dialogue between a pestilence and a famine. (Convulsive laughter.) Imagine the conversation between a block and the axe. As I read their conversation it seemed to me as though John Knox and John Calvin were made for each other, and that they fitted one another like the upper and lower jaws of a wild beast. They believed happiness was a crime. They looked upon laughter as blasphemy. And they did all they could to destroy every human feeling, and to fill the mind with the infinite gloom of predesti- page 15 nation and eternal damnation (Applause.) They taught the doctrine that God had a right to damn us because He made us. That is just the reason He has not a right to damn us. There is some dust—unconscious dust. What right has God to change that unconscious dust into a human being, when He knows that human being will live—when He knows that human being will suffer eternal agony? Why not leave Him in the unconscious dust? (Applause.) What right has an infinite God to add to the sum of human agony? Suppose I knew that I could change that piece of furniture (pointing to a chair) into a living, happy, sentient human being, and I knew that being would suffer untold agony for ever. If I did it I would be a fiend. I would leave that being in unconscious dust. And yet we are told that we must believe such doctrine or we are to be eternally damned. It won't do. Why, in 1839 there was a division in this church. They had a lawsuit to see which was the Church of God. (Laughter.) And they tried it before a judge and jury, and the jury decided that the New School