Truth about the Dead

is a good man; and, for one, about this man I intend to tell just as near the truth as I can.

Most history consists in giving the details of things that never happened; most biography is usually the lie coming from the lips of flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice; and whoever attacks the religion of a country will in his turn be attacked. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by all the meanness of ingenuity. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that there is still one weapon left in the arsenal of Jehovah—slander.

I was reading on yesterday a poem called the "Light of Asia," and I read in that how a Boodh, seeing a tigress perishing of thirst, with her mouth upon the dry stone of a stream, with her two cubs sucking at her dry and empty dugs, this Boodh took pity upon this wild and famishing beast; and throwing from himself the yellow robe of his order, and stepping naked before this tigress, said:—"Here is meat for you and for your cubs." In one moment the crooked daggers of her claws ran riot in his flesh, and in another he was devoured. Such, during nearly all the history of this world, has been the history of every man who has stood in front of superstition.

Thomas Paine, as has been so eloquently said by the gentleman who introduced me, was