Their pictures and
statues should grace our courts, our temples, and our palaces. Their
deeds should form the staple of our pleasant histories, and their
writings crowd the shelves of our libraries. Children should be taught
to lisp their names with reverence, and the aged should bless them with
their parting breath.
On the other hand, if religion be false and foolish, if it be unnatural
and mischievous, its friends should be pitied or despised, if not
rebuked and punished. Its founders and propagators should be branded as
the weakest or the basest of men. Their names should be had in contempt
or abhorrence. Their writings should be everywhere decried. Their
pictures and statues should fill some chamber of horrors. Historians,
poets, and orators should hold them up to reprobation. Christians should
be kept from places of trust, and from posts of honor. They should be
wretched, and poor, and miserable, and the hearts of men, and the powers
of nature, should combine for their destruction, and for the utter
extinction of their cause.
Yet the state of things is just the contrary. Christianity triumphs, and
Christians are honored; while infidelity languishes, and its disciples
are covered with shame. On the Atheist's theory the human race has
existed for millions of years, yet it has never produced more than a few
individuals who have acknowledged the principle of his creed.
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