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Updated: May 14, 2025
The doctrine of the Trinity is the most fundamental point of the whole Christian religion. Nothing is more easy to a freethinker, yet what different notions of it do the English priests pretend to deduce from Scripture, explaining it by "specific unities, eternal modes of subsistence," and the like unintelligible jargon?
J. M. Wheeler, I made desperate efforts to get a printer to undertake the work. At last I discovered a Freethinker who placed his inadequate resources at my disposal. He could only set up four pages of type, and only print copies with a hand-press. Even that was better than nothing; anything being preferable to lowering the flag in the heat of battle. But alas! fate is stronger than gods or men.
Why it should be necessary for a supreme intelligence to make all things straight in another world, that he could more convincingly rectify in this one, is a conception which has escaped the reason of a freethinker, but has been very profitable to those on earth that lead their adherents to believe that they hold the keys to our future abodes.
Since my release from prison they have been resumed, and they will be continued until I go to prison again, unless I see some better reason than Christian menace for their cessation. The same fifth number of the Freethinker contained an account of the first part of "La Bible Amusante," issued by the Anti-Clerical publishing house in the Rue des Ecoles.
"I can't make friends with the Christians, and so I am cut off from both." When after a thunderstorm two of the hands resigned their places at Zussmann's benches on the avowed ground that atheism attracts lightning, Zussmann's loyalty to the freethinker converted the Beadle's gratitude from fitfulness into a steady glow.
You must know, his philosophical works are generally in dialogues, where people are brought in disputing against one another: Now the priests when they see an argument to prove a God, offered perhaps by a Stoic, are such knaves or blockheads, to quote it as if it were Cicero's own; whereas Cicero was so noble a freethinker, that he believed nothing at all of the matter, nor ever shews the least inclination to favour superstition, or the belief of a God, and the immortality of the soul; unless what he throws out sometimes to save himself from danger, in his speeches to the Roman mob; whose religion was, however, much more innocent and less absurd, than that of popery at least: And I could say more but you understand me.
It was a mistake to allow people to murder each other openly, of course, because people of less intellectual capacity would take upon themselves to judge such cases in their own way. But provided that public morality, the darling of the real freethinker, were not scandalised, there would be no inherent wrong in doing away with Paolo.
I claim, therefore, that the reason that your explanations are not accepted, is because they do not explain. Your doctrines offer protection to a small part of the man, but leave all the rest exposed to the cold and inclement weather. The uneducated do not accept your doctrines because they belie their own experiences. Mr. Freethinker I hope you will pardon me for interrupting you, Mr. Orthodox.
Everybody would agree in calling such a man by a very harsh name. It is hard to see why a freethinker, who by reticence and conformity passes himself off for a believer, should be more leniently judged. The differences between a catholic and a protestant are assuredly not any greater than those between a believer and an unbeliever. We all admit the baseness of dissimulation in the former case.
"Yes, madame," said Rodin, in a sanctified tone, for these people do not take off their masks even with their accomplices, "yes, madame, we have excellent news from our house at St. Herem. M. Hardy, the infidel, the freethinker, has at length entered the pale of the holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church."
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