The Presbyterian clergy or sorcerers of Scotland, of old times, claimed that they could consign their deluded victims to Heaven or Hell by a word, and could by their magic power strike with death any enemy of God, that is, the clergy. They would not allow anyone to remain in town who failed to go and hear their sermons. Buckle says the clergy kept the people in a worse than Egyptian bondage, inasmuch as they enslaved mind as well as body.

“John Knox sanctioned the murder of the Roman Archbishop Beaton of Scotland in 1548, and shut himself up with the assassins in the palace of the Archbishop. When the Catholic power was destroyed in Scotland by the nobles in 1560 and the church property confiscated by them, the Protestant clergy claimed that it was impious to secularize ecclesiastical property, and that they should be endowed with the spoils of the war, that it was right for the Lords to plunder the Church of Rome, but the loot should be turned over to them. They said that what rightly belonged to them was devoured by idle bellies. The Presbyterian clergy said that King James was a traitor and had seven devils inside of him, and he ought to be seized. And their associate in crime, the Earl of Gourie, entrapped the King into his castle in order to murder him.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-201.

The Presbyterian clergy said that cheerfulness was to be guarded against. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might occasionally be allowed, still being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to smile on Sunday. A Christian has no business with love or sympathy. He has his own soul to attend to, that is enough for him. On Sunday in particular he must never think of benefitting others and thus break the Sabbath. On no occasion must food or shelter be given to a starving man unless he is a Presbyterian.

“In priest-ridden Spain, Charles V, the tool of religion, in his will provided that all heretics should be put to death and that the Inquisition should be upheld. Under his orders, according to Grotius, 100,000 persons were beheaded, buried alive and burnt at the stake in the Netherlands. Phillip II, of Spain, said it was better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics. The Duke of Alva, in this reign, boasted that in five or six years he had put to death in cold blood more than 18,000 heretics, beside a still greater number of infidels he had slain on the battlefield.”—Idem 2-14.

When it was proposed to expel from Spain the remnant of Moors remaining, who had turned Christians and were baptized by force, Bleda, the Dominican, said that every Moor in Spain should have his throat cut, because it was impossible to tell which of them were Christians at heart, but God knew his own and he could sort them out. About one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority in the most wretched plight sailed for Africa. During the passage the crew in many of the ships butchered the men, ravished the women and threw the children into the sea. From this time Spain began to degenerate. The tyranny of religion was supreme. While every other country was advancing, Spain, numbed into a death-like torpor, spell-bound and entranced by the accursed superstition, presented to Europe a solitary instance of constant decay.“—Idem, 2-53.

“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the name of the Lamb.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-22.

The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your property was an act of the highest piety.

The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of the church.”—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.

“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress. Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044 Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous lives.”—Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness, avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them before the commission of the murder.”

The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic, the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings from god.

The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god. Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful, then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was, in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its name to Christian.

Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing because he thought he was going to Hell.

Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison. He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637, was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick, because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on Sunday.

In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common.

“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27.

The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight, Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal butchers.—Roman Religion, 35.

“When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of the Christians.”—Boston Sun. American.

Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan, “and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.” The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.” Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all illegitimate.