So the gods have gone, bag and baggage. Where they have gone, no one knows. The skies give no sign that they are hiding up there. The telescope has found _seventy million stars, but not one god_.
It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.
Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth, and every book revealed by God was written by man.
Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the lies told about what God has done.
Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no one knows any more about these matters than I do.
We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one needs to get as far from the Church as possible.
Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their fellow-beings.
I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made to believe that he is having a good time.