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6
INFIDEL
FOOTE.
Idle Tales of Dying Horrors.
—CAffiLYEE.
PUBLISHING
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
��NATIONAL SEOUL' ' —'THIY
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
BY
G. W. FOOTE.
■>
“ Idle Tales of Dying Horrors."
—Carlyle.
LONDON:
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
1886.
�LONDON:
FEINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. FOOTE,
AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
----------- f-----------
Infidel death-beds have been a fertile theme of pulpit elo
quence.
The priests of Christianity often inform their
congregations that Faith is an excellent soft pillow, and
Reason a horrible hard bolster, for the dying head. Freethought, they say, is all very well in the days of our health
and strength, when we are buoyed up by the pride of carnal
intellect; but ah! how poor a thing it is when health and
strength fail us, when, deserted by our self-sufficiency, we
need the support of a stronger power. In that extremity the
proud Freethinker turns to Jesus Christ, renounces his wicked
scepticism, implores pardon of the Savior he has despised,
and shudders at the awful scenes that await him in the next
world should the hour of forgiveness be past.
Pictorial art has been pressed into the service of this plea
for religion, and in such orthodox periodicals as the British
Workman, to say nothing of the horde of pious inventions
which are circulated as tracts, expiring sceptics have been
portrayed in agonies of terror, gnashing their teeth, wringing
their hands, rolling their eyes, and exhibiting every sign of
despair.
One minister of the gospel, the Rev. Erskine Neale, has not
thought it beneath his dignity to compose an extensive series
of these holy frauds, under the title of Closing Scenes. This *
work was, at one time, very popular and influential; but its
specious character having been exposed, it has fallen into
disrepute, or at least into neglect.
The real answer to these arguments, if they may be called
SBich, is to be found in the body of the present work. I have
narrated in a brief space, and from the best authorities, the
“ closing scenes ” in the lives of many eminent Freethinkers
during the last three centuries. They are not anonymous
persons without an address, who cannot be located in time or
space, and who simply serve “to point a moral or adorn a
tale.” Their names are in most cases historical, and in some
�4
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
cases familiar to fame; great poets, philosophers, historians,
and wits, of deathless memory, who cannot be withdrawn
from the history of our race without robbing it of much of its
dignity and splendor.
In some instances I have prefaced the story of their deaths
with a short, and in others with a lengthy, record of their
lives. The ordinary reader cannot be expected to possess a
complete acquaintance with the career and achievements of
every great soldier of progress; and I have therefore-; con
sidered it prudent to afford such information as might be
deemed necessary to a proper appreciation of the character,
the greatness, and the renown, of the subjects of my sketches.
When the hero of the story has been the object of calumny
or misrepresentation, when his death has been falsely related,
and simple facts have been woven into a tissue of lying ab
surdity, I have not been content with a bare narration of the
truth ; I have carried the war into the enemy’s camp, and
refuted their mischievous libels.
One of our greatest living thinkers entertains “ the belief
that the English mind, not readily swayed by rhetoric, moves
freely under the pressure of facts.”* I may therefore venture
to hope that the facts I have recorded will have their proper
effect on the reader’s mind. Yet it may not be impolitic to
examine the orthodox argument as to death-bed repentances.
Carlyle, in his Essay on Voltaire, utters a potent warning
against anything of the kind.
“ Surely the parting agonies of a fellow-mortal, when the spirit
of oui- brother, rapt in the whirlwinds and thick ghastly vapors of
death, clutches blindly for help, and no help is there, are not the
scenes where a wise faith would seek to exult, when it can no longer
hope to alleviate ! For the rest, to touch farther on those their idle
tales of dying horrors, remorse, and the like ; to write of such, to
believe them, or disbelieve them, or in anywise discuss them, were
but a continuation of the same ineptitude. He who, after the imper
turbable exit of so many Cartouches and Thurtells, in every age of
the world, can continue to regard the manner of a man’s death as a
test of his religious orthodoxy, may boast himself impregnable to
merely terrestrial logic. ”f
There is a great deal of truth in this vigorous passage. I
fancy, however, that some of the dupes of priestcraft are not
absolutely impregnable to terrestrial logic, and I discuss the
* Dr. E. B. Tylor: Preface to second edition of Primitive Culture.
t Essays, Vol. II., p. 161 (People's edition).
�INTBODUCTION.
5
subject for their sakes, even at the risk of being held guilty
of “ineptitude.”
____
Throughout the world, the religion of mankind is determined
by the geographical accident of their birth. In England men
grow up Protestants-; in Italy, Catholics ; in Russia, Greek
Christians ; in Turkey, Mohammedans ; in India, Brahmans ; >
in China, Buddhists or Confucians. What they are taught
in their childhood, they believe in their manhood; and they
die in the faith in which they have lived.
Here and there a few men think for themselves. If they
discard the faith in which they have been educated, they are
never free from its influence. It meets them at every turn,
and is constantly, by a thousand ties drawing them back to
the orthodox fold. The stronger resist this attraction, the
weaker succumb to it. Between them is the average man,
whose tendency will depend on several things. If he is iso
lated, or finds but few sympathisers, he may revert to the
ranks of faith ; if he finds many of the same opinion with
himself, he will probably display more fortitude. Even
Freethinkers are gregarious, and in the worst as well as the
best sense of the words, the saying of Novalis is true—“ My
F
11
1
''
”’
jther.”
Lut m all cases ot reversion, the sceptic invariably returns
to the creed of his own country. What does this prove ?
Simply the power of our environment, and the force of early
training. When “ infidels ” are few, and their relatives are
orthodox, what could be more natural than what is called “ a
death-bed recantation ?” Their minds are enfeebled by dis
ease, or the near approach of death; they are surrounded by
persons who continually urge them to be reconciled to the
popular faith ; and is it astonishing if they sometimes yield to
these solicitations ? Is it wonderful if, when all grows dim,
and the priestly carrion-crow of the death-chamber mouths his
perfunctory shibboleths, that the weak brain should become
dazed, and the poor tongue mutter a faint response ?
Should the dying man be old, there is still less reason for
surprise. Old age yearns back to the cradle, and as Dante
Rossetti says—
“ Life all past
Is like the sky when the sun sets in it,
Clearest where furthest off.”
The “recantation” of old men, if it occurs, is easily under
�6
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
stood. Having been brought up in a particular religion, their
earliest and tenderest memories may be connected with it;
and when they lie down to die they may mechanically recur
to it, just as they may forget whole years of their maturity,
and vividly remember the scenes of their childhood. Those
who have read Thackeray’s exquisitely faithful and pathetic
narrative of the death of old Col. Newcome, will remember
that as the evening chapel bell tolled its last note, he smiled,
lifted his head a little, and cried “ Adsum 1”—the. boy’s answer
when the names were called at school.
Cases of recantation, if they were ever common, which
does not appear to be true, are now exceedingly rare ; so rare,
indeed, that they are never heard of except in anonymous
tracts, which are evidently concocted for the glory of God,
rather than the edification of Man. Sceptics are at present
numbered by thousands, and they can nearly always secure
at their bedsides the presence of friends who share their un
belief. Every week, the Freethought journals report quietly,
and as a matter of course, the peaceful end of “ infidels ”
who, having lived without hypocrisy, have died without fear^.
They are frequently buried by theirTieterodox friends, and
never a week passes without the Secular Burial Service, or
some other appropriate words, being read by sceptics over a
sceptic’s grave.
. Christian ministers know this. They usually confine
themselves, therefore, to the death-bed stories of Paine and
Voltaire, which have been again and again refuted. Little,
if anything, is said about the eminent Freethinkers who
have died in the present generation. The priests must wait
half a century before they can hope to defame them wiih
success. Our cry to these pious sutlers is “ Hands off 1”
Refute the arguments of Freethinkers, if you can ; but do
not obtrude your disgusting presence in the death chamber,
or vent your malignity over their tombs.
Supposing, however, that every Freethinker turned Chris
tian on his death-bed. It is a tremendous stretch of fancy,
but I make it for the sake of argument. What does it prove ?
Nothing, as I said before, but the force of our surroundings
and early training. It is a common saying among Jews,
when they hear of a Christian proselyte, “ Ah, wait till he
comes to die !” As a matter of fact, converted Jews generally
die in the faith of their race; and the same is alleged as to
�INTRODUCTION.
7
the native converts that are made by our missionaries in
India.
Heine has a pregnant passage on this point. Referring to
Joseph Schelling, who was “an apostate to his own thought,”
who “ deserted the altar he had himself consecrated,” and
“ returned to the crypts of the past,” Heine rebukes the “ old
believers ” who cried Kyrie eleison in honor of such a con
version. “ That,” he says, “ proves nothing for their doctrine.
It only proves that man turns to religion when he is old and
fatigued, when his physical and mental force has left him,
when he can no longer enjoy nor reason. So many Free
thinkers are converted on their death-beds ! . . . But at least
do not boast of them. These legendary conversions belong
at best to pathology, and are a poor evidence for your cause.
After all, they only prove this, that it was impossible for you
to convert those Freethinkers while they were healthy in
body and mind.”*
Renan has some excellent words on the same subject in his
delightful volume of autobiography. After expressing a
rooted preference for a sudden death, he continues : “ I should
be grieved to go through one of those periods of feebleness,
in which the man who has possessed strength and virtue is
only the shadow and ruins of himself, and often, to the great
joy of fools, occupies himself in demolishing the life he has
laboriously built up. Such an old age is the worst gift the
gods can bestow on man. If such a fate is reserved for me,
I protest in advance against the fatuities that a softened
brajp iiMiy-.TXLa.kft thr say or sign. It is Renan souncHrTheart
and head, such as I am now, and not Renan half destroyed
by death, and no longer himself, as I shall be if I decompose
gradually, that I wish people to listen to and believe.”f
To find the best passage on this topic in our own literature
we must go back to the seventeenth century, and to Selden’s
Table Talk, a volume in which Coleridge found “ more
weighty bullion sense ” than he “ ever found in the same
number of pages of any uninspired writer.” Selden lived in a
less mealy-mouthed age than ours, and what I am going to
quote smacks of the blunt old times; but it is too good to
miss, and all readers who are not prudish will thank me for
citing it. “ For a priest,” says Selden, “ to turn a man
* De L'Allemagne, Vol. I., p. 174.
JU
(M-
f Souvenirs D'Enfance et de Jeunesse, p. 377.
�8
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
when he lies a dying, is just like one that hath a long time
solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length he
makes her drunk, and so lies with her.” It is a curious thing
that the writer of these words helped to draw up the West
minster Confession of Faith.
For my own part, while I have known many Freethinkers
who were stedfast to their principles in death, I have never
known a single case of recantation, The fact is, Christians
are utterly mistaken on this subject, It is quite intelligible
that those who believe in a vengeful God, and an everlasting
hell, should tremble on “the brink of eternity ” ; and it is
natural that they should ascribe to others the same trepida
tion. But a moment’s reflection must convince them that this
is fallacious. The only terror in death is the apprehension
of what lies beyond it, and that emotion is impossible to a
sincere disbeliever. Of course the orthodox may ask “ But
is there a sincere disbeliever ?” To which I can only reply,
like Diderot, by asking “ Is there a sincere Christian ?”
Professor Tyndall, while repudiating Atheism himself, has
borne testimony to the earnestness of others who embrace it.
“ I haygjinown.some of the most pronounced among them,” he
* C-says, “not only in lHeT5uFm"3feath-—seen them approaching
with open eyes the inexorable goal, with no dread of a hang
man’s whip, with no hope of a heavenly crown, and still as
mindful of their duties, and as faithful in the discharge of
them, as if their eternal future depended on their latest deeds.”*
Lord Bacon said “ I do not believe that any man fears to
be dead, but only the stroke of death.” True, and the
physical suffering, and the pang of separation, are the same
for all. Yet the end of life is as natural as its beginning,
and the true philosophy of existence is nobly expressed in
the lofty sentence of Spinoza, “A free man thinks less of
nothing than of death.”
~
“ So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”!
Fortnightly Review, November, 1S77.
t Bryant, Thanatopsis.
�LORD AMBERLEY.
Viscount Amberley, the eldest son of the late Earl Russell,
and the author of a very heretical work entitled an Analysis
of Religious Belief, lived and died a Freethinker. His will,
stipulating that his son should be educated by a Sceptical
friend, was set aside by Earl Russell; the law of England
being such, that Freethinkers are denied the parental rights
which are enjoyed by their Christian neighbors.
Lady
Frances Russell, who signs with her initials the Preface to
Lord Amberley’s book, which was published after his death,
writes : “ Ere the pages now given to the public had left the
press, the hand that had written them was cold, the heart—
of which few could know the loving depths—had ceased to
beat, the far-ranging mind was for ever still, the fervent
spirit was at rest. Let this be remembered by those who
read, and add solemnity to the solemn purpose of the book.”
LORD BOLINGBROKE.
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was born in 1672
at Battersea, where he also died on December 12, 1751. His
life was a stormy one, and on the fall of the Tory ministry,
of which he was a distinguished member, he was impeached
by the Whig parliament under the leadership of Sir Robert
Walpole. It was merely a party prosecution, and although
Bolingbroke was attainted of high treason, he did not lose a
friend or forfeit the respect of honest men. Swift and Pope
held him in the highest esteem; they corresponded with him
throughout their lives, and it was from Bolingbroke that Pope
derived the principles of the Essay on Man. That Bolingbroke’s
abilities were of the highest order cannot be gainsaid. His
political writings are masterpieces of learning, eloquence, and
wit, the style is sinewy and graceful, and in the greatest heat
of controversy he never ceases to be a gentleman. His philo
sophical writings were published after his death by his literary
executor, David Mallet, whom Johnson described as “a beggarly
Scotchman ’’who was “ left half-a-crown ” to fire off a blunder
�10
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
bus, which his patron had charged, against “ religion and moral
ity.” Johnson’s opinion on suchasubject is, however, of trifling
importance. He hated Scotchmen and Infidels, and he told
Boswell that Voltaire and Rousseau deserved transportation
more than any of the scoundrels who were tried at the Old
Bailey.
Bolingbroke’s philosophical writings show him to have been
a Deist. He believed in God but he rejected Revelation. His
views are advanced and supported with erudition, eloquence,
and masterly irony. The approach of death, which was pre
ceded by the excruciating disease of cancer in the cheek, did
not produce the least change in his convictions. According
to Goldsmith, ‘ ‘ He was consonant with himself to the last;
and those principles which he had all along avowed, he con
firmed with his dying breath, having given orders that none
of the clergy should be permitted to trouble him in his last
moments.”*
GIORDANO BRUNO.
This glorious martyr of Freethought did not die in a
quiet chamber, tended by loving hands. He was literally
“ butchered to make a Roman holiday.” When the assassins of
“ the bloody faith ” kindled the fire which burnt out his
splendid life, he was no decrepit man, nor had the finger of
Death touched his cheek with a pallid hue. The blood
coursed actively through his veins, and a dauntless spirit
shone in his noble eyes. It might have been Bruno that
Shelley had in mind when he wrote those thrilling lines in
Queen Mab :
“ I was an infant when my mother went
To see an Atheist burned. She took me there:
The dark-robed priests were met around the pile,
The multitude was gazing silently;
And as the culprit passed with dauntless mien,
Tempered disdain in his unaltering eye,
Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth:
The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs;
His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon;
His death-pang rent my heart! The insensate mob
Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept.”
Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548,
Life of Lord Bolingbroke; Works, Vol, IV, p. 248. Edition: Tegg, 1835.
�GIORDANO BRUNO.
11
ten years after the death of Copernicus, and ten years before
the birth of Bacon. At the age of fifteen he became a novice
in the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, and after his
year’s novitiate expired he took the monastic vows. Study
ing deeply, he became heretical, and an act of accusation was
drawn up against the boy of sixteen. Eight years later he
was threatened with another trial for heresy. A third pro
cess was more be to dreaded, and in his twenty-eighth year
Bruno fled from his persecutors. He visited Borne, Noli,
Venice, Turin and Padua. At Milan he made the acquain
tance of Sir Philip Sidney. After teaching for some time in
th® university, he went to Chambery, but the ignorance and
bigotry of its monks were too great for his patience. He
next visited Geneva, but although John Calvin was dead, his
dark spirit still remained, and only flight preserved Bruno
from the fate of Servetus. Through Lyons he passed to
Toulouse, where he was elected Public Lecturer to the
University. In 1579 he went to Paris. The streets were still
foul with the blood of the Bartholomew massacres, but Bruno
declined a professorship at the Sorbonne, a condition of which
Was attending mass. Henry the Third, however, made him
Lecturer Extraordinary to the University. Paris at length
became too hot to hold him, and he went to London, where
he lodged with the French ambassador. His evenings were
mostly spent with Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, Dyer,
and Hervey. So great was his fame that he was invited to
read at the University of Oxford, where he also held a public
debate with its orthodox professors on the Copernican
astronomy. Leaving London in 1584, he returned to Paris,
and there also he publicly disputed with the Sorbonne. His
safety being once more threatened, he went to Marburg, and
thence to Wittenburg, where he taught for two years. At
Helenstadt he was excommunicated by Boetius. Bepairing
to Frankfort, he made the acquaintance of a Venetian noble
man, who lured him to Venice and betrayed him to the
Inquisition. Among the charges against him at his trial were
these : “ He is not only a heretic, but an heresiarch. He has
Witten works in which he highly lauds the Queen of England
and other heretical monarchs. HeThas written divers things'
touching religion, which are contrary to the faith.” The
Venetian Council transferred him to Borne, where he languished
for seven years in a pestiferous dungeon, and was repeatedly
�12
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
tortured, according to the hellish code of the Inquisition.
At length, on February 10, 1600, he was led out to the
■church of Santa Maria, and sentenced to be burnt alive, or,
as_the Holy Church hypocritically phrased it, to be punished
'~77as mercifully as possible, and without effusion of blood.”
Haughtily raising his head, he exclaimed : “ You are more
afraid to pronounce my sentence than I to receive it.” He
was allowed a week’s grace for recantation, but without avail;
and on the 17th of February, 1600, he was burnt to death
on the Field of Flowers. To the last he was brave and
'defiant; he contemptuously pushed aside the crucifix they
presented him to kiss; and, as one of his enemies said, he
died without a plaint or a groan.
Such heroism stirs the blood more than the sound of a
trumpet. Bruno stood at the stake in solitary and awful
grandeur. There was not a friendly face in the vast crowd
around him. It was one man against the world. Surely the
knight of Liberty, the champion of Freethought, who lived
such a life and died such a death, without hope of reward on
earth or in heaven, sustained only by his indomitable man
hood, is worthy to be accounted the supreme martyr of all
time. He towers above the less disinterested martyrs of
Faith like a colossus ; the proudest of them might walk under
him without bending.
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE.
The author of the famous History of Civilisation believed in
God and immortality, but he rej ected all the special tenets of
Christianity. He died at Damascus on May 29, 1862. His
incoherent utterances in the fever that carried him off showed
that his mind was still dwelling on the uncompleted purpose
of his life. “Oh my book,” he exclaimed, “ my book, I
shall never finish my book I ” * His end, however, was quite
peaceful. His biographer says : “ He had a very quiet night,
with intervals of consciousness ; but at six in the morning a
sudden and very marked change for the worse became but
too fearfully evident; and at a quarter past ten he quietly
breathed his last, with merely a wave of the hand.” f
* Pilgrim Memories, by J. Stuart Glennie, p. 508.
t Life and Writings of Henry Thomas Buckle, by A. Huth; Vol. II. 252.
�LORD BYRON.
LORD
13
BYRON.
No one can read Byron’s poems attentively without seeing
that he was not a Christian, and this view is amply corrobo
rated by his private letters, notably the very explicit one to
Hobhouse, which has only been recently published. Even
the poet’s first and chief biographer, Moore, was con
strained to admit that “ Lord Byron was, to the last, a
sceptic.”
Byron was born at Hoiles Street, London, on January 22,
1788. His life was remarkably eventful for a poet, but its
history is so easily accessible, and so well known, that we need
not summarise it here. His death occurred at Missolonghi
on April 19, 1824. Greece was then struggling for indepen
dence, and Byron devoted his life and fortune to her cause.
His sentiments on this subject are expressed with power and
dignity in the lines written at Missolonghi on his thirty-sixth
birthday. The faults of his life were many, but they were
redeemed by the glory of his death.
Exposure, which his declining health was unfitted to bear,
brought on a fever, and the soldier-poet of freedom died with
out proper attendance, far from those he loved. He conversed
a good deal at first with his friend Parry, who records that
“ he spoke of death with great composure.” The day before
he expired, when his friends and attendants wept round his
bed at the thought of losing him, he looked at one of them
steadily, and said, half smiling, “ Oh questa e una bella
scena 1”—Oh what a fine scene ! After a fit of delirium, he
called his faithful servant Fletcher, who offered to bring pen
and paper to take down his words. “ Oh no,” he replied,
“ there is no time. Go to my sister—tell her—go to Lady
Byron—you will see her, and say------ .” Here his voice be
came indistinct. For nearly twenty minutes he muttered to
himself, but only a woi;d now and then could be distinguished
He then said, “ Now, I have told you all.” Fletcher replied
that he had not understood a word. “ Not understand me ?”
exclaimed Byron, with a look of the utmost distress, “ what a
pity !—then it is too late ; all is over.” He tried to utter a
few more words, but none were intelligible except “my sister
—my child.” After the doctors had given him a sleeping
draught, he muttered “ Poor Greece !—poor town !—my poor
servants !—my hour is come !—I do not care for death—but
�14
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
why did I not go home ?—There are things that make the
world dear to me : for the rest I am content to die.” He
spoke also of Greece, saying “ I have given her my time, my
means, my health—and now I give her my life! what could I
do more ?” About six o’clock in the evening he said “ Now
I shall go to sleep.” He then fell into the slumber from
which he never woke. At a quarter past six on the following
day, he opened his eye3 and immediately shut them again.
The physicians felt his pulse—he was dead.
*
His work was done. As Mr. Swinburne wrote in 1865,
“ k little space was allowed him to show at least an heroic
purpose, and attest a high design; then, with all things un
finished before him and behind, he fell asleep after many
troubles and triumphs. Few can have ever gone wearier to
the grave ; none with less fear.”f The pious guardians of
Westminster Abbey denied him sepulture in its holy precincts,
but he found a grave at Hucknall, and “ after life’s fitful fever
he sleeps well.”
RICHARD CARLILE.
Richard Carlile was born at Ashburton, in Devonshire, on
December 8, 1790. His whole life was spent in advocating
Freethought and Republicanism, and in resisting the Blas
phemy laws. His total imprisonments for the freedom of
the press amounted to nine years and four months. Thir
teen days before his death he penned these words : ‘ The
enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with 'who m no
peace can be made. Idolatry will not parley ; superstition
will not treat on covenant. They must be uprooted for
public and individual safety.” Carlile died on February 10,
1843. He was attended in his last illness by Dr. Thomas
Lawrence, the author of the once famous Lectures on Man.
Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his
body to dissection. His wish was complied with by the
family, and the post-mortem examination was recorded in
the Lancet. The burial took place at Kensal Green Cemetary, where a clergyman insisted on reading the Church
Service over his remains. “ His eldest son Richard,” says
Mr. Holyoake, “ who represented his sentiments as well as
* Byrons Life and Letters by Thomas Moore, pp. £84—688.
t Fieface (p. 28, to a Selection from Byron's poems, 1865.
�WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD.
15
his name, very properly protested against the proceedings, as
an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes
of the family. Of course the remonstrance was disre
garded, and Richard, his brothers, and their friends, left
the ground.”* After their departure, the clergyman called
the great hater of priests his “ dear departed brother,” and
declared that the rank Materialist had died “ in the sure and
certain hope of a glorious resurrection.”
WILLIAM KING-DON CLIFFORD.
Professor Clifford died all too early of consumption on
March 3, 1879. He was one of the gentlest and most amiable
of men, and the centre of a large circle of distinguished
friends. His great ability was beyond dispute ; in the higher
mathematics he enjoyed a European reputation. Nor was his
courage less, for he never concealed his heresy, but rather
proclaimed it from the housetops. A Freethinker to the
heart’s core, he “utterly dismissed from his thoughts, as
being unprofitable or worse, all speculations on a future or
unseen world ” ; and “as never man loved life more, so never
man feared death less.”' He fulfilled, continues Mr. Pollock,
“ well and truly the great saying of Spinoza, often in his
mind and on his lips : Homo liber de nulla re minus quam
de mortc cogitat. [A free man thinks less of nothing than
of death.J’t Clifford faced the inevitable with the utmost
calmness.
“ Foi’ a week he had known that it might come at any moment, and
looked to it stedfastly. So calmly had he received the warning which
conveyed this knowledge that it seemed at the instant as if he did not
understand it. . . . He gave careful and exact directions as to the
disposal of his works. . . . More than this, his interest in the outer
world, his affection for his friends and his pleasure in their pleasures,
did not desert him to the very last. He still followed the course of
events, and asked for public news on the morning of his death, so
strongly did he hold fast his part in the common weal and in active
social life.”J
Clifford was a great loss to “ the good old cause.” He was
a most valiant soldier of progress, cut off before a tithe of
his work was accomplished.
* Life and Character of Richard Carlile, by G. J. Holyoake.
t Lectures and Essays, by Professor Clifford. Pollock’s Introduction, p. 25.
t Ibid, p. 26.
�16
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
ANTHONY COLLINS.
Anthony Collins was one of the chief English Freethinkers
of the eighteenth century. Professor Fraser calls him “ this
remarkable man,”* Swift refers to him as a leading sceptic
of that age. He was a barrister, born of a good Essex family
in 1676, and dying on Dec. 13, 1729. Locke, whose own cha
racter was manly and simple, was charmed by him. “ He
praised his love of truth and moral courage,” says Professor
Fraser, “ as superior to almost any other he had ever known,
and by his will he made him one of his executors.”* Yet
f bigotry was then so_ rampant, that Bishop Berkeley, who,|
7 according to Pope, had every—virtue under heaven,|
| actually said in the Guardian that the author of AT(
j Discourse, on Freethinking—“ deserved—io—he—deniecL the_>
common benefits of air and water.” Collins afterwards
engaged in controversy with the clergy, wrote against
priestcraft, and debated with Dr. Samuel Clarke “ about
necessity and the moral nature of man, stating the argu
ments against human freedom with a logical force unsur
passed by any necessitarian.”j" With respect to Collins’s con
troversy on “ the soul,” Professor. Huxley. says : “I do not
think anyone can read the letters which passed between
Clarke and Collins, without - admitting that Collins, who
writes with wonderful power and closeness of reasoning, has
by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes ; and that in this battle the Goliath
of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was con
sidered Orthodoxy.’’^ According to Berkeley, Collins had
announced “ that he was able to demonstrate the impossibility of God’s existence,” but this is probably the exaggera
tion of an opponent. We may be sure, however, that he was
a very thorough sceptic with regard to Christianity. His
death is thus referred to in the Biographia Britannica
“Notwithstanding all the reproaches cast upon Mr. Collins as an
enemy to all religion, impartiality obliges us to remark, what is said,
and generally believed to be true, upon his death-bed he declared
‘ That, as he had always endea vored to the best of his abilities, to serve
his God, his king, and his country, so he was persuaded he was going
to the place which God had designed for those who love him ’: to
which he added that ‘ The catholic religion is to love God, and to love
* Berkeley, by A. O. Fraser, LL.D., p. 99.
t Critiques and Addresses, p. 324.
t Ibid, p. 99.
�17
CONDORCET.
man’; and he advised such as were about him to have a constant
regard to these principles.”
There is probably a good deal apocryphal in this passage,
but it is worthy of notice that nothing is said about any
dread of death. Another memorable fact is that Collins left
his library to an opponent, Dr. Sykes. It was large and
curious, and always open to men of letters. Collins was so
earnest a seeker for truth, and so candid a controversialist,
that he often furnished his antagonists with books to confute
himself.
CONDOBCET.
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, was
born at Bibemont in Picardy, in 1743. As early as 1764 he
composed a work on the integral calculus. In 1773 he was
appointed perpetual secretary of the French Academy. He
was an intense admirer of Voltaire, and wrote a life of that
great man.
At the commencement of the Bevolution he
ardently embraced the popular cause. In 1791 he represented
Paris in the Legislative Assembly, of which he was imme
diately elected secretary. It was on his motion that, in the
following year, all orders of nobility were abolished. Elected
by the Aisne department to the new Assembly of 1792, he
was named a member of the Constitutional Committee, which
also included Danton and Thomas Paine. After the execu
tion of Louis XVI., he was opposed to the excesses of the
extreme party. Always showing the courage of his convic
tions, he soon became the victim of proscription. “ He cared
as little for his life,” says Mr. Morley, “ as Danton or St. Just
cared for theirs. Instead of coming down among the men of
the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the Mountain
to its face.” While hiding from those who thirsted for his
blood, and burdened with anxiety as to the fate of his wife
and child, he wrote, without a single book to refer to, his novel
and profound Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Proges de
I’Esprit Humain. Mr. Morley says that “Among the many
wonders of an epoch of portents this feat of intellectual
abstraction is not the least amazing.” Despite the odious law
that whoever gave refuge to a proscribed person should suffer
death, Condorcet was, offered shelter by a noble-hearted womam.
. who said “ If you are outside the law, we are not outside
humanity.” But he would not bring peril upon her house
B
�J8
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
and he went forth to his doom. Arrested at Clamart-sousMeudon, he was conducted to prison at Bourg-la-Reine.
Wounded in the foot, and exhausted with fatigue and priva
tion, he was flung into a miserable cell. It was the 27th of
March, 1794. “On the morrow,” says Mr. Morley, “when
the gaolers came to see him, they found him stretched upon
the ground, dead and stark. So he perished—of hunger and
weariness, say some; of poison ever carried by him in a ring,
say others.”* The Abbe Morellet, in his narrative of the
death of Condorcet (Memoires, ch. xxiv.), says that the poison
was a mixture of stramonium and opium, but he adds that
the surgeon described the death as due to apoplexy. In any
case Condorcet died like a hero, refusing to save his life at
the cost of another’s danger.
ROBERT COOPER.
Robert Cooper was secretary to Robert Owen and editor of
the London Investigator. His lectures on the Bible and the
Immortality of the Soul still enjoy a regular sale, as well as
his Holy Scriptures Analysed. He was a thorough-going
Materialist, and he never wavered in this philosophy. He died
on May 3, 1868. The National Reformer of July 26, 1868,
contains a note written by Cooper shortly before his death.
“ At a moment when the hand of death is suspended over me, my
theological opinions remain unchanged; months of deep and silent
cogitation, under the pressure of long suffering, have confirmed rather
than modified them. I calmly await therefore all risk attached to
these convictions. Conscious that, if mistaken, I have always been
sincere, I apprehend no disabilities for impressions I cannot resist.”
It may be added that Robert Cooper was no relation to
Thomas Cooper.
DANTON.
Danton, called by Carlyle the Titan of the Revolution, and
certainly its greatest figure after Mirabeau, was guillotined on
April 5, 1794. He was only thirty-five, but he had made a
name that will live as long as the history of France. With
all his faults, says Carlyle, “ he was a Man ; fiery-real, from
the great fire-bosom of Nature herself.” Some of his phrases
are like pyramids, standing sublime above the drifting
MUcellantei.
Y.j John Morley. Vol. I., p. 75.
�DALTON.
19
sand of human speech. It was he who advised “ daring, and
still daring, and ever daring.” It was he who cried “ The
coalesced kings of Europe threaten us, and as our gage of
battle we fling before them the head of a king.” It was he
who exclaimed, in a rapture of patriotism, “Let my name be
blighted, so that France be free.” And what a saying was
that, when his friends urged him to flee from the Terror,
“ One does not carry his country with him at the sole of his
shoe!”
Danton would not flee. “ They dare not ” arrest him, he
said ; but he was soon a prisoner in the Luxembourg. “ What
is your name and abode ?” they asked him at the tribunal.
“ My name is Danton,” he answered, “ a name tolerably known
in the Revolution : my abode will soon be Annihilation ; but
I shall live in the Pantheon of History.” Replying to his
infamous Indictment, his magnificent voice “reverberates
with the roar of a lion in the toils.” The President rings his
bell, enjoining calmness, says Carlyle, in a vehement manner.
“ What is it to thee how I defend myself ?” cries Danton;
“ the right of dooming me is thine always. The voice of a
man speaking for his honor and life may well drown the
jingling of thy bell!”
Under sentence of death he preserved, as Jules Claretie
says, that virile energy and superb sarcasm which were the
basis of his character. Fabre d’Eglantine being disquieted
about his unfinished comedy, Danton exclaimed “Des vers ! Des
vers ! Dans huit jours tu en feras plus que tu ne voudras !”• Then
he added nobly, “We have finished our task, let us sleep.”
Thus the time passed in prison.
On the way to the guillotine Danton bore himself proudly.
Poor Camille Desmoulins struggled and writhed in the cart,
which was surrounded by a howling mob. “ Calm, my
friend,” said Danton, “heed not that vile canaille.” Herault
de Sechelles, whose turn it was to die first, tried to embrace his
friend, but the executioners prevented him. “ Fools,” said
Danton, “you cannot prevent our heads from meeting in the
basket.” At the foot of the scaffold the thought of home
flashed through his mind. “ 0 my wife,” he exclaimed, “ my
well-beloved, I shall never see thee more then !” But recover
ing himself, he said “Danton, no weakness!” Looking the
executioner in the face, he cried with his great voice, “ You
will show my head to the crowd; it is worth showing ; you
�20
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
don’t see the like in these days.” The next minute that
head, the one that might have guided France best, was severed
from his body by the knife of the guillotine. What a man
this Danton was ! With his Herculean form, his huge black
head, his mighty voice, his passionate nature, his fiery cour
age, his strong sense, his poignant wit, his geniality, and his
freedom from cant, he was a splendid and unique figure. An
Atheist, _hg__ perished in. trying to arrestbloodshed. Eobespiere, the Deist^ continued the bloodshed till it drowned him.
The two men were as diverse in nature as in creed, and Danton
killed by Eobespierre, as Courtois said, was Pyrrhus killed by a
woman!
[The reader may consult Carlyle's French Revolution, Book vi.,
ch. ii.; and Jules Claretie’s Camille Desmoulins et les Dantonistes, ch. vi.,
DENIS DIDEEOT.
Earely has the world seen a more fecund mind than
Diderot’s. Voltaire called him Pantophile, for everything
came within the sphere of his mental activity. The twenty
volumes of his collected writings contain the germ-ideas of
nearly all the best thought of our age, and his anticipations
of Darwinism are nothing less than extraordinary. He had
not Voltaire’s lightning wit and supreme grace of style, nor
Eousseau’s passionate and subtle eloquence; but he was
superior to either of them in depth and solidity, and he was
surprisingly ahead of his time, not simply in his treatment
of religion, but also in his view of social and political prob
lems. His historical monument is the great Encyclopcedia.
For twenty years he labored on this colossal enterprise,
assisted by the best heads in France, but harassed and
thwarted by the government and the clergy. The work is
out of date now, but it inaugurated an era : in Mr. Morley’s
words, “ it rallied all that was then best in France round
the standard of light and social hope.” Diderot tasted im
prisonment in 1749, and many times afterwards his liberty
was menaced. Nothing, however, could intimidate or divert
him from his task ; and he never quailed when the ferocious
beast of persecution, having tasted the blood of meaner
victims, turned an evil and ravenous eye on him.
Carlyle’s brilliant essay on Diderot is ludicrously unjust.
The Scotch puritan was quite unable to judge the French
�DENIS DIDEROT.
21
atheist. A greater than Carlyle wrote: “ Diderotis Diderot,
a peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or his doings
cheaply is a Philistine, and the name of them is legion.”
Goethe’s dictum outweighs that of his disciple.
Diderot’s character, no less than his genius, was misunder
stood by Carlyle. His materialism and atheism were in
tolerable to a Calvinist steeped in pantheism ; and his freedom
of life, which might be pardoned or excused in a Scotch
poet, was disgusting in a French philosopher. Let not the
reader be biassed by Carlyle’s splenetic utterances on Diderot,
but turn to more sympathetic and impartial judges.
Born at Langres in 1713, Diderot died at Paris 1784. His
life was long, active and fruitful. His personal appearance
is described by Mr. Morley :—“ His admirers declared his
head to be the ideal head of an Aristotle or a Plato. His
brow was wide, lofty, open, gently rounded. The arch of
the eyebrow was full of delicacy ; the nose of masculine
beauty; the habitual expression of the eyes kindly and
sympathetic, but as he grew heated in talk, they sparkled
like fire ; the curves of the mouth bespoke an interesting
mixture of finesse, grace, and geniality. His bearing was
nonchalant enough, but there was naturally in the carriage
of his head, especially when he talked with action, much
dignity, energy and nobleness.”*
His conversational powers were great, and showed the
fertility of his genius. “When I recall Diderot,” wrote
Meister, “ the immense variety of his ideas, the amazing mul
tiplicity of his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the
impetuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all
the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his cha
racter to nature herself, exactly as he used to conceive her—
rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort, gentle and
fierce, simple and majestic, worthy and sublime, but without
any dominating principle, without a master and without a
God.”
Diderot was recklessly prodigal of his ideas, flinging them
without hesitation or reticence among his friends. He was
equally generous in other respects, and friendship was of the
essence of his life. “ He,” wrote Marmontel in his Memoirs,
“ he who was one of the. most enlightened men of the century,
* Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. By John Morley, Vol. I., pp. 39-40.
�22
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
was also one of the most amiable ; and in everything that
touched moral goodness, when he spoke of it freely, I cannot
express the charm of his eloquence. His whole soul was in
his eyes and on his lips; never did a countenance better
depict the goodness of the heart.”
*
Chequered as Diderot’s life had been, his closing years were
full of peace and comfort. Superstition was mortally wounded,
the Church was terrified, and it was clear that the change the
philosophers had worked for was at hand. As Mr. Morley
says, “ the press literally teemed with pamphlets, treatises,
poems, histories, all shouting from the house-tops open
destruction to beliefs which fifty years before were actively
protected against so much as a whisper in the closet. Every
form of literary art was seized and turned into an instru
ment in the remorseless attack on L’Infame.” Diderot rejoiced
at all this, as largely the fruit of his own labors. He was
held in general esteem by the party of progress throughout
Europe. Catherine the Great’s generosity secured him a
steady income, which he had never derived from his literary
labors. His townsmen of Langres placed his bust among the
worthies in the town hall. More than a hundred years later
a national statue of Diderot was unveiled at his native place,
and the balance of subscriptions was devoted to publishing a
popular selection of his works. Truly did this great Atheist
say, looking forward to the atoning future, “ Posterity is for
the philosopher what the other world is for the devout.
In the spring of 1784 Diderot was attacked by what he felt
was his last illness. Dropsy set in, and in a few months the
end came. A fortnight before his death he was removed
from the upper floor in the Rue Taranne, which he had occu
pied for thirty years, to palatial rooms provided for him by
the Czarina in the Rue de Richelieu. Growing weaker every
day, he was still alert in mind.
“He did all he could to cheer the people around him, and amused
himself and them by arranging his pictures and his books. In the
evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on science and
philosophy to the friends who were eager as ever for the last gleanings
of his prolific intellect. In the last conversation that his daughter
heard him carry on, his last words were the pregnant aphorism that
the first step towardsphilosophy is incredulity^^
“ Orf the evening of the 30th of July, 1784 he sat down to table, and
at the end of the meal took an apricot. His wife, with kind solicitude,
remonstrated. Mais quel diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse 1 fHow
�DENIS DIDEROT.
23
the deuce can that hurt me ?] he said, and ate the apricot. Then he
rested his elbow on the table, trifling with some sweetmeats. His
wife asked him a question ; on receiving no answer, she looked up and
saw that he was dead. He had died as the Greek poets say that men
died in the golden age—they passed away as if mastered by sleep’'
*
Grimm gives a slightly different account of Diderot’s death,
omitting the apricot, and stating that his words to his wife
were, “ It is long since I have eaten with so much relish.”!
With respect to the funeral, Grimm says that the cure of
St. Eoch, in whose parish he died, had scruples at first about
burying him, on account of his sceptical reputation and the
doctrines expounded in his writings ; but the priest’s scruples
were overcome, partly by a present of “ fifteen or eighteen
thousand livres.”
According to Mr. Morley, an effort was made to convert
Diderot, or at least to wring from him something like a
retractation.
“ The priest of Saint Sulpice, the centre of the philosophic quarter,
came to visit him two or three times a week, hoping to achieve at least
the semblance of a conversion. Diderot did not encourage conversation
on theology, but when pressed he did not refuse it. One day when
they found, as two men of sense will always find, that they had ample
common ground in matters of morality and good works, the priest
ventured to hint that an exposition of such excellent maxims, accom
panied by a slight retractation of Diderot’s previous works, would have
a good effect on the world. ‘ I dare say it would, monsieur le cure,
but confess that I should be acting an impudent lie.’ And no word of
retractation was ever made.”J
If judging men by the company they keep is a safe rule, we need
have no doubt as to the sentiments which Diderot entertained
to the end. Grimm tells us that on the morning of the very
day he died “ he conversed for a long time and with the
greatest freedom with his friend the Baron D’Holbach,” the
famous author of the System of Nature, compared with
whom, says Mr. Morley, “ the most eager Nescient or Denier
to be found in the ranks of the assailants of theology in our
own day is timorous and moderate.” These men were the
two most earnest Atheists of their generation. Both were
genial, benevolent, and conspicuously generous. D’Holbach
_was learned, eloquent, and trenchant; and Diderot, inTlbnrtff-s——_
opinion, was the greatest genius of the eighteenth century.
* Morley, Vol. II., pp. 259, 260.
t Quoted, from the Revue Retrospective in Assfeat's complete edition of Diderot.
j Morley, Vol. II., p. 258.
�24
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
GEORGE ELIOT.
Marian Evans, afterwards Mrs. Lewes, and finally Mrs.
Cross, was one of the greatest writers of the third quarter of
this century. The noble works of fiction she published under
the pseudonym of George Eliot are known to all. Her earliest
writing was done for the IFesYmmsfer Tfm’ew, a magazine of
marked sceptical tendency. Her inclination to Freethought
is further shown by her translation of Strauss’s famous Life
of Jesus and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity the latter,
being the work of a profound Atheist. George Eliot was, to
some extent, a disciple of Comte, and reckoned a member of
the Society of Positivists. Mr. Myers tells us that in the last
conversation he had with her at Cambridge, they talked of
God, Immortality and Duty, and she gravely remarked how
hypothetical was the first, how improbable was the second,
and how sternly real the last. Whenever in her novels she
speaks in the first person she breathes the same sentiment.
Her biography has been written by her second husband, who
says that “ her long illness in the autumn had left her no
power to rally. She passed away about ten o’clock at night
on the 22nd of December, 1880. She died, as she would
herself have chosen to die, without protracted pain, and with
every faculty brightly vigorous.”* Her body lies in the next
grave to that of George Henry Lewes at Highgate Cemetery ;
her spirit, the product of her life, has, in her own words,
joined “ the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of
the world.”
FREDERICK THE GREAT.
Frederick the Great, the finest soldier of his age, the
maker of Prussia, and therefore the founder of modern
Germany, was born in January, 1712. His life forms the
theme of Carlyle’s masterpiece. Notoriously a disbeliever in
Christianity, as his writings and correspondence attest, he
loved to surround himself with Freethinkers, the most con
spicuous of whom was Voltaire. When the great French
heretic died, Frederick pronounced his eulogium before the
Berlin Academy, denouncing “the imbecile priests,” and
declaring that “ The best destiny they can look for is that
Zife and Letters of George Eliot, by J. W. Cross, Vol. III., p. 439.
�LEON GAMBETTA,
25
they and their vile artifices will remain forever buried in the
darkness. o£ oblivion,, while the fame of Voltaire .will., in.er.eaae__
from age., toage, and transmit his name to immortality.” , , ,
When the old king was on his death-bed, one of his
subjects, solicitous about his immortal soul, sent him a letter
full of pious advice. “Let this,” he said, “be answered
•civilly ; the intention of the writer is good.” Shortly after,
on August 17, 1786, Frederick died in his own fashion.
Carlyle says:
“For the most part he was unconscious, never more than half
conscious. As the wall clock above his head struck eleven, he asked :
‘ What o’clock ?’ ‘ Eleven,’ answered they. ‘ At four,’ murmured he,
I will rise.’ One of his dogs sat on its stool near him ; about mid
night he noticed it shivering for cold : ‘ Throw a quilt over it,’ said or
beckoned he ; that, I think, was his last completely conscious utter
ance. Afterwards, in a severe choking fit, getting at last rid of the
phlegm, he said, La montagne est passe, nous irons mieux—We are on
the hill, we shall go bettei’ now.’ ”*
Better it was. The pain was over, and the brave old king,
who had wrestled with all Europe and thrown it, succumbed
quietly to the inevitable defeat which awaits us all.
LEON GAMBETTA.
Gambetta was the greatest French orator and statesman
of his age. He was one of those splendid and potent figures
who redeem nations from commonplace. To him, more than
to any other man, the present Republic owes its existence.
He played deeply for it in the great game of life and
death after Sedan, and by his titanic -organisation of the
national defence he made it impossible for Louis Napoleon
to reseat himself on the throne with the aid of German
bayonets. Again, in 1877, he saved the Republic he loved
so well from the monarchical conspirators. He defeated their
base attempt to subvert a nation’s liberties, but the struggle
sapped his enormous vitality, which had already been im
paired by the terrible labors of his Dictatorship. He died
at the early age of forty-four, having exhausted his strength
in fighting for freedom. Scarcely a dark thread was left in
the leonine mane of black hair, and the beard matched the
whiteness of.his shroud.
France mourned like one man at the hero’s death. The
Frederick the Great, Vol. VI., p. 694; edition, 1869.
�26
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
people gave him a funeral that eclipsed the obsequies of
r
I
kings. He was carried to his grave by a million citizens.
Yet in the whole of that vast throng, as Mr. Frederic
Harrison remarked, “ there was no emblem of Christ, no priest
of God, not one mutter of heaven, no hollow appeal to the
mockery of the resurrection, no thought but for the great
human loss and human sorrow. It was the first time in the
history of Europe that a foremost man had been laid to rest
/ by a nation in grief, without priest or church, prayer or
hymn.”
Like almost every eminent Republican, Gambetta was a
Freethinker. As Mr. Frederic Harrison says, “ he systemati
cally and formally repudiated any kind of acceptance of
theology.” During his lifetime he never entered a church,
even when attending a marriage or a funeral, but stopped
short at the door, and let who would go inside and listen to
the mummery of the priest. In his own expressive words,
he declined to be “rocked asleep by the myths of childish^
religions.’’. He professed himself an admirer And^a'disciple
of Voltaire—Vadmirateur et le disciple de Voltaire. Every
member of his ministry was a Freethinker, and one of them,
the eminent scientist Paul Bert, a militant Atheist. Speaking
at a public meeting not long before his death, Gambetta
called Comte the greatest thinker of this century ; that Comte
who proposed to “ reorganise society, without God and with
out king, by the systematic cultus of humanity.”
When John Stuart Mill died, a Christian journal, which
died itself a few weeks after, declared he had gone to hell,
and wished all his friends and disciples would follow him.
Several pious prints expressed similar sentiments with regard
to Gambetta. Passing by the English papers, let us look at a
few French ones. The Due de Broglie’s organ, naturally
anxious to insult the statesman who had so signally beaten
him, said that “ he died suddenly after hurling defiance at
God.” The Pays, edited by that pious bully, Paul de Cassagnac, said—“He dies, -poisoned by his own blood. He
set himself up against God. He has fallen. It is fearful.
Bat it is just.” The Catholic Univers said “While he was
recruiting his strength and meditating fresh assaults upon
the Church, and promising himself victory, the tlivine Son
of the Carpenter was preparing his coffin.”
These tasty exhibitions of Christian charity show that
�LEON GAMBETTA.
27
Gambetta lived and died a Freethinker. Yet the sillier sort
of Christians have not scrupled to insinuate and even argue
that he was secretly a believer.
One asinine priest, M.
Feuillet des Conches, formerly Vicar of Notre Dame des
Victoires, and then honorary Chamberlain to the Pope, stated
in the London Times that, about two years before his death,
Gambetta came to his church with a brace of big wax tapers
which he offered in memory of his mother. He also added
that the great orator knelt before the Virgin, dipped his finger
in holy water, and made the sign of the cross. Was there
ever a more absurd story ?
Gambetta was a remarkable
looking man, and extremely well known. He could not have
entered a church unobserved, and had he done so, the story
would have gone round Paris the next day.
Yet nobody
heard of it till after his death. Either the priest mistook
some portly dark man for Gambetta, or he was guilty of a
pious fraud.
According to another story, Gambetta said “ I am lost ”
when the doctors told him he could not recover. But the
phrase Je suis perdu has no theological significance. Nothing
is more misleading than a literal translation. Gambetta
simply meant “It is all over then.” This monstrous per
version of a simple phrase could only have arisen from sheer
malice or gross ignorance of French.
While lying on his death-bed Gambetta listened to Rabelais,
Moliere, and other favorite but not very pious authors, read
aloud by a young student who adored him. Almost his last
words, as recorded in the Tinies, were these—“Well, I have
suffered so much,, it will be a^deliverance/’ The words are
calm, collected, and truthful. There is no rant and no quail
ing. It is the natural language of a strong man confronting
Death after long agony. Shortly after he breathed his last.
The deliverance had come. Still lay the mighty heart and
the fertile brain that had spent themselves for France, and
the silence was only broken by the sobs of dear friends who
would have died to save him. No priest administered “ the
consolations of religion,” and he expressly ordered that he
should be buried without religious rites. His great heroic
genius was superior to the creeds, seeing through them and
over them. He lived and died a Freethinker, like nearly all
the great men since Mirabeau and Danton who have built
up the freedom and glory of France.
�.28
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
ISAAC GENDRE,
The controversy over the death of this Swiss Freethinker
was summarised in the London Echo of July 29, 1881.
“A second case of death-bed conversion of an eminent Liberal to
Roman Catholicism, suggested probably by that of thp great French
philologist Littre, has passed the round of the Swiss papers. A few
days ago the veteran leader of the Freiburg Liberals, M. Isaac Gendre,
died. The Ami du Peuple, the organ of the Freiburg Ultramontanes,
immediately set afloat the sensational news that when HL Gendre
found that his last hour was approaching, he sent his brother to fetch
n priest, in order that the last sacraments might be administered to
him, and the evil which he had done during his life by his persistent
Liberalism might be atoned by bis repentance at the eleventh hour.
This brother, M. Alexandre Gendre, now writes to the papei’ stating
that there is not one word of truth in this story. What possible
benefit can any Church derive from the invention of such tales ?
Doubtless there is a credulous residuum which believes that there
must be ‘ some truth ’ in anything which has once appeared in print.’’
It might be added that many people readily believe what
pleases them, and that a lie which has a good start is very
hard to run down.
EDWARD GIBBON.
Edward Gibbon, the greatest of modern historians, was
born at Putney, near London, on April 27, 1737. His
monumental work, the Decline and Fall of the Homan Empire,
which Carlyle called “ the splendid bridge from the old world
to the new,” is universally known and admired. To have
your name mentioned by Gibbon, said Thackeray, is like
having it written on the dome of St. Peter’s which is seen by
pilgrims from all parts of the earth. Twenty years of his
life were devoted to his colossal History, which incidentally
•conveys his opinion of many problems. His views on Chris
tianity are indicated in his famous fifteenth chapter, which
is a masterpiece of grave and temperate irony. When
Gibbon wrote that “ it was not in this world that the primitive
Christians were desirous of making themselves either agree
able or useful,” every sensible reader understood his meaning.
The polite sneer rankled in the breasts of the clergy, who
replied with declamation and insult. Their answers, how
ever, are forgotten, while his merciless sarcasms live on, and
help to undermine the Church in every fresh generation.
Gibbon did not long survive the completion of his great
�GOETHE.
29
work. The last volumes of the Decline and Fall were pub
lished on M4y 8, 1788, and he died on January 14, 1794.
His malady was dropsy. After being twice tapped in
November, he removed to the house of his devoted friend,
Lord Sheffield. A week before he expired he was obliged,
for the sake of the highest medical attendance, to return to
his lodgings in St. James’s Street, London. The following
account of his last moments was written by Lord Sheffield :
“ During the evening he complained much of his stomach, and of a
feeling of nausea. Soon after nine he took his opium draught and
went to bed. About ten he complained of much pain, and desired that
warm napkins might be applied to his stomach.’ He almost inces
santly expressed a sense of pain till about four o’clock in the morning,
when he said he found his stomach much easier. About seven the
servant asked whether he should send for Mr. Farquhar [the doctor].
He answered, No ; that he was as well as the day before. At about
half-past eight he got out of bed, and said he was ‘ plus adroit ’ than
he had been for three months past, and got into bed again without
assistance, better than usual. About nine he said he would rise. The
servant, however, persuaded him to remain in bed till Mr. Farquhar,
who was expected at eleven, should come. Till about that hour he
spoke with great facility. Mr. Farquhar came at the time appointed,,
and he was then visibly dying. When the valet-de-chambr'e returned,
after attending Mr. Farquhar out of the room, Mr. Gibbon said,
‘ Pourquoi est ce que vous me quittez ?’ [Why do you leave me ?]
This was about half-past eleven. At twelve he drank some brandy
and water from a teapot, and desired his favorite servant to stay with
him. These were the last words he pronounced articulately. To the
last he preserved his senses ; and when he could no longer speak, his
servant having asked a question, he made a sign to show that he
understood him. He was quite tranquil, and did not stir, his eyes half
shut. About a quarter before one he ceased to breathe. The valetde-chambre observed that he did not, at any time, evince the least
sign of alarm or apprehension of death.”
Mr. James Cotter Morison, in his admirable monograph on
Gibbon, which forms a volume of Macmillan’s “ English Men
of Letters ” series, quotes the whole of this passage from
Lord Sheffield with the exception of the last sentence. It
is not easy to decide whether Mr. Morison thought the sen
tence trivial, or hesitated to affront his readers’ susceptibilities.
In our opinion the words we have italicised are the most im
portant in the extract, and should not have been withheld.
GOETHE.
The greatest of German poets died at a ripe old age on
March 22, 1832. He was a Pantheist after the manner of
�30
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
Spinoza, and his countrymen called him the “ great pagan.”
In one of his epigrams he expresses hatred of four things—
garlic, onions, bugs, and the cross. Heine, in his De I'Allentrigne, notices Goethe’s “ vigorous heathen nature,” and his
“ militant antipathy to Christianity.” His English biographer
thus describes his last moments :
“His speech was becoming less and less distinct. The last words
audible were: More light.' The final darkness grew apace, and he
whose eternal longing had been for more Light, gave a parting cry for
it, as he was passing under the shadow of death. He continued to
express himself by signs, drawing letters with his forefinger in the
air, while he had strength, and finally as life ebbed away drawing
figures slowly on the shawl which covered his legs. At half-past
twelve he composed himself in the corner of the chair. The watcher
placed a finger on her lips to intimate that he was asleep. If sleep
it was, it was a sleep in which a great life glided from the world.”*
Let us add that infinite nonsense, from which even Lewes
was obviously not free, has been talked and written about
Goethe’s cry “ More light.” His meaning was of course
purely physical. The eyesight naturally fails in death, all
things grow dim, and the demand for “more light” is
common enough at such times.
HENRY HETHERINGTON.
Henry Hetherington, one of the heroes of “ the free press,”
was born at Compton Street, Soho, London, in 1792. He
very early became an ardent reformer. In 1830 the Gov
ernment obtained three convictions against him for publishing
the Poor Man’s Guardian, and he was lodged for six months
in Clerkenwell gaol. At the end of 1832 he was again im
prisoned there for six months, his treatment being most
cruel. An opening, called a window, but without a pane of
glass, let in the rain and snow by day and night. In 1841
__ he was a third time incarcerated in the Queen’s Bench prison
for four months. This time his crime was “ blasphemy,” in
other words, publishing Haslam’s Petters to the Clergy. He
died on August 24, 1849, in his fifty-seventh year, leaving
behind him his “ Last Will and Testament,” from which we
take the following extracts :
“ As life is uncertain, it behoves every one to make preparations
for death; I deem it therefore a duty incumbent on me, ere I quit
this life, to express in writing, for the satisfaction and guidance of
Life of Goethe, by G. H. Lewes, p. 559.
�HENRY HETHERINGTON.
31
•esteemed friends, my feelings and opinions in reference to our com
mon principles. I adopt this course that no mistake or misapprehen
sion may arise through the false reports of those who officiously and
«
obtrusively obtain access to the death-beds of avowed infidels to
priestcraft and superstition; and who, by their annoying importuni
ties, labor to extort from an opponent, whose intellect is already worn
out and subdued by protracted physical suffering, some trifling ad
mission, that they may blazon it forth to the world as a Death-bed
Confession, and a triumph of Christianity over infidelity.
“ In the first place, then, I calmly and deliberately declare that I
4© not believe in the popular notion of the existence of an Almighty,
All-Wise and Benevolent God—possessing intelligence, and conscious
of his own operations ; because these attributes involve such a mass
of absurdities and contradictions, so much cruelty and injustice on
his part to the poor and destitute portion of his creatures—that, in my
opinion, no rational reflecting mind can, after disinterested investiga
tion, give credence to the existence of such a Being. 2nd. I believe
death to be an eternal sleep—that I shall never live again in this
world, or another, with a consciousness that I am the same identical
person that once lived, performed the duties, and exercised the func
tions of a human being. 3rd. I consider priestcraft and superstition._____
the greatest_obstacle to human improvement and happiness. During
' mf life I have, to the best of my ability, sincerely'anastrenubusly ex
posed and opposed them, and die with a firm conviction that Truth,
Justice, and Liberty will never be permanently established on earth
till every vestige of priestcraft and superstition shall be utterly de
stroyed. 4th. I have ever considered that the only religion useful to
man consists exclusively of the practice of morality, and in the mutual
interchange of kind actions. In such a religion there is no room for
priests—and when I see them interfering at our births, marriages,
and deaths, pretending to conduct us safely through this state of
being to another and happier world, any disinterested person of the
least shrewdness and discernmentmust perceive that their sole aim
js to stultify the minds of the people by theirincohipi-ehensTbre 4oc=------- Ti-ines,' that theymayYhre more eiteef ua Uv fleece the poor deludecTsheep
who listen to their empty babblings and mystifications. 5th. As I have
lived so I die, a determined opponent to their nefarious and plundering
system. I wish my friends, therefore, to deposit my remains in un
consecrated ground, and trust they will allow no priest, or clergyman
of any denomination, to interfere in any way whatever at my
funeral. My earnest desire is, that no relation or friend shall wear
black or any kind of mourning, as I consider it contrary to our
rational principles to indicate respect for a departed friend by com
plying with a hypocritical custom. 6th. I wish those who respect
me, and who have labored in our common cause, to attend my re
mains to their last resting-place, not so much in consideration of
the individual, as to do honor to our just, benevolent and rational
principles. I hope all true Rationalists will leave pompous disp ays
to the tools of priestcraft and superstition.”
Hetherington wrote this Testament nearly two years before
his death, but he signed it with a firm hand three days before
�82
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
he breathed his last, in the presence of Thomas Cooper, who
left it at the Reasoner office for “ the inspection of the curious
or sceptical.” Thomas Cooper is now a Christian, but he
cannot repudiate what he printed at the time, or destroy his
“ personal testimony,” as he called it, to the consistency with
which Hetherington died in the principles of Freethought.
THOMAS HOBBES.
The philosopher of Malmesbury, as he is often called, was
one of the clearest and boldest thinkers that ever lived. His
theological proclivities are well expressed in his witty aphorism
that superstition is religion out of fashion, and religion super
stition in fashion. Although a courageous thinker, Hobbes
was physically timid. This fact is explained by the circum
stances of his birth. In the spring of 1588 all England was
alarmed at the news that the mighty Spanish Armada had
set sail for the purpose of deposing Queen Elizabeth, bringing
the country under a foreign yoke, and re-establishing the
power of the papacy. In sheer fright, the wife of the vicar
of Westport, now part of Malmesbury, gave premature birth
to her second son on Good Friday, the 5 th of April. This
seven months’ child used to say, in later life, that his
mother brought forth himself and a twin brother Fear. He
was delicate and nervous all his days. Yet through strict
temperance he reached the great age of ninety-one, dying on
the 4th of December, 1679.
This parson’s son was destined to be hated by the clergy
for his heresy. The Great fire of 1666, following the Great
Plague of the previous year, excited popular superstition, and
to appease the wrath of God, a new Bill was introduced in
Parliament against Atheism and profaneness. The Committee
to which the Bill was entrusted were empowered to “ receive
information touching ” heretical books, and Hobbes’s Levia
than was mentioned “ in particular.” The old philosopher,
then verging on eighty, was naturally alarmed. Bold as he
was in thought, his inherited physical timidity shrank from
the prospect of the prison, the scaffold, or the stake. He
made a show of conformity, and according to Bishop Kennet,
who is not an irreproachable witness, he partook of the
sacrament. It was said by some, however, that he acted
thus in compliance with the wishes of the Devonshire family,
�THOMAS HOBBES.
*
33
who were his protectors, and whose private chapel he attended.
A noticeable fact was that he always went out before the
sermon, and when asked his reason, he answered that “ they
could teach him nothing but what he knew.” He spoke of
th® chaplain, Dr. Jasper Mayne, as “ a very silly fellow.”
Hated by the clergy, and especially by the bishops ; owing
hig liberty and perhaps his life to powerful patrons ; fearing
that some fanatic might take the parsons’ hints and play the
part of an assassin ; Hobbes is said to have kept a lighted
candle in his bedroom. The fact, if it be such, is not men
tioned in Professor Croom Robertson’s exhaustive biography.
*
It is perhaps a bit of pious gossip. But were the story
authentic, it would not show that Hobbes had any super
natural fears. He was more apprehensive of assassins than
of ghosts and devils. Being very old, too, and his life pre
carious, he might well desire a light in his bedroom in case of
accident or sudden sickness. The story is too trivial to de
serve further notice. Orthodoxy must be hard pushed to
dilate on so simple a thing as this.
According to one Christian tract, which is scarcely worth
mention, although extensively circulated, Hobbes when
dying said “he was about to take a leap in the dark.”
Every dying man might say the same with equal truth. Yet
the story seems fictitious. I can discover no trace of it in
any early authority.
Hobbes does not appear to have troubled himself about
death. Bishop Kennet relates that only “ the winter before
he died he made a warm greatcoat, which he said must last
him three years, and then he. would have such another.”
Even so late as August, 1676, four months before his decease,
he was “ writing somewhat ” for his publisher to “ print in
English.” About the middle of October he had an attack of
strangury, and “ Wood and Kennet both have it that, on
Bearing the trouble was past cure, he exclaimed, ‘ I shall be
glad then to find a hole to creep out of the world at.’
This story was picked up thirty years after Hobbes’s death,
and is probably apocryphal. If the philosopher said anything
©f the kind, he doubtless meant that, being very old, and
without wife, child, or relative to care for him, he would be
glad to find a shelter for his last moments, and to expire in
* Hobbes. By George Croom Robertson. Blackwood and Sons; 1886.
t Robertson, p. 203.
C
�34
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
comfort and peace. At the end of November his right side
was paralysed, and he lost his speech. He “ lingered in a
somnolent state ” for several days, says Professor Robertson,
and “ then his life quietly went out.”
Bishop Kennet was absurd enough to hint that Hobbes’s
“ lying some days in a silent stupefaction, did seem owing to
his mind, more than his body.”* An old man of ninety-one
suffers a paralytic stroke, loses his speech, sinks into unconsciouness, and quietly expires. What could be more natural ?
Yet the Bishop, belonging to an order which always scents a
brimstone flavor round the heretic’s death-bed, must explain
this stupor and inanition by supposing that the moribund
philosopher was in a fit of despair. We have only to add
that Bishop Kennet was not present at Hobbes’s death. His
theory is, therefore, only a professional surmise; and we may
be sure that the wish was father to the thought.
AUSTIN HOLYOAKE.
This stedfast Freethinker was a younger brother of George
Jacob Holyoake. He was of a singularly modest and amiable
nature, and although he left many friends he left not a
single enemy. He was entirely devoted to the Freethought
cause, and satisfied to work hard behind the scenes whilfi
more popular figures took the credit and profit. His assiduity
in the publishing business at Fleet Street, which was osten
sibly managed by his better-known and more fortunate
brother, induced a witty friend to call him “ Jacob’s ladder.”
Afterwards he threw in his lot with Charles Bradlaugh, then
the redoubtable “Iconoclast,” and became the printer and
in part sub-editor of the National lieformer, to whose columns
he was a frequent and welcome contributor. He died on
April 10, 1874, and was interred at Highgate Cemetery, his
funeral being largely attended by the London Freethinkers,
including C. Bradlaugh, C. Watts, G. W. Foote, James Thomson,
and G. J. Holyoake. The malady that carried him off was
consumption; he was conscious almost to the last; and his
only regret in dying, at the comparatively early age of forty
seven, was that he could no longer fight the battle of freedom,
nor protect the youth of his little son and daughter.
* Afemoin of the Cavendiih Family, p, 108.
�VICTOR HUGO.
35
Two days before his death, Austin Holyoake dictated his
last thoughts on religion, which were written down by his
devoted wife, and printed in the National Reformer of April
19, 1874. Part of this document is filled with his mental
history. In the remainder he reiterates his disbelief in the
cardinal doctrines of Christianity. The following extracts are
interesting and pertinent:
“ Christians constantly tell Freethinkers that their principles of
‘ negation,’ as they term them, may do very well for health ; but when
the hour of sickness and approaching death arrives they utterly break
down, and the hope of a ! blessed immortality ’ can alone give con
solation. In my own case I have been anxious to test the truth of
this assertion, and have therefore deferred till the latest moment I
think it prudent to dictate these few lines.
“ To desire eternal bliss is no proof that we shall ever attain it;
and it has long seemed to me absurd to believe in that which we wish
for, however ardently. I regard all forms of Christianity as founded
in selfishness. It is the expectation held out of bliss through all
eternity, in return for the profession of faith in Christ and him cruci
fied, that induces the erection of temples of worship in all Chris
tian lands. Remove the extravagant promise, and you will hear very
little of the Christian religion.
“ As I have stated before, my mind being free from any doubts on
these bewildering matters of speculation, I have experienced
for twenty years the most perfect mental repose ; and now I find that
the near approach of death, the ‘ grim King of Terrors,’ gives me not
the slightest alarm. I have suffered, and am suffering, most
intensely both by night and day; but this has not produced the least
symptom of change of opinion. No amount of bodily torture can
alter a mental conviction. Those who, under pain, say they see the
error of their previous belief, had never thought out the subject for
themselves.”
These are words of transparent sincerity; not a phrase is
strained, not a line aims at effect. Beading them, we feel
in presence of an earnest man bravely confronting death, con
sciously sustained by his convictions, and serenely bidding the
world farewell.
VICTOR HUGO.
The greatest French poet of this century, perhaps the
greatest French poet of all time, was a fervent Theist,
reverencing the prophet of Nazareth as a man, and holding that
“ the divine tear” of Jesus and “ the human smile” of
Voltaire “compose the sweetness of the present civilisation.”
But he was perfectly free from the trammels of' creeds, and
he hated priestcraft, like despotism, with a perfect hatred.
�36
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
In one of his striking later poems, Religion et les Religions, he
derides and denounces the tenets and pretensions of Chris
tianity. The Devil, he says to the clergy, is only the monkey
of superstition ; your Hell is an outrage on Humanity and a
blasphemy against God ; and when you tell me that your
deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must be
very ugly.
As a man, as well as a writer, there was something magni
ficently grandiose about him. Subtract him from the nine
teenth century, and you rob it of much of its glory. For
nineteen years on a lonely channel island, an exile from the
land of his birth and his love, he nursed the conscience of
humanity within his mighty heart, brandishing the lightnings
and thunders of chastisement over the heads of the political
brigands who were stifling a nation, and prophesying their
certain doom. When it came, after Sedan, he returned to
Paris, and for fifteen years he was idolised by its people.
There was great mourning at his death, and “ all Paris ”
attended his funeral.' But true to the simplicity of his life,
he ordered that his body should lie in a common coffin, which
contrasted vividly with the splendid procession. France
buried him, as she did Gambetta; he was laid to rest in the
Church of St. Genevieve, re-secularised as the Pantheon for
the occasion ; and the interment took place without any
religious rites.
Hugo’s great oration on Voltaire, in 1878, roused the ire
of the Bishop of Orleans, who reprimanded him in a public
letter. The freethinking poet sent a crushing reply :
“ France had to pass an ordeal. France was free. A man traitor
ously seized her in the night, threw her down, and garroted her. If a
people could be killed, that man had slain France. He made her dead
enough for him to reign over her. He began his reign, since it was a
reign, with perjury, lying in wait, and massacre. He continued it by
oppression, by tyranny, by despotism, by an unspeakable parody of
religion and justice. He was monstrous and little. The Te Deum,
Magnificat, Salvum fac, Gloria tibi, were sung for him. Who sang
them ? Ask yourself. The law delivered the people up to him. The
church delivered God up to him. Under that man sank down right,
honor, country; he had beneath his feet oath, equity, probity, the glory
of the flag, the dignity of men, the liberty of citizens. That man’s
.prosperity disconcerted the human conscience. It lasted nineteen
years. During that time you were in a palace. I was in exile. I pity
you, sir.”
Despite this terrible rebuff to Bishop Dupanloup, another
�DAVID HUME.
37
priest, Cardinal Guibert, Archbishop of Paris, had the temerity
and bad taste to obtrude himself when Victor Hugo lay dying
in 1885. Being born on February 26, 1802, he was in his
eighty-fourth year, and expiring naturally of old age. Had
the rites of the Church been performed on him in such cir
cumstances, it would have been an insufferable farce. Yet
the Archbishop wrote to Madame Lockroy, offering to bring
personally “ the succor and consolation so much needed in
these cruel ordeals.” Monsieur Lockroy at once replied as
follows:
“ Madame Lockroy, who cannot leave the bedside of her father-in?
law, begs me to thank you for the sentiments which you have ex
pressed with so much eloquence and kindness. As regards M. Victor
Hugo, he has again said within the last few days, that he had no wish
during his illness to be attended by a priest of any persuasion. We
should be wanting in our duty if we did not respect his resolution.”*
Hugo’s death-chamber was thus unprofaned by the presence
of a priest. He expired in peace, surrounded by the beings
he loved. According to the Times correspondent in Paris,
“ Almost his last words, addressed to his granddaughter,
were, ‘ Adieu, Jeanne, adieu!’ And his last movement of
consciousness was to clasp his grandson’s hand.”
The
hero-poet bade his charming grandchildren adieu ; but the
world will not bid them adieu, any more than him, for he
has immortalised them in his imperishable A’Art d’etre Grandpere, every page of which is scented with the deathless per
fume of adorable love.
DAVID HUME.
Professor Huxley ventures to call David Hume “ the most
acute thinker of the eighteenth century, even though it pro
duced Kant.”t Hume’s greatness is no less clearly acknow
ledged by Joseph De Maistre, the foremost champion of the
Papacy in our own century. “ I believe,” he says, “ that
taking all into account, the eighteenth century, so fertile in
this respect, has not produced a single enemy of religion who
can be compared with him. His cold venom is far more
dangerous than the foaming rage of Voltaire. If ever, among
men who have heard the gospel preached, there has existed a
veritable Atheist (which I will not undertake to decide) it is
he.”J Allowing for the personal animosity in his estimate
* London Times, May 23, 1885: Paris Correspondent’s letter,
t Lay Sermons, p. 141.
J Lettres sur V Inquisition, pp. 147, 148.
�38
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
of Hume, De Maistre is as accurate as Huxley. The immor
tal Essays attest both his penetration and his scepticism ; the
one on Miracles being a perpetual stumbling-block to Christian
apologists. With superb irony, Hume closes that portentous
discourse with a reprimand of “ those dangerous friends or
disguised enemies to the Christian Religion, who have under
taken to defend it by the principles of human reason.” He
reminds them that “our most holy religion is founded on
faith, not on reason” He remarks that Christianity was “ not
only attended by miracles, but even at this day cannot be
believed by any reasonable person without one.” For
“whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious
of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all
the principles of his understanding, and gives him a deter
mination to believe what is most contrary to custom and ex
perience.”
Hume was bom at Edinburgh on April 26, 1711. His life
was the uneventful one of a literary man. Besides his Essays,
he published a History of England, which was the first serious
effort in that direction. Judged by the standard of our day
it is inadequate ; but it abounds in philosophical reflections of
the highest order, and its style is nearly perfect. Gibbon,
who was a good judge of style, had an unbounded admiration
for Hume’s “ careless inimitable beauties.”
Fortune, however, was not so kind to him as fame. At the
age of forty, his frugal habits had enabled him to save no
more than £1,000. He reckoned his income at £50 a year,
but his wants were few, his spirit was cheerful, and there
were few prizes in the lottery of life for which he would have
made an exchange. In 1775 his health began to fail.
Knowing that his disorder (hemorrhage of the bowels) would
prove fatal, he made his will, and wrote My Own Life, the
conclusion of which, says Huxley, “ is one of the most cheer
ful, simple and dignified leave-takings of life and all its con
cerns, extant.” He died on August 25, 1776, and was buried
a few days later on the eastern slope of Calton Hill, Edinburgh,
his body being “ attended by a great concourse of people, who
seem to have anticipated for it the fate appropriate to wizards
and necromancers.”*
Dr. Adam Smith, the great author of the Wealth of Nations,
Ilume, by Professor Huxley, p. 43.
�M. LITTRE.
39
was one of Hume’s most intimate friends. He tells us that
Hume went to London in April, 1776, and soon after his re
turn he “ gave up all hope of recovery, but submitted with
the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency
and resignation.” His cheerfulness was so great that many
people could not believe he was dying. ft Mr. Hume’s mag
nanimity and firmness were such,” says Adam Smith, “ that
his most affectionate friends knew that they hazarded nothing
in talking and writing to him as a dying man, and that, so
far from being hurt by this frankness, he was rather pleased
and flattered by it.” His chief thought in relation to the
possible prolongation of his life, which his friends hoped,
although he told them their hopes were groundless, was that
he would “ have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of
some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” On August 8,
Adam Smith went to Kirkcaldy, leaving Hume in a very
weak state but still very cheerful. On August 28, he received
the following letter from Dr. Black, the physician, announcing
the philosopher’s death.
“ Edinburgh, Monday, Aug. 26,1776. Dear Sir, Yesterday, about
four o’clock, afternoon, Mr. Hume expired. The near approach of
his death became evident in the night between Thursday and Friday,
when his disease became excessive, and soon weakened him so much,
that he could no longer rise out of his bed. He continued to the last
perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He
never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he
had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with
affection and tenderness. I thought it improper to write to bring you
over, especially as I heard that he had dictated a letter to you, desiring
you not to come. When he became weak it cost him an effort to speak,
and he died in such a happy composure of mind that nothing could
exceed it.”
“Thus,” says Adam Smith, “died our most excellent and
never to be forgotten friend. . . . Upon the whole, I have
always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death
as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will
permit.”*
M. LITTRE.
This great French Positivist died in 1882 at the ripe age
of eighty-one. M. Littre was one of the foremost writers in
* Letter to William Strahan, dated November 9, 1776, and usually prefixed to
Hume’s History of England.
�40
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
France. His monumental “ Dictionary of the French Lan
guage ” is the greatest work of its kind in the world. As a
scholar and a philosopher his eminence was universally recog
nised. His character was so pure and sweet that a Catholic
lady called him “ a saint who does not believe in God.”
Although not rich, his purse was ever open to the claims of
parity. He was one who “did good by stealth,” and his
benefactions were conferred without respect to creed. A
Freethinker himself, he patronised the Catholic orphanage near
his residence, and took a keen interest in the welfare of its
inmates. He was an honor to France, to the world, and to
the Humanity which he loved and served instead of God.
M. Littre’s wife was an ardent Catholic, yet she was
allowed to follow her own religious inclinations without the
least interference. The great Freethinker valued liberty of
conscience above all other rights, and what he claimed for
himself he conceded to others. He scorned to exercise autho
rity even in the domestic circle, where so much tyranny is
practised.
His wife, however, was less scrupulous. After
enjoying for so many years the benefit of his steadfast tolera
tion, she took advantage of her position to exclude his friends
from his death-bed, to have him baptised in his last moments,
and to secure his burial in consecrated ground with pious
rites. Not satisfied with this, she even allowed it to be under
stood that her husband had recanted his heresy and died in
the bosom of the Church. The Abbe Huvelin, her confessor,
who frequently visited M. Littre during his last illness, assisted
her in the fraud.
There was naturally a disturbance at M. Littre’s funeral.
As the Standard correspondent wrote, his friends and dis
ciples were “ very angry at this recantation in extremis, and
claimed that dishonest priestcraft took advantage of the dark
ness cast over that clear intellect by the mist of approaching
death to perform the rites of the Church over his semi
inanimate body.” While the body was laid out in Catholic
fashion, with crucifixes, candles, and priests telling their
beads, Dr. Galopin advanced to the foot of the coffin and
spoke as follows :—
“ Master, you used to call me your son, and you loved me. I remain
your disciple and your defender. I come, in the name of Positive
*
Philosophy, to claim the rights of universal Freemasonry. A deception
has been practised upon us, to try and steal you from thinking
�M. LITTRE.
41
humanity. But the future will judge your enemies and ours. Master
we will revenge you by making our children read your books.;"
At the grave M. Wyrouboff, editor of the Comtist review,
La Philosophic Positive, founded by M. Littre, delivered a
brief address to the Freethinkers who remained, which con
cluded thus—
“ Littre proved by his example that it is possible for a man to
possess a noble and generous heart, and at the same time espouse a
doctrine which admits nothing beyond what is positively real and
which prevents any recantation. And gentlemen, in spite of deceptive
appearances, Littre died as he had lived, without contradictions or weak
ness. All those who knew that calm and serene mind—and I was of
the number of those who did—are well aware that it was irrevocably
closed to the ‘ unknowable,’ and that it was thoroughly prepared to
meet courageously the irresistible laws of nature. And now sleep in
peace, proud and noble thinker ! You will not have the eternity of a
world to come, which you never expected ; but you leave behind you
your country that you strove honestly to serve, the Republic which
you always loved, a generation of disciples who will remain faithful
to you; and last, but not least, you leave your thoughts and your
virtues to the whole world. Social immortality, the only beneficent
and fecund immortality, commences for you to-day.”
M. Wyrouboff has since amply proved his statements.
The English press creditably rejected the story of M.
Littre’s recantation. The Daily News sneered at it, the
Times described it as absurd, the Standard said it looked untrue. But the Morning Advertiser was still more outspoken.
It said:—
s‘ There can hardly be a doubt that M. Littre died ■ a steadfast ad
herent to the principles he so powerfully advocated during his laborious
and distinguished life. The Church may claim, as our Paris corres
pondent, in his interesting note on the subject, tells us she is already
claiming, the death-bed conversion of the great unbeliever, who for
the last thirty-five years was one of her most active and formidable
enemies. She has attempted to take the same posthumous revenge
on Voltaire, on Paine, and on many others, who were described by
Roman Catholic writers as calling in the last dreadful hour for the
Spiritual support they held up to ridicule in the confidence of health
and. the presumption of their intellect.”
In the Paris Gaulois there appeared a letter from the Abbe
Huvelin, written very ambiguously, and obviously intended to
mislead. But one fact stands out clear. This priest was
only admitted to visit M. Littre as a friend, and he was not
allowed to baptise him. The Archbishop of Paris also, in
his official organ, La Semaine Religieuse, admitted that “he
received the sacrament of baptism on the morning of the very
�42
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
day of his death, not from the hands of the priest, who had not
yet arrived, but from those of Madame Littrg.” The Arch
bishop, however, insists that he “ received the ordinance in
perfect consciousness and with his own full consent.” Now
as M. Littre was eighty-one years old, as he had been for
twelve months languishing with a feeble hold on life, during
which time he was often in a state of stupor, and as this was
the very morning of his death, I leave the reader to estimate
the value of what the Archbishop calls “ perfect consciousness
and full consent.” If any consent was given by the dying
Freethinker, it was only to gratify his wife and daughter, and
at the last moment when he had no will to resist; for if he
had been more compliant they would certainly have baptised
him before. Submission in these circumstances counts for
nothing ; and in any case there is forceful truth in M. Littre’s
words, written in 1879 in his “Conservation, Revolution, et
Positivisme”—a whole life passed without any observance of
religious rites must outweigh the single final act.”
Unfortunately for the clericals, there exists a document
which may be considered M. Littrd’s last confession. It is an
article written for the Comtist review a year before his death,
entitled, “ Pour la Derniere Fois ”—For the Last Time.
While writing it he knew that his end was not far off. “ For
many months,” he’says, “my sufferings have prostrated me
with dreadful persistence. . . Every evening when I have
to be put to bed, my pains are exasperated, and often I have
not the strength to stifle cries which are grievous to me and
grievous to those who tend me.” After the article was com
pleted his malady increased. Fearing the worst, he wrote to
his friend, M. Caubet, as follows :—
“ Last Saturday I swooned away for a long time. It is for that
reason I send you, a little prematurely, my article for the Review.
If 1 live, I will correct the proofs as usual. If I die, let it be printed
and published in the Review as a posthumous article. It will be a
last trouble which I venture to give you. The reader must do his
best to follow the manuscript faithfully.”
If I live—If I die ! These are the words of one in the
shadow of Death.
Let us see what M. Littre’s last confession is. I translate
two passages from the article. Referring to Charles Greville,
he says:
“ I feel nothing of what he experienced. Like him, I find it im
�HARRIET MARTINEAU.
43
possible to accept the theory of the world which Catholicism prescribes
*
to all true believers; but I do not regret being without such doctrines,,
and I cannot discover in myself any wish to return to them.”
And he concludes the article with these words :
“ Positive Philosophy, which has so supported me since my thirtieth
year, and which, in giving me an ideal, a craving for progress, the
vision of history and care for humanity, has preserved me from being
a simple negationist, accompanies me faithfully in these last trials.
The questions it solves in its own way, the rules it prescribes by virtue
of its principle, the beliefs it discountenances in the name of our igno
rance of everything absolute ; of these I have in the preceding pages
made an examination, which I conclude with the supreme word of the
commencement: for the last time.”
So much for the lying story of M. Littre’s recantation. In
the words of M. Wyrouboff, although his corpse was accom
panied to the grave by priests and believers, his name will go
down to future generations as that of one who was to the end
servant to science and an enemy to superstition.”
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
This gifted woman died on May 27, 1876, after a long
a®d useful life, filled with literary labor in the cause of
progress. On April 19, less than six weeks before her death,
she wrote her last letter to Mr. H. G. Atkinson, from which
the following is taken.
“ I cannot think of any future as at all probable, except the ‘ annihila
tion’from which some people recoil with so much horror. I find
myself here in the universe—I know not how, whence, or why. I see
everything in the universe go out and disappear, and I see no reason
for supposing that it is an actual and entire death. And for my part,
I have no objection to such an extinction. I well remember the passion
with which W. E. Forster said to me ‘ I had rathei- be damned than
annihilated.’ If he once felt five minutes’ damnation, he would be
thankful for extinction in preference. The truth is, I care little about
it any way. Now that the event draws near, and that I see how fully
my household expectmy death pretty soon, the universe opens so widely
before my view, and I see the old notions of death, and scenes to follow
so merely human—so impossible to be true, when one glances through
the range of science,—that I see nothing to be done but to wait, without
fear or hope or ignorant prejudice, for the expiration of life. I have
no wish for future experience, nor have I any fear of it. Under the
weariness of illness I long to be asleep.”f
These are the words of a brave woman, who met Death
• To a Frenchman, Catholicism and Christianity mean one and the same thing
t Autobiography of Hariiet Mart/neaw, Vol. Ill, p. 454; edition 1877.
�44
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
with the same fortitude as she exhibited in the presence of
the defenders of slavery in the United States.
JOHN STUART MELL.
Mill was born in Rodney Street, Pentonville, London, on
May 20, 1806, and he died at Avignon on May 8, 1873. Not
withstanding the unguarded admissions in the one of his
three Essays on Religion which he never prepared for the
press, it is certain that he lived and died a Freethinker. His
father educated him without theology, and he never really
imbibed any afterwards. Professor Bain, his intimate friend
and his biographer, tells us that “ he absented himself during
his whole life from religious services,” and that “ in every
thing characteristic of the creed of Christendom he was a
thorough-going negationist. He admitted neither its truth
nor its utility.”* Mr. John Morley also, in his admirably
written account of the last day he spent with Mill,! says that
he looked forward to a general growth of the Religion of
Humanity. There is no extant record of Mill’s last moments,
but there has never been any pretence that he recanted or
showed the least alarm. One Christian journal, which died
itself soon after, declared its opinion that his soul was burn
ing in hell, and expressed a pious wish that his disciples
would soon follow him. We may therefore conclude that
Mill died a Freethinker as he had always lived.
MIRABEAU.
Gabriel Honore Riquetti, son and heir of the Marquis de
Mirabeau, was born on March 9, 1749. He came of a wild
strong stock, and was a magnificent “ enormous ” fellow at
his birth, the head being especially great. The turbulent
life of the man has been graphically told by Carlyle in his
Essays and in the French Revolution. Faults he had many,
but not that of insincerity ; with all his failings, he was a
•gigantic mass of veracious humanity. “ Moralities not a few,”
says Carlyle, “ must shriek condemnatory over this Mirabeau ;
the Morality by which he could be judged has not yet got
uttered in the speech of men.”
John Stuart Mill, by Alexander Bain, pp. 139,140.
t Miscellanies, Vol. III.
�MIRABEAU.
45
Mirabeau’s work in the National Assembly belongs to
history. It was mighty and splendid, but it cannot be recited
here. His life burned away during those fateful months,
the incessant labor and excitement almost passing credibility.
“ If I had not lived with him,” says Dumont, “ I never
should have known what a man can make of one day, what
things may be placed within the interval of twelve hours.
A day for this man was more than a week or a month is for
others.” One day his secretary said to him “ Monsieur le
Comte what you require is impossible.” Whereupon Mira
beau started from his chair, with the memorable ejaculation,
“ Impossible ! Never name to me that blockhead of a word ”
—Ne me elites jamais ce bete de mot.
But the Titan of the Revolution was exhausted before his
task was done. In January, 1791, he sat as President of theAssembly with his neck bandaged after the application of
leeches. At parting he said to Dumont “ I am dying, my
friend ; dying as by slow fire.” On the 27th of March he
stood in the tribune for the last time. Four days later he
was on his death-bed. Crowds beset the street, anxious but
silent, and stopping all traffic so that their hero might not
be disturbed. A bulletin was issued every three hours.
“ On Saturday the second day of April,” says Carlyle, “ Mira
beau feels that the last of the Days has risen for him ; that
on this day he has to depart and be no more. His death is
Titanic, as his life has been! Lit up, for the last time, in the
glare of the coming dissolution, the mind of the man is all
glowing and burning; utters itself in sayings, such as men
long remember. He longs to live, yet acquiesces in death,
argues not with the inexorable. *
Gazing out on the Spring sun, Mirabeau said, Si ce n’est
pas Id Dieu, cest du moins son cousin germain—If that is not
God, it is at least his cousin german. It was the great utter
ance of an eighteenth-century Pagan, looking across the
mists of Christian superstition to the saner nature-worship of
antiquity.
Power of speech gone, Mirabeau made signs for paper and
pen, and wrote the word Dormir “ To sleep.” Cabanis, the
great physician, who stood beside him, pretended not to
understand this passionate request for opium. Thereupon,
* French Revolution Vol. II., p. 120.
�46
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
writes the doctor, “ he made a sign for the pen and paper to
be brought to him again, and wrote,-‘Do you think
that Death is dangerous ?’—Seeing that I did not comply
with his demand, he wrote again,-' . . . How can you
leave your friend on the wheel, perhaps for days ?’ ” Oabanis
and Dr. Petit decided to give him a sedative. While it was
sent for “the pains became atrocious.” Recovering speech a
little under the torture, he turned to M. de la Marek, saying,
“ You deceive me.” “ No,” replied his friend, “ we are not
deceiving you, the remedy is coming, we all saw it ordered.”
“ Ah, the doctors, the doctors !” he muttered. Then, turn
ing to Oabanis, with a look of mingled anger and tenderness,
he said, “ Were you not my doctor and my friend ? Did you
not promise to spare me the agonies of such a death ? Do
you wish me to expire with a regret that I trusted you ?”
“ Those words,” says Cabanis, “ the last that he uttered,
ring incessantly in my ears. He turned over on the right
side with a convulsive movement, and at half-past eight in
the morning he expired in our arms.”* Dr. Petit, standing
at the foot of the bed, said “ His sufferings are ended.”
“ So dies,” writes Carlyle, “ a gigantic Heathen and Titan ;
stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to his rest.”
Mirabeau was an Atheist, and he was buried as became his
philosophy and his greatness. The Assembly decreed a
Public Funeral; there was a procession a league in length,
and the very roofs, trees, and lamp-posts, were covered with
people. The Church of Sainte-Genevieve was turned into a
Pantheon for the Great Men of the Fatherland, Aux Grands
Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante. It was midnight ere the
ceremonies ended, and the mightiest man in France was left
in the darkness and silence to his long repose. Of him, more
than most men, it might well have been said, “ After life’s
fitful fever he sleeps well.” Dormir “ To sleep,” he wrote
in his dying agony. Death had no terror for him ; it was
only the ringing down of the curtain at the end of the drama.
From the womb of Nature he sprang, and like a tired child
he fell asleep at last on her bosom.
ROBERT OWEN.
Robert Owen, whose name was once a terror to the clergy
* Journal de la Maladieet de la Mort d'Honors—Gabriel Mirabeau. Paris, 1791;
p. 263.
�ROBERT OWEN.
47
and the privileged classes, was born at Newtown, Mont
gomeryshire, on May 14, 1771. In his youth he noticed the
inconsistency of professing Christians, and on studying the
various religions of the world, as he tells us in his Auto
biography, he found that “ one and all had emanated from
the same source, and their varieties from the same false
imaginations of our early ancestors.” We have no space to
narrate his long life, his remarkable prosperity in cotton
spinning, his experiments in the education of children, his
disputes with the clergy, and his efforts at social reform,
to which he devoted his time and wealth, with sin
gular disinterestedness and simplicity. At one time his in
fluence even with the upper classes was remarkable, but he
seriously impaired it in 1817, by honestly stating, at a great
meeting at the City of London Tavern, that it was useless
to hope for real reform while people were besotted by “ the
gross errors that have been combined with the fundamental
notions of every religion.” After many more years of labor
for the cause he loved, Owen quietly passed away on No
vember 17, 1858, at the great age of eighty-eight. His last
hours are described in the following letter by his son, Robert
Dale Owen, which appeared in the newspapers of the time,
and is preserved in Mr. G. J. Holyoake’s Last Days of Robert
Owen.
“ Newtown, November 17, 1858. My dear father passed away this
morning, at a quarter before seven, and passed away as gently and
quietly as if he had fallen asleep. There was not the least struggle,
not a contraction of a limb, of a muscle, not an expression of pain on
his face. His breathing gradually became slower and slower, until at
last it ceased so imperceptibly, that, even as I held his hand, I could
scarcely tell the moment when he no longer breathed. His last words
distinctly pronounced about twenty minutes before his death, were
‘Relief has come.’ About half an hour before he said ‘Very easy
and comfortable.’ ”
Owen’s remains were interred in the churchyard of St.
Mary’s, Newtown, and as the law then stood, the minister
had a right, which he exercised, of reading the Church of
England burial service over the heretic’s coffin, and the Free
thinkers who stood round the grave had to bear the mockery
as quietly as possible. In Owen’s case, as in Carlile’s, the
Church appropriated the heretic’s corpse. Even Darwin’s
body rests in Westminster Abbey, and that is all of him the
' Church can boast.
�48
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
THOMAS PAINE.
George Washington has been called the hero of American
Independence, but Thomas Paine shares with him the honor.
The sword of the one, and the pen of the other, were both
necessary in the conflict which prepared the ground for
building the liepublic of the United States. While the
farmer-general fought with unabated hope in the darkest
hours of misfortune, the soldier-author wrote the stirring
appeals which kindled and sustained enthusiasm in the sacred
cause of liberty. Common Sense was the precursor of the
Declaration of Independence. The Rights of Man, subse
quently written and published in England, advocated the
same principles where they were equally required. Replied
to by Government in a prosecution for treason, it brought
the author so near to the gallows that he was only saved by
flight. Learning afterwards that the Rights of Man can
never be realised while the people are deluded and degraded
by priestcraft and superstition, Paine attacked Christianity
in The Age of Reason. That vigorous, logical, and witty
volume has converted thousands of Christians to Freethought.
It was answered by bishops, denounced by the clergy, and
prosecuted for blasphemy. But it was eagerly read in fields
and workshops ; brave men fought round it as a standard of
freedom; and before the battle ended the face of society was
changed.
Thomas Paine was bom at Thetford, in Norfolk, on January
29, 1736. His scepticism began at the early age of eight,
when he was shocked by a sermon on the Atonement, which
represented God as killing his own son when he could not
revenge himself in any other way. Becoming acquainted
with Dr. Franklin in London, Paine took his advice and emi
grated to America in the autumn of 1774. A few months
later his Common Sense announced the advent of a masterly
writer. More than a hundred thousand copies were sold, yet
Paine lost money by the pamphlet, for he issued it, like all
his other writings, at the lowest price that promised to cover
expenses. Congress, in 1777, appointed him Secretary to the
Committee for Foreign Affairs. Eight years later it granted
him three thousand dollars on account of his “ early, un
solicited, and continued labors in explaining the principles of
the late Revolution.” In the same year the State of Pen-
�49
THOMAS PAINE.
sylvania presented liim with £500, and the State of New York
gave him three hundred acres of valuable land.
Returning to England in 1787, Paine devoted his abilities
to engineering. He invented the arched iron bridge, and the
first structure of that kind in the world, the cast-iron bridge
over the Wear at Sunderland, was made from his model. Yet
he appeals to have derived no more profit from this than
from his writings.
Burke’s Reflections appeared in 1790. Paine lost no time
in replying, and his Rights of Man was sold by the hundred
thousand. The Government tried to suppress the work by
bribery; and that failing, a prosecution was begun. Paine’s
defence was conducted by Erskine, but the jury returned a
verdict of Guilty “ without the trouble of deliberation.” The
intended victim of despotism was, however, beyond its reach.
He had been elected by the departments of Calais and Ver
sailles to sit in the National Assembly. A splendid reception
awaited him at Calais, and his journey to Paris was marked by
popular demonstrations. At the trial of Louis XVI., he spoke
and voted for banishment instead of execution. He was one of
the Committee appointed to frame the Constitution of 1793,
but in the close of that year, having become obnoxious to
the Terrorists, he was deprived of his seat as “a foreigner,”
and imprisoned in the Luxembourg for no better reason. At
the time of his arrest he had written the first part of the
Age of Reason. While in prison he composed the second
part, and as he expected every day to be guillotined, it was
penned in the very presence of Death.
Liberated on the fall of Robespierre, Paine returned to
America; not, however, without great difficulty, for the British
cruisers were ordered to intercept him. From 1802 till his
death he wrote and published many pamphlets on religious
and other topics, including the third part of the Age of Reason.
His last years were full of pain, caused by an abscess in the
side, which was brought on by his imprisonment in Paris.
He expired, after intense suffering, on June 8, 1809, placidly
and without a struggle.
*
Paine’s last hours were disturbed by pious visitors who
wished to save his immortal soul from the wrath of God.
One afternoon a very old lady, dressed in a large scarlet-hooded
* Life of Thomas Paine. By Olio Rickman.
1819. P. 187.
D
�50
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
cloak, knocked at the door and inquired for Thomas Paine. Mr
Jarvis, with whom Mr. Paine resided, told her he was asleep. ‘ I am
very sorry,’ she said, ‘ for that, for I want to see him particularly.’
Thinking it a pity to make an old woman call twice, Mr. Jarvis took
her into Mr.'Paine’s bedroom and awoke him. He rose upon one elbow;
then, with an expression of eye that made the old woman stagger back
a step or two, he asked ‘ What do you want ?’ ‘ Is your name Paine ?’
‘ Yes.’ ‘ Well then, I come from Almighty God to tell you, that if you
do not repent of your sins, and believe in our blessed Savior Jesus
Christ, you will be damned and—’ 1 Poh, poh, it is not true; you were
not sent with any such impertinent message: Jarvis make her go
away—pshaw! he would not send such a foolish ugly old woman
about his messages : go away, go back, shut the door.’”*
Two weeks before his death, his conversion was attempted
by two Christian ministers, the Bev. Mr. Milledollar and the
Bev. Mr. Cunningham.
“ The latter gentleman said, ‘ Mr. Paine, we visit you as friends and
neighbors : you have now a full view of death, you cannot live long,
and whoever does not believe in Jesus Christ will assuredly be
damned.’ ‘ Let me,’ said Mr. Paine, 1 have none of your popish stuff;
get away with you, good morning, good morning.’ The Rev. Mr.
Milledollar attempted to address him, but he was interrupted in the
same language. When they were gone he said to Mrs. Hedden, his
housekeeper, ‘ do not let them come here again; they intrude upon
me.’ They soon renewed their visit, but Mrs. Hedden told them they
could not be admitted, and that she thought the attempt useless, for
God did not change his mind, she was sure no human power could.”f
Another of these busybodies was the Bev. Mr. Hargrove,
a Swedenborgian or New Jerusalemite minister. This gentle
man told Paine that his sect had found the key for interpreting
the Scriptures, which had been lost for four thousand years.
“ Then,” said Paine, “ it must have been very rusty.”
Even his medical attendant did not scruple to assist in this
pious enterprise. Dr. Manley’s letter to Cheetham, one of
Paine’s biographers, says that he visited the dying sceptic at
midnight, June 5-6, two days before he expired. After
tormenting him with many questions, to which he made
no answer, Dr. Manley proceeded as follows :
“ Mr. Paine, you have not answered my questions : will you answer
them ? Allow me to ask again, do you believe, or—let me qualify
the question—do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God ? After a pause of some minutes he answered, ‘ I have no wish,
to believe on that subject.’ I then left him, and know not whether he
afterwards spoke to any person on the subject.”
Hickman, pp. 182—18;.
t Rickman, p. 184.
�THOMAS PAINE.
51
Sherwin confirms this statement. He prints a letter from
Mr. Clark, who spoke to Dr. Manley on the subject. “ I
asked him plainly,” says Mr. Clark, “ did Mr. Paine recant
his religious sentiments ? I would thank you for an explicit
answer, sir. He said, ‘No he did not.'' ”*
Mr. Willet Hicks, a Quaker gentleman who frequently
called on Paine in his last illness, as a friend and not as a
soul-snatcher, bears similar testimony. “ In some serious
conversation I had with him a short time before his death,”
said Mr. Hicks, “he said his sentiments respecting the
Christian religion were precisely the same as they were
when he wrote the Age of Reason.'f
Lastly, we have the testimony of Cheetham himself, who
was compelled to apologise for libelling Paine during his life,
and whose biography of the great sceptic is a continuous
libel. Even Oheetham is bound to admit that Paine “ died
as he had lived, an enemy to the Christian religion.”
Notwithstanding this striking harmony of evidence as to
Paine’s dying in the principles of Freethought, the story of
his “recantation” gradually developed, until at last it was
told to the children in Sunday-schools, and even published
by the Religious Tract Society. Nay, it is being circulated to
this very day, as no less true than the gospel itself, although
it was triumphantly exposed by William Oobbett over sixty
years ago. “ This is nota question of religion,” said Cobbett,
“ it is a question of moral truth. Whether Mr. Paine’s
opinions were correct or erroneous, has nothing to do with
this matter.”
Cobbett investigated the libel on Paine on the very spot
where it originated. Getting to the bottom of the matter,
he found that the source of the mischief was Mary Hinsdale,
who had formerly been a servant to Mr. Willet Hicks. This
gentleman sent Paine many little delicacies in his last illness,
and Mary Hinsdale conveyed them. According to her story,
Paine made a recantation in her presence, and assured her
that if ever the Devil had an agent on earth, he who wrote
the Age of Reason was undoubtedly that person: When she
was hunted out by Oobbett, however, “ she shuffled, she evaded,
she affected not to understand,” and finally said she had “no
recollection of any person or thing she saw at Thomas Paine’s
* Sherwin’s Life of Paine, p 225.
t Cheetham’s Life of Paine, p. 152.
�52
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
house.” Cobbett’s summary of the whole matter commends
itself to every sensible reader.
“ This is, I think, a pretty good instance of the lengths to which
hypocrisy will go. The whole story, as far as it relates to recantation,
. . is a lie from beginning to end. Mr. Paine declares in his last Will,
that he retains all his publicly expressed opinions as to religion. His
executors, and many other gentlemen of undoubted veracity, had the
same declaration from his dying lips. Mr. Willet Hieks visited hiifc to
nearly the last. This gentleman says that there was no change
of opinion intimated to him; and will any man believe that Paine
would have withheld from Mr. Hieks that which he was so forward to
communicate to Mr. Hicks's servant girl?”*
I have already said that the first part of the Age of Reason
was entrusted to Joel Barlow when Paine was imprisoned at
Paris, and the second part was written in gaol in the very
presence of Death. Dr. Bond, an English surgeon, who was
by no means friendly to Paine’s opinions, visited him in the
Luxembourg, and gave the following testimony :
“ Mr. Paine, while hourly expecting to die, read to me 'parts of his
Age of Reason; and every night when I left him to be separately
locked up, and expected not to see him alive in the morning, he always
expressed his firm belief in the principles of that book, and begged I
would tell the world such were his dying opinions.”!
Surely when a work was written in such circumstances, it
is absurd to charge the author with recanting his opinions
through fear of death. Citing once more the words of his
enemy Cheetham, it is incontestible that Thomas Paine “ died
as he had lived, an enemy to the Christian religion.”
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
This glorious poet of Atheism and Republicanism was born
at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792.
His whole life was a daring defiance of the tyranny of Custom.
In 1811, when less than nineteen, he was expelled from Oxford •
University for writing The Necessity of Atheism. After writing
Queen Mob and several political pamphlets, -besides visiting
Ireland to assist the cause of reform in that unhappy island,
he was deprived of the guardianship of his two children by
Lord Chancellor Eldon on account of his heresy. Leaving
England, he went to Italy, where his principal poems were
composed with remarkable rapidity during the few years of
life left him. His death occurred on July 8, 1822. He was
Republican, February 13, 1824, Vol. IX., p. 221.
+ Hickman p. 194.
�PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
53
barely thirty, yet he had made for himself a deathless fame
as the greatest lyrical poet in English literature.
Shelley was drowned in a small yacht off Leghorn. The
only other occupants of the boat were his friend Williams
and a sailor lad, both of whom shared his fate. The squall
which submerged them was too swift to allow of their taking
proper measures for their safety. Shelley’s body was re
covered. In one pocket was a volume of JEschylus, in the
other a copy of Keats’s poems, doubled back as if hastily
thrust away. He had evidently been reading “ Isabella ” and
“Lamia,” and the waves cut short his reading for ever. It
was an ideal end, although so premature ; for Shelley was
fascinated by the sea, and always expressed a preference for
death by drowning. His remains were cremated on the sea
coast, in presence of Leigh Hunt, Trelawney, and Byron.
Trelawney snatched the heart from the flames, and it is still
preserved by Sir Percy Shelley. The ashes were coffered,
and soon after buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome,
close by the old cemetery, where Keats was interred—a beau
tiful open space, covered in summer with violets and daisies,
of which Shelley himself had written “ It might make one in
love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet
a place.” Trelawney planted six young cypresses and four
laurels. On the tomb-stone was inscribed a Latin epitaph by
Leigh Hunt, to which Trelawney added three lines from
Shakespeare’s Tempest, one of Shelley’s favorite plays.
Percy Bysshe Shelley.
cor CORDIUM
Natus iv. Aug. MDOCXCII
Obit vii. Jul. MDCOOXXII
“ Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
And there at Rome, shadowed by cypress and laurel,
covered with sweet flowers, and surrounded by the crumbling
ruins of a dead empire, rests the heart of hearts.
Shelley’s Atheism cannot be seriously disputed, and Tre
lawney makes a memorable protest against the foolish and
futile attempts to explain it away.
“ The principal fault I have to find is that the Shelleyan writers
being Christians themselves, seem to think that a man of geniuo
cannot be an Atheist, and so they strain their own faculties to disprovs
�54
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
what Shelley asserted from the very earliest stage of his career to the
last day of his life. He ignored all religions as superstitions. ... A
clergyman wrote in the visitors’ book at the Mer de Glace, Chamotmi,
something to the following effect: ‘No one can view this sublime
scene, and deny the existence of God.’ Under which Shelley, using a
Greek phrase, wrote ‘ P. B. Shelley, Atheist,’ thereby proclaiming his
opinion to all the world. And he never regretted having done so.”*
Trelawny’s words should be printed on the forefront of
Shelley’s works, so that it might never be forgotten that “ the
poet of poets and purest of men ” was an Atheist.
BENEDICT SPINOZA.
Benedict Spinoza (Baruch Despinosa) was born at Amster
dam on November 24, 1632. Hi^ father was one of the
Jewish fugitives from Spain who settled in the Netherlands
to escape the dreaded Inquisition. With a delicate constitu
tion, and a mind more prone to study than amusement, the
boy Spinoza gave himself to learning and meditation. He
was soon compelled to break away from the belief of his
family and his teachers ; and, after many vain admonitions,
he was at length excommunicated.
His anathema was
pronounced in the synagogue on July 27, 1656. It was a
frightful formula, cursing him by day and night, waking and
sleeping, sitting and standing, and prohibiting every Jew from
holding any communication with him, or approaching him
within a distance of four cubits. Of course it involved his
exile from home, and soon afterwards he narrowly escaped a
fanatic’s dagger.
The rest of Spinoza’s life was almost entirely that of a
scholar. He earned a scanty livelihood by polishing lenses,
but his physical wants were few, and he subsisted on a few
pence per day. His writings are such as the world will not
willingly let die, and his Ethics places him on the loftiest
heights of philosophy, where his equals and companions may
be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Through Goethe
and Heine, he has exercised a potent influence on German,
and therefore on European thought. His subtle Pantheism
identifies God with Nature, and denies to deity all the attri
butes of personality.
His personal appearance is described by Colerus, the Dutch
pastor, who some years after his death gathered all the inRecords of Byron and Shelley, Vol. I., pp. 243-245
�BENEDICT SPINOZA.
55
formation about him that could be procured. He was of
middle height and slenderly built; with regular features, a
broad and high forehead, large dark lustrous eyes, full dark
eyebrows, and long curling hair of the same hue. His
character was’worthy of his intellect. He made no enemies
except by his opinions. “Even bitter opponents,” as Mr.
Martineau says, “ could not but own that he was singularly
blameless and unexacting, kindly and disinterested. Children,
young men, servants, all who stood to him in any relation of
dependence, seem to have felt the charm of his affability and
sweetness of temper.”*
Spinoza was lodging, at the time of his death, with a poor
Dutch family at the Hague. They appear to have regarded
him with veneration, and to have given him every attention.
But the climate was too rigorous for his Southern tempera
ment.
!! The strict and sober regimen which was recommended by frugality
Was not unsuited to his delicate constitution: but, in spite of it, his
emaciation increased ; and, though he made no change in his habits,
he became so far aware of his decline as on Sunday, the 20th of Feb
ruary, 1677, to send for his medical friend Meyer from Amsterdam.
That afternoon Van der Spijck and his wife had been to church, in
preparation for the Shrovetide communion next day: and on their
return at 4 p.m., Spinoza had come downstairs and, whilst smoking
his pipe, talked with them long about the sermon. He went early to
bed; but was up again next morning (apparently before the arrival of
Meyer), in time to come down and converse with his host and hostess
before they went to church. The timely appearance of the physician
enabled her to leave over the fire a fowl to be boiled for a basin of
broth. This, as well as some of the bird itself, Spinoza took with a
relish, on their return from church about midday. There was nothing
to prevent the Van der Spijcks from going to the afternoon service.
But on coming out of the church they were met by the startling news
that at 3 p.m. Spinoza had died; no one being with him but his
physician. ”f
Mr. Martineau hints that perhaps “the philosopher and
the physician had arranged together and carried out a method
of euthanasia,” but as he admits that “ there is no tittle of evi
dence for such a thing,” it is difficult to understand why he
makes such a gratuitous suggestion.
Pious people, who judged every philosopher to be an
Atheist, reported that Spinoza had cried out several times in
dying “ Oh God, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner 1 ”
* 4 Study of Spinoza. By Dr. James Martineau, p. 104.
t Ibid, pp. 101 102
�56
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
Colerus investigated this story and found it an invention.
Dr. Meyer was the only person with Spinoza when he died,
so that it was impossible for the scandal-mongers to have
heard his last words. Besides, his hostess denied the truth
of all such statements, adding that “ what persuaded her of
the contrary was that, since he began to fail, he had always
shown in his sufferings a stoical fortitude.”*
DAVID FREDERICK STRAUSS.
Strauss’s Life of Jesus once excited universal controversy
in the Christian world, and the author’s name was opprobrious
in orthodox circles. So important was the work, that it was
translated into French by Littre and into English by George
Eliot. Subsequently, Strauss published a still more heterodox
book, The Old Faith and the New, in which he asserts that
“if we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknow
ledge we are no longer Christians,” and strenuously repudiates
all the dogmas of theology as founded on ignorance and super
stition.
This eminent German Freethinker died in the spring of
1874, of cancer in the stomach, one of the most excruciating
disorders.
“But in these very sufferings the mental greatness and moral
strength of the sufferer proclaimed their most glorious victory. He
was fully aware of his condition. With unshaken firmness he adhered
o the convictions which he had openly acknowledged in his last
work [The Old Faith and the IVew] and he never for a moment retpented having written them. But with these convictions he met
death with such repose and with such unclouded serenity of mind,
that it was impossible to leave his sick room without the impression
of a moral sanctity which we all the more surely receive from great
ness of soul and mastery of mind over matter, the stronger are the
hindrances in the surmounting of which it is manifested.”!
Strauss left directions for bis funeral. He expressly for
bade all participation of the Church in the ceremony, but on
the day of his interment a sum of money was to be given to
the poor. “On February 10 [1874] therefore,” says his bio
grapher, “ he was buried without ringing of bells or the pre
sence of a clergyman, but in the most suitable manner, and
amid the lively sympathy of all, far and near.”
* La Vie de Spinoza, par Oolerus: Saisset’s CEuvres de Spinoza, Vol. II.. p. xxxvii.
t Edward Zdier, David Frederick Strauss in his Life andWritings, p. 148.
�JOHN TOLAND.
57
JOHN TOLAND.
Toland was one of the first to call himself a Freethinker.
He was born at Redcastle, near Londonderry, in Ireland, on
November 30, 1670 ; and he died at Putney on March 11,
1722. His famous work Christianity not Mysterious was
brought before Parliament, condemned as heretical, and
ordered to be burnt by the common hangman.
One
member proposed that the author himself should be
burnt; and as Thomas Aitkenhead had been hung at Edin
burgh for blasphemy in the previous year, it is obvious that
Toland incurred great danger in publishing his views.
Among other writings, Toland’s Letters to Serena achieved
distinction. They were translated into French by the famous
Baron D’Holbach, and Lange, in Tris great History of Materi
alism, says that “ The second letter handles the kernel of the
whole question of Materialism.” Lange also says that
“ Toland is one of those benevolent beings who exhibit to us
a great character in the complete harmony of all the sides of
human existence.”
For some years before his death, Toland lived in obscure
lodgings with a carpenter at Putney. His health was broken,
and his circumstances were poor. His last illness was pain
ful, but he bore it with great fortitude. According to one
of his most intimate friends, he looked earnestly at those in
the room a few minutes before breathing his last, and on
being asked if he wanted anything, he answered “ I want
nothing but death.” His biographer, Des Maizeaux, says
that “ he looked upon death without the least perturbation
of mind, bidding farewell to those that were about him, and
telling them he was going to sleep.”
LUCILIO VANINI.
Lucilio Vanini was born at Taurisano, near Naples, in
1584 or 1585. He studied theology, philosophy, physics,
astronomy, medicine, and civil and ecclesiastical law. At
Padua he became a doctor of canon and civil law, and was
ordained a priest.
Resolving to .visit the academies of
Europe, he travelled through France, England, Holland, and
Germany. According to Fathers Mersenne and Garasse, he
formed a project of promulgating Atheism over the whole of
Europe. The same priests allege that he had fifty thousand
�58
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
Atheistic followers at Paris ! One of his books was con
demned to the flames by the Sorbonne. Vanini himself met
eventually with the same fate. Tried at Toulouse for heresy,
he was condemned as an Atheist, and sentenced to the stake.
At the trial he protested his belief in God, and defended the
existence of Deity with the flimsiest arguments; so flimsy,
indeed, that one can scarcely read them, without suspecting
that he was pouring irony on his judges. They ordered him
to .have his tongue cut out before being burnt alive. It is
said that he afterwards confessed, took the communion, and
declared himself ready to subscribe the tenets of the Church.
But if he did so, he certainly recovered his natural dignity
when he had to face the worst. Le Mercure Franqais, which
cannot be suspected of partiality towards him, reports that
“ he died with as much constancy, patience, and fortitude as
any other man ever seen ; for setting forth from the Conciergerie joyful and elate, he pronounced in Italian these
words—‘Come, let us die cheerfully like a philosopher!’”
There is a report that, on seeing the pile, he cried out “ Ah,
my God !’ ” On which a bystander said, “ You believe in
God, then.” “No,” he retorted, “it’s a fashion of speaking.”
Father Garasse says that he uttered many other notable
blasphemies, refused to ask forgiveness of God, or of the
king, and died furious and defiant. So obstinate was he,
. that pincers had to be employed to pluck out his tongue.
President Gramond, author of the History of France Under
Louis XIII., writes: “I saw him in the tumbril as they led
him to execution, mocking the Cordelier who had been sent
to exhort him to repentance, and insulting our Savior by
these impious words, ‘ He sweated with fear and weakness,
_ . and L I die undaunted.”’ ... _
Vanini’s martyrdom took place at Toulouse on February
19, 1619. He was only thirty-four, an age, as Camille Des
moulins said, “ fatal to revolutionists.”
[The reader may consult M. X. Rousselot’s (Euvres Philosophique
de Vanini, Avec une Notice sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages. Paris, 1842].
VOLNEY.
The author of the famous Ruins of Empires was a great
traveller, and his visits to Oriental countries were described
so graphically and philosophically, that Gibbon wished he
�VOLTAIRE.
59
miglit go over the whole world and record his experiences for
the delight and edification of mankind. I have not been
able to ascertain how he died, but I have tracked for exposure
a very foolish story about his “ cowardice ” in a storm in
America, which is still circulated in pious tracts. It is said
that he threw himself on the deck of the vessel, crying in
agony, “Oh, my God, my God !” “There is a God, then,
Monsieur Volney?” said one of the passengers. “Oh, yes,”
he exclaimed, “ there is ! there is ! Lord save me 1” When
the vessel arrived safely in port, says the story, he “ returned
to his Atheistical sentiments.” I have traced this nonsense
back to the Tract Magazine for July, 1832, where it appearsvery much amplified, and in many respects different. It
appears in a still different form in the eighth volume of the
Evangelical Magazine. Beyond that it is lost in obscurity.
The story is an evident concoction ; it bears every appearance
of being “ worked up ” for the pious public ; and it could not
be credited for a moment by any one acquainted with Volney’s
life and writings.
VOLTAIRE.
Francois Marie Arouet, generally known by the name of
Voltaire, was born at Chatenay on February 20, 1694. He
died at Paris on May 30, 1778. To write his life during
those eighty-three years would be to give the intellectual his
tory of Europe.
While Voltaire was living at Ferney in 1768, he gave a
curious exhibition of that diabolical sportiveness which was a
strong element in his character. On Easter Sunday he took
his secretary Wagniere with him to commune at the village
church, and also “ to lecture a little those scoundrels who
steal continually.” Apprised of Voltaire’s sermon on theft,
the Bishop of Anneci rebuked him, and finally “ forbade
everycurate, priest, and monk of his diocese to confess, absolve
or give the communion to the seigneur of Ferney, without his
express orders, under pain of interdiction.” With a wicked
light in his eyes, Voltaire said he would commune in spite of
the Bishop; nay, that the ceremony should be gone through
in his chamber. Then ensued an exquisite comedy, which
shakes one’s sides even as described by the stolid Wagniere.
Feigning a deadly sickness, Voltaire took to his bed. The-
�€0
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
surgeon, who found his pulse was excellent, was bamboozled
into certifying that he was in danger of death. Then the
priest was summoned to administer the last consolation. The
poor devil at first objected, but Voltaire threatened him with
legal proceedings for refusing to bring the sacrament to a
dying man, who had never been excommunicated. This was
accompanied with a grave declaration that M. de Voltaire
“had never ceased to respect and to practise the Catholic
religion.” Eventually the priest came “half dead with
fear.” Voltaire demanded absolution at once, but the
Capuchin pulled out of his pocket a profession of faith, drawn
up by the Bishop, which Voltaire was required to sign. Then
the comedy deepened. Voltaire kept demanding absolution,
and the distracted priest kept presenting the document for
his signature. At last the L or d of Ferney had his way. The
priest gave him the wafer, and Voltaire declared, “Having
my God in my mouth,” that he forgave his enemies. Directly
he left the room, Voltaire leapt briskly out of bed, where a
minute before he seemed unable to move. “I have had a
little trouble,” he said to Wagniere, “with this comical
genius of a Capuchin ; but that was only for amusement, and
to accomplish a good purp ose. Let us take a turn in the
garden. I told you I would be confessed and commune in my
bed, in spite of M. Biord.”*
Voltaire treated Christianity so lightly that he confessed
and took the sacrament for a joke. Is it wonderful if he
did the same thing on his death-bed to secure the decent
burial of his corpse ? He r em embered his own bitter sorrow
and indignation, which he expressed in burning verse, when
the remains of poor Adrienne Lecouvreur were refused
sepulture because she died outside the pale of the Church.
Fearing similar treatment himself, he arranged to cheat the
Church again. By the agenc y of his nephew, the Abbe Mignot,
the Abbe Gautier was brought to his bedside, and according
to Condorcet he “confessed Voltaire, receiving from him a
profession of faith, by which he declared that he died
in the Catholic religion, wherein he was bom.”t This
story is generally credited, but its truth is by no means in
disputable : for in the Abbe Gautier’s declaration to the
Prior of the Abbey of Scellieres, where Voltaire’s remains
Parton’s Life of Voltaire, Vol. IL. pp. 410—415.
Condorcet's Vie de Voltaire, p. 144.
�VOLTAIRE.
61
were interred, he says that when he vis’ited M. de Voltaire,
he found him “ unfit to be confessed.”
The curate of St. Sulpice was annoyed at being forestalled
by the Abbe Gautier, and as Voltaire was his parishioner,
he demanded “ a detailed profession of faith and a disavowal
of all heretical doctrines.” He paid the dying Freethinker
many unwelcome visits, in the vain hope of obtaining a full
recantation, which would be a fine feather in his hat. The
last of these visits is thus described by Wagniere, who was
an eyewitness to the scene. I take Carlyle’s translation :
“ Two days before that mournful death, M. l’Abbe Mignot, his
nephew, went to seek the Cure of St. Sulpice and the Abbe Gauthier,
and brought them into his uncle’s sick room : who, on being informed
that the Abbe Gautier was there, ‘ Ah'; well!’ said he, ‘ give him my
compliments and my thanks.’ The Abbe'spoke some words to him,
exhorting him to patience. The Cure of St. Sulpice then came forward,
having announced himself, and asked of M. de Voltaire, elevating his
voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ ? The
sick man pushed one of his hands against the Cure'’s calotte (coif),
shoving him back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, ‘Let
me die in peace (Laissez-moi mourir en paix).’ The Cure seemingly
considered his person soiled, and his coif dishonored, by the touch of
the philosopher. He made the sick-nurse give him a little brushing,
and then went out with the Abbe Gautier.”*
A. further proof that Voltaire made no real recantation lies
in the fact that the Bishop of Troyes sent a peremptory dis
patch to the Prior of Scellieres, which lay in his diocese,
forbidding him to inter the heretic’s remains. The dispatch,
however, arrived too late, and Voltaire’s ashes remained there
until 1791, when they were removed to Paris and placed in
the- Pantheon, by order of the N ational Assembly.
Voltaire’s last moments are re corded by Wagniere. I again
take Carlyle’s translation.
“ He expired about a quarter past eleven at night, with the most
perfect tranquility, after having suffered the ciuelest pains, in conse
quence of those fatal drugs, which his o wn imprudence, and especially
that of the persons who should have looked to it, made him swallow.
Ten minutes before his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his
valet-de-chambre, who was watching him; pressed it, and said,
1 Adieu, mon cher Morand, je me meurs'-—‘Adieu, my dear Morand, I
am gone.’ These are the last words uttered by M. de Voltaire.”f
Such are the facts of Voltaire’s decease. He made no re
cantation, he refused to utter or sign a confession of faith,
* Carlyle's Essays, Vol. II. (People’s Edition), p. 161.
t Carlyle, Vol. II. p. 160.
�€2
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
but with, the connivance of his nephew, the Abbe Mignot, he
tricked the Church *nto granting him a decent burial, not
i
choosing to be flung into a ditch or buried like a dog. His
heresy was never seriously questioned at the time, and the
clergy actually clamored for the expulsion of the Prior who
had allowed his body to be interred in a church vault.
*
Many years afterwards the priests pretended that Voltaire
died raving.
They declared that Marshal Richelieu was
horrified by the scene and obliged to leave the chamber.
From France the pious concoction spread to England, until it
was exposed by Sir Charles Morgan, who published the
following extracts from a letter by Dr. Burard, who, as
assistant physician, was^constantly about Voltaire in his last
moments :
“ I feel happy in being able, while paying homage to truth, to
destroy the effects of the lying sto ries which have been told respecting
the last moments of Mons, de Vol taire. I was, by office, one of those
who were appointed to watch the whole progress of his illness, with
M. M. Tronchin, Lorry, and Try, his medical attendants. I never left
him for an instant during his last moments, and I can certify that we
invariably observed in him the sa me strength of character, though his
disease was necessarily attended with horrible pain. (Here follow the
details of his case.) We positive ly forbade him to speak in order to
prevent the increase of a spitting o f blood, with which he was attacked ;
still he continued to communicate with us by means of little cards, on
which he wrote his questions ; we replied to him verbally, and if he
was not satisfied, he always ma de his observations to us in writing.
He therefore retained his facult ies up to the last moment, and the
fooleries which have been attr ibuted to him are deserving of the
greatest contempt. It could not even be said that such or such person
had related any circumstance of his death, as being witness to it; for
at the last, admission to his chamber was forbidden to any person.
Those who came, to obtain intelligence respecting the patient, waited
in the saloon, and other apartments at hand. The proposition, there
fore, which has been put in the mouth of Marshal Richelieu is as
unfounded as the rest.”
(Signed) “ Bubabd.”
“ Paris, April 3rd, 1819.” f
Another slander appears to emanate from the Abbe
Barruel, who was so well infor med about Voltaire that he
calls him “the dying Atheist,” when, as all the world knows,
he was a Deist.
“ In his last illness he sent for Dr. Tronchin. When the Doctor
came, he found Voltaire in the greatest agony, exclaiming with the
utmost horror—‘ I am abandoned by God and man.’ He then said,
4 Doctor, I will give you half of what I am worth, if you will give me
* Parton, Vol. II., p. 615.
t Philosophy of Moralf, by Sir Charles Morgan.
�JAMES WATSON.
63
six months’ life.’ The Doctor answered, ‘ Sir, you cannot live six
weeks.’ Voltaire replied, ‘ Then I shall go to hell, and you will go with
me !’ and soon after expired.”
When the clergy are reduced to manufacture such con
temptible rubbish as this, they, must indeed be in great
straits. It is flatly contradicted by the evidence of every
contemporary of Voltaire.
My readers will, I think, be fully satisfied that Voltaire
neither recanted nor died raving, but remained a sceptic to
the last; passing away quietly, at a ripe old age, to “ the un
discovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,”
and leaving behind him a name that brightens the track of
time.
JAMES WATSON.
James Watson was one of the bravest heroes in the struggle
for a free press. He was one of Richard Carlile’s shopmen,
and took his share of imprisonment when the Government
tried to suppress Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and
several other Freethought publications. In fighting for the
unstamped press, he was again imprisoned in 1833. As a
publisher he was notorious for his editions of Paine, Mirabaud, Volney, Shelley and Owen. He died on November 29,
1874, aged seventy-five, “passing away in his sleep, without
a struggle, without a sigh.’’*
JOHN WATTS.
John Watts was at one time sub-editor of the Reasoner,
and afterwards, for an interval, editor of the National Reformer.
He was the author of several publications, including Half
Hours ivith Freethinkers in collaboration with Charles Bradlauc^^^I death took place on October 31, 1866, and the
His
] account of it was written by Dr. George Sexton,
ished in the National Reformer of the following week.
SO
|out half-past seven in the evening he breathed his last, so
gentlymat although I had one of his hands in mine, and his brother
the other in his, the moment of his death passed almost unobserved
by either of us. No groan, no sigh, no pang indicated his departure.
He died as a candle goes out when burned to the socket.”
George Sexton has since turned Christian, at least by
profession; but, after what he has written of the last
moments of John Watts, he can scarcely pretend that unIh^ievers have any fear of death.
James Watson, by W. J. Linton, p. 86.
�64
INFIDEL DEATH-BEDS.
WOOLSTON.
Thomas Woolston was born at Northampton in 1669, and
he died at London in 1733. He was educated at Sidney
College, Cambridge, taking Jp.is M.A. degree, and being elected
a fellow. Afterwards he was deprived of his fellowship for
heresy. Entering into holy orders, he closely studied divinity,
and gained a reputation for scholarship, as well as for
sobriety and benevolence. His profound knowledge of
ecclesiastical history gave him a contempt for the Fathers,
in attacking whom he reflected on the modern clergy. He
maintained that miracles were incredible, and that all the
supernatural stories of the New Testament must be regarded
as figurative. For this he was prosecuted on a charge of
blasphemy and profaneness, but the action dropped through
the honorable intervention of Whiston. Subsequently he
published Six Discourses on Miracles, which were dedicated
to six bishops. In these the Church was assailed in homely
language, and her doctrines were mercilessly ridiculed.
Thirty thousand copies are said to have been sold. A fresh
prosecution for blasphemy was commenced, the AttorneyGeneral declaring the Discourses to be “the most blas
phemous book that ever was published in any age whatever.”
Woolston ably defended himself, but he was found guilty,
and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of £100.
Being too poor to pay the fine, Christian charity detained
him permanently in the King’s Bench Prison. With a noblejw
jjourage he refused to purchase his jelease by promising to
refrain from promulgating his views, and prison fever at length
released him from his misery. The following account of his
last moments is taken from the Daily Coura^. Don, thlay,
January 29, 1733
« On Saturday night, about nine o’clock, died Mr.
T
athor
of the ‘ Discourses on our Savior’s Miracles,’ in the si.x,
a year
of his age. About five minutes before he died he uttered tnese words :
This is?a struggle which all men must go through, and which I bear
not only with patience but'willingness.’ Upon which he closed his
eyes, and shut his lips, with a seeming design to compose his face
with decency, without the help of a friend’s hand, and then he
expired.” .
<
Without the help ofa friend's hand ! Helpless and friendlesj^
pent in a prison cell, the brave old man faced Death in
tary grandeur, yielding, for the first and last time, tci—
lord of all.
��BIBLE CONTRADICTIONS.
ARRANGED IN PARALLEL COLUMNS.
.Being Part I, of a
BIBLE HANDBOOK FOR FREETHINKERS & INQUIRING CHRISTIANS.
EDITED BY
G. W. Foote & W. P. Ball.
With a SPECIAL INTRODUCTION by G. W. FOOWS.
“ It is the,most painstaking work of the kind we have Jet seen.”—
Seculai Review.
“ A convenient and useful arrangement.”—Monro's Ironclad Age.
“ It is questionable whether a more effective impression could be
made on an ordinary Christian than by getting him to go through
this little handbook. . . . The collection has the merit of giving in
abundance the contradictions not only of the letter but of the spirit.
The antitheses are always precise and forcible.”—Our Corner
----- 0----In Paper Wrapper, FOURPENCE.
BIBLE
ABSURDITIES.
Being Part II. of “ The Bible Handbook,”
EDITED BY
G.
W.
FOOTE
and
B^LLige whatever''''
found guilty,
fcfme of £100.
■\y detained
~
—■
c
ztth a noble
him permanently in
*> —o
/promising to
.Qpurage he refused to purchase
z& fever at length
refrain from promulgating his view
nXg account of his
released him from his misery. Th |
last moments is taken from the JO ft, | (ur^C- 'Vtion, tday,
^pp&elieu
January 29, 1733 :—
-, -AyBURART ,
Containing all the chief absurd!/
tion, conveniently and strikinglid
(^headlines, giving the point of <
“ On Saturday night, about nine o’clocS^med Mr.
i
Jthor
n year
of the ‘ Discourses on our Savior’s Miracles,’ in the Si.\,
of his age. About five minutes before he died he uttered these words:
This is a struggle which all men must go through, and which I bear
not only with patience but'willingness.’ Upon which he closed his
eyes, and shut his lips, with a seeming design to compose his face
with decency, without the help of a friend’s hand, and then he
expired.” .
<
Without the help of a friend’s hand ! Helpless and friendles^ A
pent in a prison cell, the brave old man faced Death in p f f
tary grandeur, yielding, for the first and last time, tc-—
lord of all.
e
�
Dublin Core
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Infidel death-beds
Creator
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Foote, G. W. (George William) [1850-1915]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 64 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Publisher's advertisements on back cover. Annotations in pencil, red crayon and red ink. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Progressive Publishing Company
Date
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1886
Identifier
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N245
Subject
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Free thought
Death
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Infidel death-beds), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Freethinkers-Biography
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NSS