FAITH OR FACT ILLUSTRATING CONFLICTS BETWEEN CREDULITY AND VITALIZED HYPOCRISY AND BY HENRY M. TABER. WITH PREFACE BY COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. "Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."-Moore. NEW YORK. PETER ECKLER, PUBLISHER, No. 35 FULTON STREET. 1 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1897, BY HENRY. M TABER, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 1 D '97 BR ·TII DEDICATION. To the lovers of mental freedom, of every land, and especially those who have endured the sneers, the invectives, the ostracisms, the persecutions, of orthodox Christianity; this unpretentious volume is sympathetically and affectionately inscribed. The Author. INTRODUCTION. N introducing Faith or Fact to my readers I wish to say that it is composed of a series of articles which have appeared from time to time, within the past seven years, in the Freethought Magazine of Chicago, and that I have yielded to the flattering solicitations of many of my best friends in placing this collection before the public in its present form. I ask for a candid, unprejudiced judgment on my book, and nothing will give me greater pleasure than to have pointed out to me any error of fact into which I may have, inadvertently, been drawn ; my aim having been to search for and to record the truth. It is significant that, in support of my positions, I furnish authorities mostly from Christian writers, the larger number of whom being clergymen. It appears to me that Christianity has invited criticism, if not censure, by reason of its inculcation of belief by faith alone regardless of opposing and incontrovertible fact; by reason of its credulity, its superstitions, its intolerance; of its arrogant pretensions; its dogma of inspiration, of the fall of man, of eternal punishment, of the trinity, of the atonement, of a personal devil; its pretended knowledge of the "unknowable," and of a future life; its anathema of doubt; its insistence upon unprovable miracles: its antagonism to the later discoveries of science; its conflict with civil liberty; its unjustice in the matter of exempting church property from taxation, and of its |