My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Context: “If his master have given him a wife, and she hath borne him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself…The slave is allowed to have his liberty if he will give up his wife and children. He must remain in slavery for the sake of wife and child. This is another of the laws of the most merciful God. This God changes even love into a chain. Children are used by him as manacles and fetters, and wives become the keepers of prisons. Any man who believes that such hideous laws were made by an infinitely wise and benevolent God is, in my judgment, insane or totally depraved.
“A god that cannot make a soul that is not totally depraved, I respectfully suggest, should retire from the business. And if a god has made us, knowing that we are totally depraved, why should we go to the same being to be “born again?””
Orthodoxy (1884)
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Robert G. Ingersoll 439
Union United States Army officer 1833–1899Related quotes
“The total depravity of inanimate things.”
Epigram, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270
The Rubaiyat (1120)