In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

46 speechatthe thomas Paine Celebration:separation of Church and state January 31, 1859 New York, New York In this speech at the annual Thomas Paine Celebration, Rose took as her subject threats to the separation of church and state. She decried violations of the Constitutional doctrine in the United States, ranging from Sunday “blue laws” to the use of the Bible in public schools. As an example of the dangers of combining the powers of church and state, Rose points to the Papal States, the region of central Italy where the Pope was civil as well as religious leader. Her reference to “the case of Mortara” would have been well-understood by her audience, for the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a six-yearold Jewish child, had been reported in the press internationally. Agents of the Papal States had seized the child from his family home in Bologna so that he could be reared in the Catholic religion. The rationale for the kidnapping was that during a serious illness , a domestic servant, fearing the boy would die and go to hell, baptized him without his parents’ permission. Despite numerous appeals to the papacy by the parents, and by international figures as Napoleon III and the European Jewish activist Sir Moses Montefiore , the child was never returned. As an adult, he chose to remain with the church and became a canon in Rome and professor of theology (Berenbaum and Skolnik 2007, [14] 513; see also Kerzer 1999). The speech was published as part of a report on the event in the Boston Investigator, February 16, 1859. The report referred to her talk as “a spicy exposé of the faith” and described the reverberations of the applause as causing the crockery to “fairly dance with approbation.” n Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose, on being called to respond to the second toast— “The Rights of Man,”—arose and delivered the following address:— Mr. President and Friends—Thanking you for the honor conferred upon me, in wishing me to speak on this interesting occasion, allow me to assure you that no public event inspires me with as heartfelt an interest as the annual assembly of Liberal friends to celebrate the natal day that gave to the world the noble champion of political and religious freedom, one who by his devotion to human rights, has proved himself indeed the “Friend of Man”—Thomas Paine. Were we to measure the talents, virtue and services of Paine by the extent, fierceness and duration of the slander , abuse and persecution that he suffered, not only during life, but from which even the grave has not been able to shield him, we would have to 47 pronounce him the greatest man that probably ever lived. It is true some of the noble defenders of liberty had to pay for the prerogative of benefiting the race with a forfeiture of life; but, at least, they were permitted to rest in peace in the grave, and the people endeavored to make restitution by bestowing upon them that honor, after death, of which despotic and corrupt governments deprived them while living. Thomas Paine was allowed to die a natural death; the laws of the country sanctioned no actual decapitation; but religious intolerance, fiercer and more brutal than law, that hardly permitted him to die in peace, will not let him, even after the lapse of fifty years, rest in peace in his grave. This unrelenting persecution is not the work of a despotic government. No! Not of Rome, where in the name of religion and of God, bands of ecclesiastical marauders break in at the dead of night to rob parents of their children—as in the case of Mortara—where the “glad tidings of the gospel” are enforced by the light of the dungeon, the rack and the stake, but here, in Protestant republican America, where a Thomas Paine projected and a Thomas Jefferson perfected the immortal declaration that man has an inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet through the venomous shafts of slander, of a corrupt clergy, the sworn enemies of free thought and free speech, the warfare against Paine has not yet ceased. Hardly a week passes but you can see in some of the religious papers the same falsehoods that were long ago invented; and every one who has the good sense to appreciate, and the justice to honor his devotion to the rights of man, comes under the same stigma and shares the same...

Share