Pearson's Sermon on Angels, February, 1920

From the editorial page of The Fool-Killer, A Monthly Mustard-Plaster for the Blood-Boils of Society, Church and State, published monthly, James Larkin Pearson, Editor, Boomer, N.C., February 1, 1920.

A Little Sermon on Angels

I discover as I jog along that a whole lot of the orthodox wooden-heads are all balled up in the angel business. When I was a little bare-footed rascal going to the old-fashioned meetin’-house I used to hear ‘em punish a song that went something like this:

“I want to be an angel,

And with the angels stand,

A crown upon my fore-head,

A harp within my hand.”

And then the very minute one of them would feel a little pain across the small end of his misery somebody would have to go lickety-split for the doctor, and they would try every remedy under the sun that they thought might keep them from being an angel a little while longer.

And that put me to thinking. Even then, in my boyish ignorance, I could see that the good Amen Corner tobacco-squirters didn’t want to be angels one half as bad as they pretended to. That kind of sam-singing is just about one per cent religion, 19 per cent hypocrisy, and 80 per cent pure unadulterated ignorance.

I find some people yet who actually think that dead people go to heaven and become angels as soon as they die. They think all the angels they read about in the Bible are dead human folks that have been sorter revamped and made over and had turkey wings grated onto their shoulder blades.

That is all very foolish and unreasonable. There was just as many angels in heaven before Adam was made as there is now. God isn’t so poor and hard-run for material that he has to hang around and wait for somebody on earth to die in order to get the scraps to make an angel out of.

Angels are entirely a different order of creation from human beings. Angels are a higher order than man, just as the animal creation is a lower order than man and these different orders will not mix at all. You can’t make an angel out of a human being, any more than you could make gasoline out of branch water.

It does look like the orthodox fools would learn a little sense sometime.