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Title: I don't know, do you?
Author: Ricker, Marilla M.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "I don't know, do you?" ***
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[Illustration: _Marilla M. Ricker._]
I DON'T KNOW, DO YOU?
BY
MARILLA M. RICKER
[Illustration]
DONE INTO
A PRINTED BOOK BY THE ROYCROFTERS
AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN
EAST AURORA, NEW YORK
MCMXVI
Copyright, 1916
By
Marilla M. Ricker
You are what you think, and to believe in a Hell for other people
is literally to go to Hell yourself.--_Elbert Hubbard._
A religious man is a man scared.
FOREWORD
_There is in the city of Boston a memorial building to Thomas Paine.
This Paine Memorial was finished and dedicated forty-two years ago. It
is the finest monument to Thomas Paine on the earth._
_For twenty years Ralph Washburn Chainey has been the Manager of this
building and the Treasurer of the Paine Memorial Corporation. Under his
wise and prudent management the building was freed from debt, and today
it is a monument to the energy and devotion of its Manager as much as
to the genius and labors of Thomas Paine._
_Ralph Washburn Chainey is only forty-two, and as great an example of
thrift as Ben Franklin was. Very early in life he acquired the habit of
thrift--which is the basis of all virtues. He learned early that time
was money and he is always at work. He is not only able to take care
of himself, but he can and does take care of others. He is sufficient
unto himself, and when one is right with himself he is right with all
the world. I have known him intimately for more than a quarter of a
century, and if he has faults I have yet to learn what they are._
_In appreciation, therefore, of his great service to the cause of
Freethought, I dedicate this volume to_
RALPH WASHBURN CHAINEY
--_Marilla M. Ricker_.
_Dover, New Hampshire December, Nineteen Hundred Fifteen_
As man advances, as his intellect enlarges, as his knowledge
increases, as his ideals become nobler, the Bibles and creeds will
lose their authority, the miraculous will be classed with the
impossible, and the idea of special providence will be discarded.
Thousands of religions have perished, innumerable gods have died,
and why should the religion of our time be exempt from the common
fate?
--_Robert Ingersoll._
CONTENTS
FOREWORD 7
CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION 11
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT SOME CHURCHES,
AND WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC 33
A LETTER AND THE REJOINDER 55
THE HOLY GHOST 65
HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST? 71
COLONEL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 81
MARK TWAIN'S BEST THOUGHT 85
AN IRRELIGIOUS DISCOURSE ON RELIGION 89
DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY 107
I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and
degradation of woman as the Bible.
--_Elizabeth Cady Stanton._
That God had to come to earth to find a mother for his son reveals
the poverty of Heaven.
CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION
Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child can not be a
true system.
--_Thomas Paine._
Hell is a place invented by priests and parsons for the sake of
being supported.
[Illustration]
CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION
One hundred fifty years ago, there was not a single white man in what
is now Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. What is now the most
flourishing part of the United States was then as little known as the
country in the heart of Africa itself. It was not until Seventeen
Hundred Seventy-six that Boone left his home in North Carolina to
become the first settler in Kentucky; and the pioneers of Ohio did not
settle that territory until twenty years later.
Canada belonged to France one hundred fifty-three years ago, and
Washington was a modest Virginia Colonel, and the United States was
the most loyal part of the British Empire, and scarcely a speck on the
political horizon indicated the struggle that in a few years was to lay
the foundation of the greatest republic in the world.
One hundred fifty years ago there were but four small newspapers in
America; steam-engines had not been imagined; and locomotives and
railroads, and telegraphs and postal cards, and friction-matches,
and revolvers and percussion-caps, and breechloading-guns and Mauser
rifles, and stoves and furnaces, and gas and electricity and rubber
shoes, and Spaulding's glue, and sewing-machines and anthracite coal,
and photographs, and kerosene-oil, free schools, and spring-beds and
hair-mattresses, and lever-watches and greenbacks were unknown. The
spinning-wheel was in almost every family, and clothing was spun and
woven and made up in the family; and the printing-press was a cumbrous
machine worked by hand.
Down to Eighteen Hundred Fourteen every paper in the world was printed
one side at a time, on an ordinary hand-press; and a nail, or a brick,
or a knife, or a pair of shears or scissors, or a razor, or a woven
pair of stockings, or an ax or a hoe or a shovel, or a lock and key, or
a plate of glass of any size, was not made in what is now the United
States.
In Seventeen Hundred Ninety, there were only seventy-five post-offices
in the country, and the whole extent of our post-routes was less
than nineteen hundred miles; cheap postage was unheard of; so were
envelopes; and had any one suggested the transmission of messages with
lightning speed, he would have been thought insane. The microscope on
the one hand and the telescope on the other were in their infancy as
instruments of science; and geology and chemistry were almost unknown,
to say nothing of the telephone and all the other various phones, and
the X-rays, and hundreds of other new things.
In Seventeen Hundred Sixty-two there were only six stagecoaches running
in all England, and these were a novelty. A man named John Crosset
thought they were so dangerous an innovation that he wrote a pamphlet
against them. "These coaches," he wrote, "make gentlemen come to London
upon every small occasion which otherwise they would not do, except
upon urgent necessity. The conveniency of the passage makes their wives
come often up, who, rather than come such long journeys on horseback,
would stay at home. Then when they come to town they must be in the
'wade' [probably that is where the word _swim_ comes in now], get fine
clothes, go to plays, and treats, and by these means get such a habit
of idleness and love of pleasure that they are uneasy ever after."
* * * * *
We can all see how much improvement there has been in all things but
_creeds_. Improvements can come, and old things go, but _creeds_ go on
forever! A creed implies something fixed and immovable. In other words,
it means you have a "heel-rope on."
The word "creed" is from _credo_, "I believe." We have had a great
deal of compulsion of belief, and a thousand years of almost absolute
unanimity. Liberty was dead and the ages were dark. We call them
the Middle Ages because they were the death between the life that
was before and the life that came after. Then came a new birth of
thought--a "Renaissance"--and after this, some reformation in the form
of a Protestantism.
Since then, the Protestants have continued to protest, not only against
the old, but against each other. And this is the best thing they have
done. Thus liberty has been saved, for each would have coerced its
fellow organization, as did their infamous mother, the Roman Catholic
Church, before them. From "creed" comes "credulous" and "credulity."
And they have filled the world with their kind. In the United States
alone, there are about one hundred forty types. Each is a system of
credulity pitted against a hundred and thirty-nine others. They all
rest on authority. They all denounce investigation--unless it has for
its end the support of their authority.
Hence, with the exception of two or three denominations, to become a
professed Christian means to accept credulously and without question
a system of belief about Nature and man and the world which you would
deny in toto if you reasoned as you do about other things, and which
you do practically deny by re-explaining and refining it into anything
but what is stated. Down deep in your heart you do not, and never
did, believe it in the same honest way in which you form your other
opinions.
Think for a moment of the Christian idea of the world, its origin, its
shape, place, importance, and its final end. Does any man or woman who
has been through a common-school geography believe the ideas implied in
the common Christian dogmas regarding the world? We must remember that
the world taught in the geography is not the Christian world.
The world taught in the Christian dogmas is beneath the heavens--not a
rolling sphere flying through space. It is flat, and the sun and stars
pass over it daily. It is the chief object of God's creation on which
to place man. It is God's footstool, and his throne is Heaven above. He
created it just four thousand and four years before the Christian era
began. Now we _all_ know that this is _not_ true; that there is no up
nor down; that the earth is not the center; that it is _not_ flat; that
the sun does not go round it; that it is a very insignificant little
orb; that "up in Heaven" is an utterly meaningless expression; and that
the world is not a creation, but an evolution.
And yet thousands of people credulously cling to creeds which embody
the notions of barbarous or uncivilized ages.
Take the dogma of revelation. It tells us that the Bible is a
revelation of the will and wisdom of an omniscient God; that it is a
perfect and sufficient rule of faith and practise. What, in the name
of humanity, causes people to make such statements today? It is like
trying to light the house with a saucer of tallow in which a rag is
immersed, instead of using gas or electricity.
Take an example of this Bible. In Deuteronomy xiv: 21, we read, "Ye
shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou mayest give it
unto the sojourner that is within thy gates, that he may eat it; or
thou mayest sell it unto a foreigner: for _thou_ art a holy people unto
Jehovah thy God." In Matthew vii: 12, we read, "Whatsoever ye would
that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them."
Why do you talk about the infallibility, the inerrancy, or even the
moral unity of a volume written by many hands at widely different
times? Are such people so ignorant that they have not read the Book
they are swearing by? Are they moral idiots and do not know the
plainest right and wrong? Are they scoundrels and have some deceitful
reason for urging such a book as an authority? Or are they the dupes of
their own credulity, clinging without thought to the beliefs in which
they have been reared? They are evidently not using commonsense in an
honest way.
I often hear the Bible spoken of as a holy book, full of a holy
spirit. I sometimes reply: "Have you read the conduct of Moses, Joshua,
Samuel, David, Solomon, and other ancient worthies, who were said to be
men after the heart of the bloodthirsty and avenging Jehovah? How long
would you keep out of prison if you took them for your models? Have you
read the Thirty-fifth, Fifty-eighth, Sixty-ninth and One Hundred Ninth
Psalms? If not, read them, and tell me what you think of them."
There never was any intrinsic reason for believing the Bible except
that a designing priesthood said so, and stupid people trusted them.
Here, by common consent, people agree to be duped. Ages and ages ago,
they began to make admissions that two and two might be six, or even
sixteen, in religion. They had sense enough to say that two and two are
four in other things. In Divine Revelation they shut their eyes to all
mistakes and wilful lies. If people should deceive in other matters as
the priests, parsons and teachers do in religion, they would not escape
arrest.
Another central doctrine is that of the Atonement. This is derived
from the moral character of the Jewish God; he governed the world of
humanity on the principle of primitive society. Men were responsible to
him in everything. Any infraction of his supposed laws rendered them
subject to his vengeance. That is why the Jew thought that God sent a
thunderstorm to punish him for eating pork.
What explanation besides credulity can be suggested for the
continuation of this belief century after century? Preachers shout
it from the pulpits, and Salvation Army people hawk it through the
streets. Not one of them knows what he is talking about. Each learned
it from some one who told him to say it. They all do it because it is
a part of a system which they have inherited, but the reason for which
they do not know, and have never allowed themselves to seek.
This cringing credulity keeps the masses from using their powers. They
seem to believe that if they should lose these superstitions they would
be lost.
* * * * *
And the dogma regarding Jesus is inextricably mixed up in Christian
theology with that of the Atonement. One assumption bolsters the
other. He is made to occupy the central place in this scheme of
blood-redemption through that other highly rational fable of the
immaculate conception. If Jesus was not immaculately conceived, then
Matthew and Luke have deceived; then Jesus is not God; then he is a
mere man; and if so, he is not the Redeemer. Man could not redeem
himself according to the first premise of the scheme. Man has been and
_is_ redeeming himself by learning Nature's laws and through them
rising to a higher life ever since he reached the stage of humanity.
Take the theory of the Resurrection. The account of it was written long
after the assumed occurrence, and by credulous men with superstitious
inclinations. Men and women of these days, understanding the laws of
Nature, can not give assent to the crude beliefs which easily commanded
the minds of ancient times.
Both Protestantism and Catholicism are systems built on essentially the
same foundation. Remove any of these stones, and the systems will have
to be rebuilt. If there is no special revelation, there is no special
scheme of salvation. If there is no vengeful, blood-seeking God, there
is no theological reconciliation. If there was no fall, there is no
hopeless depravity. If there was no immaculate conception, there is
no Redeemer in a special ecclesiastical sense. If there is no total
depravity, there is no lost world. If there is no lost world, there is
no yawning Hell. One and all, these fictions have their only ground for
continuance in a _selfish_ and unreasoning priesthood and clergy, and a
credulous people.
In the place of the "fall," science has put the "rise" of man. It finds
the Garden of Eden to have been a jungle. It finds the mythical perfect
Adam to have been a savage. It finds the Biblical "origin of evil"
to have been a puerile legend. It finds that sin and evil are made by
the seeing of higher states. It finds that there was no bad until the
better was reached. It finds that it is the advancing good which makes
the existing bad. It finds that among the worst of sinners are those
who live in and propagate outworn doctrines upon their own and others'
credulity.
In the olden times, God was made a king--the world was his kingdom.
His powers, virtues and vices were simply those of earthly kings
exaggerated. Jewish and Christian liturgies are full of expressions
showing the attitude of slaves and serfs to a tyrant. Sin has been
manufactured as heresy and disobedience to the so-called orthodox
system instead of to the laws of Nature.
Science has shown that the bottomless pit did not even have a top.
Columbus sailed over the Western edge of the flat Christian world on
which all this Christian system depended, and found that the material
Heaven and Hell were unfounded myths; but the preachers and priests
still threaten _hell_ to the most ignorant and credulous, but they tell
some of us that there is a _final judgment_.
* * * * *
In the old days, we used to hear a great deal about judgments. A
certain honest, good-natured, old farmer in New Hampshire, who was a
freethinker, but had a very pious wife, lost many cattle when the
black tongue was an epidemic in the State.
One day the hired man came in and told him the red oxen were dead.
"Are they?" said the old man. "Well, they were 'breechy cusses.' Take
off their hides and carry them down to Fletcher's. They will bring the
cash."
An hour or so later the man came back with the news that Lineback and
his mate were both dead.
"Are they?" said the old man. "Well, I took them of B---- to save a bad
debt that I never expected to get. Take the hides down to Fletcher's.
They will bring the cash."
After the lapse of another hour the man came back to tell him that the
nigh brindle was dead.
"Is he?" said the old man. "Well, he was a very old ox. Take off his
hide and send it down to Fletcher's. It is worth cash and will bring
more than two of the others."
Hereupon his wife reminded him that his loss was a judgment of Heaven
upon him.
"Is it?" said the old chap. "Well, if they will take the judgment in
cattle, it is the easiest way I can pay it."
But they know no more about final judgments than they did about the
lake of fire and brimstone which commenced to drain off in Columbus'
day. Science has vaporized the notion of a future judgment by the same
method it has that of a past Creation. From the _facts_, it has learned
_laws_. But credulity is always half-hearted with facts. It does not
know enough of truth to love it. It is ever glowing over and setting
up as a dogma the little it knows, or assumes to know, of the truth of
former times. It has no faith in the newly discovered, because it knows
nothing of it.
Hence, age after age we see the spectacle of men who have not studied
the science of their own day denouncing it in pulpit and councils;
of men who have steeped themselves in the traditions of the past
pronouncing shallow invectives against the demonstrations of (science)
the present.
* * * * *
Many church people say immortality must be true, or the great majority
would not believe in it. But do they? They do not talk or write as if
they did. If language means anything, I think the majority believe in
annihilation. Most people speak of the dead body of a man as though
it were the man. They say, "He was buried at Greenwood," or, "She was
cremated at Forest Hills." And we hear the "late" Mr. Smith left an
immense fortune. If Mr. Smith still exists, why do they say the _late_
Mr. Smith? If people didn't believe that the soul and body are one,
and that life ceases and mind expires when the body dies, why do they
say, "They were"? What little the Church has learned has been by _main
force_ so to speak.
A friend of mine many years ago was a college student. At that time
they were all compelled to attend the college church. On one occasion
he heard the preacher, who was also a college professor, make these
statements:
_First_, that the _elect_ alone would be saved.
_Second_, that among those who by the world were called Christians,
probably not more than one in a hundred belonged really and truly to
the _elect_.
_Third_, that the others, by reason of their Christian privileges,
would suffer more hereafter than the heathen, who had never heard the
Gospel at all.
The young man made a note of these propositions, and on the strength
of them drew up a petition to the Faculty soliciting exemption from
further attendance at church, as only preparing for himself a more
terrible future.
He said: "The congregation here amounts to six hundred persons,
and nine of these are the college professors. Now if only one in a
hundred is to be saved, it follows that three even of the professors
must be damned, and I, being a mere student, could not expect to be
saved in preference to a professor." Far, he said, be it from him to
cherish so presumptuous a hope. Nothing remained for him, therefore,
but perdition. In this melancholy state of affairs he was anxious to
abstain from anything that might aggravate his future punishment;
and as church attendance had been shown to have this influence on the
_non-elect_, he trusted that the Faculty would for all time exempt him
from it.
The result was he came very near being expelled from the
college--simply by heeding their sermons. The professors of some
colleges have learned something, and do not insist on the students
attending church.
* * * * *
Ponder for a moment on the many dishonest ways churches have for
raising money. Think of the amount of money they can raise at a
church-fair--alias, a confidence-game.
A young man from Kentucky told me that he attended one at Chicago.
First he went to the table where refreshments were sold. A beautiful
siren with big black eyes and small white hands spread the edibles
before him. When he arose from the table he handed her a five-dollar
bill. She put it in a little box and forgot to give him any change. She
smiled sweetly at him, and asked him if he would like to walk about the
room and look at the fancy articles, all to be sold for the good of the
church.
She took his arm and murmured, "We are not strangers; we both feel
interested in the church."
"We soon came," said the young man in telling me the story, "to a
silver tea-set that was to be 'raffled off.' Would I take a chance? Of
course I did. Then came a cake with a valuable ring concealed in it.
Would I take a chance in that? Of course I did.
"So things glided on until I concluded if I took many more chances, my
chances for getting home would be slim. So I refused to tempt fortune
any further, until the little black-eyed scoundrel took me on a new
tack. Leaning heavily on my arm, and resting her cheek on my shoulder,
she said, 'Please take a chance for me.'
"It is needless to add that I took the chance, and kept on taking
chances for the beautiful and unprincipled wretch that had me in tow,
until I had not a dollar left. Yes, I was penniless, and then it
began to dawn on me that she was working me for the success of the
church. There I was, bankrupt in money and self-respect. I had been
robbed--yes, robbed, for where is the difference between a pair of
pistols and a pair of black eyes in a robbery? You part with your money
because you can not help it.
"I know that Society looks with lenient eyes upon church-fairs, but it
is my opinion that all robbers will take sentence, and when that little
Chicago robber receives her sentence, she will take her place by the
side of Jack Sheppard!"
You see he still believes in Judgments. He is learning by main force.
A very pious woman whose father was a missionary, now living in Hawaii,
wrote not long ago that professional men flocking to the Islands will
be disappointed unless they are friends of old families; and the old
families are descendants of missionaries who went there in the early
days and took lands and everything else from the natives.
There seems to be nothing like being a descendant from a missionary
family. These people, equally pious and provident, thought it a
good scheme to cheat the sinful savages out of all their worldly
possessions, in order that they might be taught humility and holiness
through the chastening influence of poverty. So they robbed the
unregenerate to the glory of God.
Who says it doesn't pay to save the heathen? Think of the ignorance and
superstition of the majority of the preachers of the present day.
* * * * *
Up in Northern Minnesota, less than fifty years ago, an old Baptist
was preaching on the death of Moses on the Mount, and his not being
permitted to go over into the Promised Land. The preacher said:
"I have always felt sorry for Moses. It has seemed so hard to me that
he could not go over with Caleb and Joshua, the only two of the host
which he had led out of Egypt, and enjoy with his people the good
country towards which they had been so long traveling. When as a boy
I read that in the Bible for the first time, I sat down and cried for
sympathy with him. But Moses had a hard time from the first. He was no
sooner born than his life was threatened. His mother had to hide him to
save it. After three months she could hide him no longer, and so she
made an ark of bulrushes and set him afloat on the river. Indeed, it
seemed as though the Lord had all he could do to raise Moses."
But the people of this generation do not take the story of Moses so
seriously. A bright young girl of ten, on being asked by her Sabbath
School teacher, "Where did Pharaoh's daughter get Moses?" replied, with
the accent on the _said_, "She _said_ she 'found him in the bulrushes.'"
I attended a campmeeting in North Carolina. The exhortations and
prayers would cause a graven image to smile audibly. One old Baptist
preacher said he always felt so sorry to think that "Ingine corn"
didn't grow in Palestine, because he would like to think that the
little Jesus had a good time playing with cob-houses.
But those preachers compare favorably with the Reverend George F. Hall,
of Decatur, Illinois, and the Reverend Doctor John P. D. John, and the
Reverend Doctor Frederick Bell, late of the Metropolitan Temple of
San Francisco, California, who at various times challenged Robert G.
Ingersoll to debate with them. It shows what ignorance, superstition
and egotism combined can do.
Darwin said the herding instinct in animals has its base in fear. Sheep
and cattle go in droves, while a lion simply flocks with his mate.
Those who wish to lead have always fostered fear, encouraging this
tendency to herd, promising protection, and offering what they call
knowledge in return for a luxurious living.
In other words, the men who preach and pray, always want the people
who _work_ to divide with them. They work on the line that fear will
compel men to join churches. This joining instinct is a manifestation
of weakness. By going with a gang they hope to get to Heaven. But the
moment you eliminate the Devil from Christianity, there is nothing
left. You can not have a revival, alias an epidemic, of religion,
without the Devil. If there were no Devil, there would be nothing to
pray about, and all these people who are gifted in prayer would be
without a job.
Think of the chaplains of the Army and Navy, in Congress and in the
Legislatures being turned out to browse for themselves. Think of their
being obliged to earn an honest living. They could not do it. I am
amused when I think of the prayers that are exchanged in war times. One
side will pray that the wrath of Heaven will descend on the other, and
the other side will return the compliment with ten per cent interest.
I remember when I was a child of reading the prayer of a Hungarian
officer. He said: "O Lord, I will not ask thee to help us, and I know
that thou wilt not help the Austrians. But if thou wilt sit on yonder
hill, thou shalt not be ashamed of thy children."
The famous Bishop Leslie prayed before a battle in Ireland, "O God, for
our unworthiness we are not fit to claim thy help, but if we are bad,
our enemies are worse, and if thou seest not meet to help us, we pray
thee help them not, but stand thou neutral this day, and leave it to
the arm of flesh."
All this dramatic power would be lost without the Devil. So it behooves
the Christian churches to hold fast to the Devil. Get a good grip on
his hoofs, horns and tail, for without him they would be relegated to
"innocuous desuetude." He should be incorporated as the fourth person
in the Orthodox Godhead, and respectfully addressed as "Holy Devil."
_There is no truth in the dogma of the divinity of Jesus, no sense
in it, no religion in it. It is the product of mythology and has no
claim upon this age._
This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right
you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of
Nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance.
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a
traitor to himself and to his fellowmen.
As far as I am concerned, I wish to be out on the high seas. I wish
to take my chances with wind and wave and star. And I had rather
go down in the glory and grandeur of the storm, than to rot in any
orthodox harbor whatever.
--_Robert Ingersoll._
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT SOME CHURCHES AND WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC
The ignorance of the masses insures abundant contributions to the
clergy and to religion.--_Ralph W. Chainey._
The mother who teaches her child to pray makes a mistake.
[Illustration]
WHY I AM AN AGNOSTIC
The Millerites--or Second Adventists, as they now call themselves--are
the first sect that I remember. They are a people of remarkable vigor:
they have been at work for seventy years to bring this world to an end,
and although they have been wrong in their arithmetic all these years,
they rub out the slate and begin again.
And they prove everything by the Bible, as all other denominations do.
The "time" has been set at least twenty times since I can remember. I
recollect having awful palpitations in the kneepans upon one of the
eventful days, and crawling under the barn so as not to be in the
way. They used to congregate on the height of land near my father's,
"to go up," and one man climbed upon an old shed, and fell and broke
his hip; he fainted, and they thought he was dead. As soon as he had
revived a little, they asked him if he had any requests to make before
he died. He replied, "I want you to work in 'durn fool' somewhere on
my tombstone." He recovered, and lived many years, but he was cured of
Millerism.
A large share of the students of the Second Advent doctrine came into
this world, not only naked, but without any brains, nor any place
suitable to put any; and the first business they do is to wonder about
their souls and talk about being "born again." They never seem to
realize that to be well born is much more essential than to be "born
again." I never knew immortality to be secured at the second birth.
I attended one of their meetings this year, and asked one of the
sisters for their _creed_. She said, "Our creed is the whole Bible,
from the first book of Genesis to the last word of the last chapter of
Revelations."
I thought of what a boy said when the Baptist Elder came and took tea
at his home, and asked a "blessing."
The boy said: "Is that the way you ask a blessing? My father doesn't
ask it that way."
"How does he ask it?"
"Oh, he sat down to the table the other evening, and looked it all
over, and said, 'My God, what a supper!'"
And I thought, "My God, what a creed!"
I was tempted to ask the Millerite sister what she thought of the
discrepancy between the first and the second chapter of Genesis. In the
first chapter Man and Woman were a simultaneous creation. In the second
chapter, Woman was an afterthought. But I had the deep sagacity to
hold my tongue, and leave her and her _creed_ in peace.
* * * * *
The second church that I remember anything about is the Free-Will
Baptist. My mother was a devout member of that church. I have heard
thousands of times, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit,
he can not enter into the Kingdom of God." And man included woman--it
always did, so far as pains and penalties were concerned.
I remember distinctly a sermon I heard on Hell. You younger people can
not have the faintest idea of the terrific sermons that were preached
in those days.
That sermon commenced in this wise:
"Now we will look into Hell and see what we can see. It is all red-hot
like red-hot iron. Streams of burning pitch and sulphur run through it.
The floor blazes up to the roof. Look at the walls--the enormous stones
are red-hot. Sparks of fire are always falling down from them. Lift
up your eyes to the roof of Hell. It is like a sheet of blazing fire.
Hell is filled with a fog of fire. In Hell, torrents not of water, but
of fire and brimstone, are rained down. You may have seen a house on
fire, but you never saw a house made of fire. Hell is a house made of
fire. The fire of Hell burns the devils, who are spirits, for it was
prepared for them. But it will burn the body as well as the soul.
Take a little spark out of Hell--less than the size of a pin-head--and
throw it into the ocean, and it will not go out. In one moment it
would dry up all the waters of the ocean, and set the whole world in a
blaze! Listen to the terrific noise of Hell--to the horrible uproar of
countless millions of tormented creatures, mad with the fury of Hell!
Oh, the screams of fear, the groanings of horror, the yells of rage,
the cries of pain, the shouts of agony, the shrieks of despair, from
millions on millions. You hear them roaring like lions, hissing like
serpents, howling like dogs, and wailing like dragons! And above all,
you hear the roaring of the thunder of God's anger, which shakes Hell
to its foundations. Little children, if you go to Hell, there will be a
devil at your side to strike you. How will you feel after you have been
struck every minute for a hundred millions of years? Look into this
inner room of Hell, and see a girl of about sixteen. She stands in the
middle of a red-hot floor; her feet are bare; sleep can never come to
her; she can never forget for one moment in all the eternity of years."
And so this description of Hell went on for nearly two hours. Do you
wonder that I, a child of ten years, said to my father, who was a
freethinker, infidel, atheist, or whatever else you please to call him:
"I _hate_ my mother's church. I will _not_ go there again!"
* * * * *
The next church I became acquainted with was the Calvin Baptist Church.
That church seemed to think that the most of us were born to be damned
anyway!
The great Ingersoll had it right when he said it was the
damned-if-you-do-and-the-damned-if-you-don't church.
The only difference between the Free-Will Baptists and the Calvin
Baptists that I can see, is, that you are allowed to exercise your
_will_. The Free-Will Baptists will damn you if you wish to be, and the
Calvinists will damn you anyway!
The next church to which I was introduced was the Congregationalist,
alias the Orthodox. Their creed is rather complex from a mathematical
standpoint. They seem to think that three Gods are one God, and one God
is three Gods.
I, having been taught that figures don't lie, couldn't understand it,
until I thought of a boy who said to his teacher when she explained to
him that figures didn't lie: "You should see my sisters at home, and
then on the street. You will find that figures do lie."
* * * * *
I then went to Italy, and became conversant with the _outside_
doings of the Roman Catholic Church. I visited many of them, saw the
beggars eating crusts at the doors, and the well-fed priests saying
masses inside; saw the white hand of famine always extended, in
bitter contrast to the magnificent cathedrals; saw well-dressed,
intelligent-looking men and women going upstairs on their hands and
knees, and saw hundreds of them kissing the toe of the bronze statue of
Saint Peter; saw monks of every shade and description; and all begging
for the Holy Catholic Church!
I attended a church festival at Rome at the Ara Cœli, where the most
"Holy Bambino" is kept, a little wooden doll about two feet long. It is
said to be the image of Jesus. It had a crown of gold on its head and
was fairly ablaze with diamonds. It has great power to heal the sick.
It is taken to visit patients in great style--that is, if the patients
are rich. The Bambino is placed in a coach accompanied by priests in
full dress. The Great Festival of the Bambino is celebrated annually.
Military bands and the Soldiers of the Guard dance attendance. Saint
Gennaro is held to be the guardian saint of Naples. The alleged miracle
by which the blood of this holy person, contained in a glass tube,
changes from a solid to a liquid state, is well known. Thousands go to
see the miracle performed. When the priest first held up the sacred
vial with its clotted contents we could hear all about us: "Holy
Gennaro, save and protect us! Bless the City of Naples, and keep it
free from plagues and earthquakes and other ills. Do this miracle so
that we can see that thy power and thy favor are still with us." And
so it went on for an hour or more, until the great throng was nearly
hysterical.
At last the priest stepped forward, showing that the blood flowed
freely in the tube, and then such a shout went up from the big crowd as
one hears only in Southern climes.
* * * * *
I have never been introduced to the Church of England, alias, the
Episcopalian, but I've always thought if a man had a good voice, and
understood the mysteries of the corkscrew, he would make a good rector.
I became acquainted with a High-Church Episcopalian woman not long ago,
and she showed me a prayer-rug and praying-costume imported from Paris.
I told her that she looked like an angel in it, as she ought after
going to all that expense and trouble; if she didn't, dressmakers might
as well give it up and wait for Gabriel. The attitude of prayer threw
the back breadths of the skirt into graceful prominence, and hence the
necessity (which will be at once recognized by all the truly _pious_)
of increased attention to the frills and embroidery required by the
religious attitude of prayer.
An old farmer in Indiana said he was a "Piscopal."
"To what parish do you belong?"
"I don't know nothing about parishes."
"Who confirmed you?"
"Nobody."
"Then how do you belong to the Episcopalian Church?"
"Well, last Winter I went down to Arkansas visiting, and while I was
there, I went to a church and it was called 'Piscopal,' and I heard
them say that they had done the things they ought not to have done, and
left undone the things they ought to have done, and I says to myself,
'That is my fix exactly,' and ever since then I've considered myself a
'Piscopal'!"
And I came to the conclusion that that is why the membership of that
church is so large!
* * * * *
I know but little about the Methodists, but I do know that John Wesley,
one of the founders of that church, believed in witchcraft, and was one
of the latest of its supporters.
History tells us that Brother Wesley preached a sermon entitled, _The
Cause and Cure of Earthquakes_. He said that earthquakes were caused
by sin, and the only way to stop them was to believe in his theology
and teachings, thus showing great knowledge of seismology; but people
who bank on gullibility are usually safe. I know the Methodists make a
great hullabaloo about their religion, and appear to think their God is
deaf.
The Methodist Conference has refused to allow women to be delegates to
the General Conference. The Methodist sisters should discipline the
Church.
* * * * *
What I know about the Universalists I like. They seem to think that
we are all in the same boat, and that one stands as good a chance as
another, of which I approve. When I was a child, Sylvanus Cobb, at that
time the great Universalist preacher, preached in the adjoining town.
One Sunday, my father and I went to hear him. His sermon caused a great
commotion, and the Baptist who preached that terrific sermon about Hell
said to my mother, "There is a wicked man about here preaching that
everybody is to be saved; but, Sister Young, let us hope for better
things!"
* * * * *
I believe that the Unitarians, as a class, think for themselves. I
approve of that, and the Evangelical Alliance disapproves of them. That
is in their favor.
I taught school at Lee, New Hampshire, fifty years ago. One of the
committee was a Unitarian, and one was a Quaker. I was tired of
selecting suitable reading matter from that obscene old book, the
Bible, and I suggested that we read from some other book, which we did
for two mornings, when the Unitarian materialized at the schoolhouse,
and with much suavity suggested that we read from the Bible every
morning, and recite the Lord's Prayer; and I, teaching school for my
bread and butter, bowed to the suggestion, and the next morning said:
"Pupils, Mr. Smith prefers that we read from the Bible. Therefore, we
will this morning read the startling and authentic account of Jonah
whilst he was stopping at the submarine hotel." That is the most
narrow-minded thing I ever knew about a Unitarian; but I always thought
Mr. Smith voiced the opinion of the parents of the pupils rather than
his own.
I am somewhat acquainted with the Church of the Latter-Day Saints,
alias the Mormons. They are a prudent, industrious, painstaking people,
and only about two per cent of them ever _did_ practise polygamy, and
that is a very small proportion for any Christian church. Brigham
Young never did have but seventeen wives, but Solomon had five hundred
wives, and one thousand other lady friends, and David, whose honor
and humility show greater in his psalms than in the history of his
ordinary, every-day life, was, as the Bible says, a man after God's own
heart.
I am sure that Brigham Young compared favorably with David. And if God
interviewed Moses, why shouldn't he have interviewed Joe Smith?
There are more than one thousand religions. They are founded mostly on
fraud. All their saviors had virgins for mothers, and gods for fathers.
The churches own more than thirteen billions of property, and they are
_all_ too dishonest to pay honest taxes. Many of the churches couldn't
be run three weeks without the women. They do all the work, for which
they get no credit.
The churches claim all the distinguished people, especially after
they are dead and hence can not deny their claims. They have many
times claimed that Abraham Lincoln was a churchman. The Honorable
H. C. Deming, of Connecticut, an old friend of Lincoln, said it is
false. Lincoln belonged to no church, and at one time said, "I have
never united myself to any church, because I have found difficulty in
giving my assent without mental reservation to the long, complicated
statements of Christian doctrine, which characterize their articles of
belief, and confessions of faith." But still they claim him. Honest,
very!
* * * * *
No institution in modern civilization is so tyrannical and so unjust to
women as is the Christian church. The history of the Church does not
contain a single suggestion for the equality of woman with man, and
still the Church claims that woman owes her advancement to the Bible.
She owes it much more to the dictionary.
History, both ancient and modern, tells us that the condition of women
is most degraded in those countries where Church and State are in
closest affiliation (such as, Spain, Italy, Russia and Ireland), and
most advanced in nations where the power of ecclesiasticism is markedly
on the wane. It has been proved that, whatever progress woman has made
in any department of effort, she has accomplished independent of, and
in opposition to, the so-called inspired and infallible Word of God;
and that the Bible has been of more injury to her than has any other
book ever written in the history of the world.
William Root Bliss, in his _Side Glimpses From the Colonial
Meetinghouse_, tells us many startling truths concerning the Puritans,
and reminds me of what Chauncey M. Depew said--that the _first_ thing
the Puritans did, after they landed at Plymouth, was to fall on their
knees, and the _second_ thing was to fall on the Aborigines.
The business of trading in slaves was not immoral by the estimate of
public opinion in Colonial times. A deacon of the church in Newport
esteemed the slave trade, with its rum accessories, as home missionary
work. It is said that on the first Sunday after the arrival of his
slaves he was accustomed to offer thanks that an overruling Providence
had been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of
benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a Gospel dispensation.
At a Bridgewater town meeting of the year Sixteen Hundred Seventy-six,
a vote was called to see what should be done with the money that was
made from selling the Indians.
John Bacon of Barnstable directed in his will that his Indian slave
Dinah be sold and the proceeds used "by my executors in buying Bibles."
By men who sat in the Colonial meetinghouse, the first fugitive-slave
law was formed. This law became a part of the Articles of Confederation
between all the New England Colonies.
The affinity between _rum_ and the religion of Colonial times was
exemplified in the license granted John Vyall to keep a house of
entertainment in Boston. He must keep it near the meetinghouse of the
Second Church, where he extended his invitation to thirsty sinners who
were going to hear John Mayo or Increase Mather preach.
* * * * *
The importation of slaves began early. The first arrival at Boston
was by the ship _Desire_, on February Twenty-sixth, Sixteen Hundred
Thirty-seven, bringing negroes, tobacco and cotton from Barbados. She
had sailed from Boston eleven months before, carrying Indian captives
to the Bermudas to be sold as slaves, and thus she became noted as the
first New England slave-ship.
In time, slaves were brought to Boston direct from Africa.
Advertisements of just-arrived negroes to be sold may be seen in the
Boston _News Letter_ of the years Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six and
Seventeen Hundred Twenty-seven. The pious Puritans did not hesitate to
sell slaves on the auction-block. I find in the Boston _News Letter_
of September Nineteenth, Seventeen Hundred Fifteen, a notice of an
auction-sale at Newport, Rhode Island, of several Indians, men and
boys, and a very likely negro man. They were treated in all respects as
merchandise, and were rated with horses and cattle.
Peter Faneuil, to whom Boston is indebted for its Cradle of Liberty,
was deep in the business. In an inventory of the property of Parson
Williams of Deerfield, in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-nine, his slaves
were rated with his horses and cows. "Believe and be baptized" is all
that was essential. I think many of them would have been improved by
anchoring them out overnight.
A negro preacher whom I knew came to me when I was in Florida, and
said: "What shall I preach about tomorrow? I'se done preached myself
'plumb out.' I'se worked on election sanctification and damnation
predestination till I can't say another word to save my life."
I said, "Preach a sermon on 'Thou shalt not steal' for a text."
"Yes," he said, "that certainly _is_ a good text, but I am monstros
'fraid it will produce a coolness in my congregation!"
Doubtless it would produce a coolness in many a congregation today.
* * * * *
Now I want to talk a little about _law_ and its penalty. We want to
consider the invariable laws of Nature. Let us look at it in the way in
which we became acquainted with it--through experience.
To the child, law is an educator; he plays with fire and is burned.
Law and its penalty have done their work. A burnt child dreads the
fire. On that point his education is complete. He cuts himself with a
knife; again the law works. Do not play with edged tools is the lesson.
And so, whenever he comes in contact with external objects, he learns
something very definite from them; and if he has any sense, he soon
conforms to the order which he sees in force all around him. He does
what he can to act in such a way as not to run counter to Nature's
laws; or, at least, Nature teaches him to do so by repeated suffering
when he acts otherwise. The law thus far is all in favor of life,
and is teaching the child to preserve it. He must eat not to starve;
he must be clothed not to freeze; he must not be burned, or cut, or
crushed. In one word, he must take care of himself, and be careful of
external objects, or he must be hurt.
But his education has another connection with law. If he has proper
parents he learns that he can not lie, or steal, or do many other
things without suffering a penalty. If he has no home education in
this matter, the reform-school and the jail step in and take up the
lesson.
And so the law teaches him that his actions must be of a certain
quality, both with respect to external Nature and his fellowmen, or
that he must pay a penalty.
Thus he comes to man's estate, and law has been to him an educator and
a good one. He has learned that Nature's law means punishment every
time it is violated, and that man's law, whatever it may attain to,
_aims_ at the same object as Nature's law.
But neither his education nor his contact with law ends with his
youth. Hitherto he has obeyed blindly for fear of the penalty. He now
obeys intelligently, and connected with the penalty to be incurred by
disobedience is the reward to be obtained through obedience. He finds
that every act, every thought, of his brings him in direct contact
with law. He can not elude it by standing still, for no man can stand
still. He must go forward, or backward. This is an inexorable law;
with progress, improvement; without progress, what? Rest? Repose?
No! Deterioration. No man can stand still in this universe for a day
without losing something. The man who means to do anything in life must
go forward; if he falters, another goes ahead; and then he learns that
the penalty of faltering is failure.
Nature works no special miracles in any one's favor. Nature works
no miracles, anyway. The sun and the moon did _not_ stand still at
Joshua's command!
No riches and influence can buy exemption from Nature.
Law says to the poor man who is dependent on his daily toil: "You have
only yourself to rely upon. Take care of your health; be temperate,
honest and industrious, for sickness, imprisonment, idleness, mean to
you death."
It says to the rich man: "Inherited wealth has exempted you from
_daily_ labor of body, but it has not earned for you rest. Go to work;
do something, or your mind and body will be enfeebled; your sympathies
will disappear; you will become dry as the summer's dust; you will sink
into a nonentity."
The whole cry of Nature's law is onward and upward. Evolution is the
word--there is no God about it. It is not alone the survival of the
fittest--that is only a part of the process. It is the fittest of one
generation becoming something better and higher for the next.
It is the fashion now to say that the struggle for existence becomes
yearly more fierce, but that is not so. The truth is that those who
struggle become with each survival fitter to struggle, and that for
which they struggle is placed one step forward. Men used to want
thousands and hundreds of thousands; now, they want millions and
hundreds of millions. They used to want general knowledge; now, they
are all specialists, and cry out that life is too short. Steam used
to content them; now, electricity does not satisfy them, and they are
grasping at the possibilities of the mighty currents of air caused by
the revolutions of the earth itself.
The law of progress is not limited to the mind. The body shares in
it. Men are stronger, larger, longer-lived than they have ever been.
Even with the animals, finer, better breeds are constantly producing
themselves under law.
This law of the survival of the fittest and the elevation of the type
of the fittest pronounced against slavery, and a nation paid the
penalty in blood, as Spain has, and other nations will pay it. It has
pronounced against the subjection of women, and let those who stand in
the way, beware, lest some ruin crush them as it falls!
The type of sympathy has become higher and tenderer. Sweet hands of
mercy are now stretched down even to the brutes. Let those lovers of
the past who can see no progress in the present, who would question
this onward tendency, and the result of law, let them remember
that they must run rapidly to keep from being overwhelmed by the
_expansionists_.
Nature's law teaches us that like begets like. You plant a grain of
wheat, and you reap wheat. You breed Morgan stock and the foal is of
Morgan blood. The child is the offspring of certain parents, and it
inherits their blood. If parents choose to unfit themselves to be
healthy parents, who shall be blamed?
* * * * *
Shall gravitation cease as I go by? Teach children that no amount of
so-called religion will compensate for rheumatism; that Christianity
has nothing to do with morality; that "vicarious atonement" is a fraud,
and a lie; that to be born well and strong is the highest birth; that
to be honest and pay one's debts spells peace of mind; that the Bible
is no more inspired than the dictionary; that _sin_ is a transgression
of the laws of life, and that the blood of all the bulls and goats
and lambs of ancient times, and the blood of Christ or any other man,
never had, and never can have, the least effect in making a life what
it would have been had it obeyed the laws of life. If you have marred
your life, you must bear the consequences. If you have made a mistake,
be more careful in the future. Let the thought that the past is
irretrievable make you more careful in the present and for the future.
And, above all, teach children that prayer is idiotic. There may be
one God or twenty. I do not know or care. I am not afraid, and no
priest or parson can make me believe that my title to a future life, if
there be one, is defective. And the great and good man Thomas Paine,
who wrote the _Age of Reason_, and said, "The world is my country, and
to do good my religion," is a good enough god for me. And the great
Ingersoll, who said, "I belong to the great Church that holds the world
within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every
race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed
and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul," is
in my opinion an excellent god--as good as any that ever lived, from
Confucius to Christ. A friend of mine said to me, "Ingersoll should
have been a Christian." I replied, "The dog-collar of Christianity did
not belong on his neck: he preached the truth; he preferred that to the
Bible. I can not imagine the great Ingersoll preaching from II Kings
xiv: 35."
_When I was a child I heard very little about Christmas and nothing
about Lent and Easter. I was taught to be honest and truthful and
to pay one hundred cents on a dollar. In my opinion there is no
Bible extant so good as Ingersoll's Complete Works._
A LETTER AND THE REJOINDER
Fear paralyzes the brain. Progress is born of courage. Fear
believes--courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and
prays--courage stands erect and thinks. Fear retreats--courage
advances. Fear is barbarism--courage is civilization. Fear believes
in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion--courage
is science.
There are real crimes enough without creating artificial ones. All
progress in legislation has for centuries consisted in repealing
the laws of the ghosts.
--_Robert Ingersoll._
[Illustration]
A LETTER AND THE REJOINDER
A LABOR OF FOLLY
_From the Portsmouth "Times"_
Our old friend, Marilla M. Ricker, of Dover, lifelong advocate of
"woman's rights," zealous champion of "freethought," admirer of Bob
Ingersoll, worshiper of Tom Paine, and collaborator of Elbert Hubbard,
who fears neither God, man nor the Devil, because she does not believe
particularly in any of them, is engaged in a labor of folly, in that
she is fighting the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul.
In the prosecution of her warfare she has gone into print and issued
a pamphlet in which she takes issue, primarily, with one Elder E. A.
Kenyon upon his proposition of a universal consciousness that "if a man
die he shall live again," and even goes so far as to assert that the
majority of mankind believe in annihilation. Moreover, she pronounces
the doctrine of personal immortality "a most selfish and harmful one,"
"pernicious in its results," and operating for the enslavement of
mankind, filling the world with gloom and making of man a crawling
coward.
We invite no controversy with Marilla, and will have none. We concede
her right to believe anything, or nothing, to say what she thinks,
write what she pleases, get it printed where she may, and circulate
it as she can; but our advice to the dear sister is to "let up" on
this contention, wherein she is out-Ingersolling Ingersoll. He did not
believe in immortality, but he did not deny it. He claimed that he did
not know, and that no man could know it to be a fact; but he never
sought to blot out hope. And the truth is that but for this hope of
immortal existence, entertained by the vast majority of the race, in
all lands and ages, life would not be worth living, and men and women
everywhere would lie down and perish in despair. It is this hope, or
faith, or consciousness--however we may express it--of life beyond
the grave, or the immortality of the soul, that inspires mankind to
all that is noble and heroic in the great struggle for progress and
development here. Without it there would be no incentive effort beyond
that which impels the brute. Without it, in fact, man would be mere
brute, and nothing else.
That the horrid doctrines of Calvinism were dinned into Mrs. Ricker's
ears in childhood, and the fear of eternal torment held up before her,
instead of the infinite love of a God of Mercy and Justice, may have
impelled her to repudiate all idea of God or Justice, or life to
come; but she ought to be intelligent enough to sift the error from
the truth and cling to the latter. If not, she should at least be
willing to allow others to do so. She may repudiate the old Calvinism,
or even Christianity itself. She may become a Mohammedan, a Buddhist,
an Agnostic or an out-and-out "heathen" if she will. She may accept
annihilation as the universal fate of humanity; but she should be
willing to allow mankind in general its indulgence in that one "Great
Hope," which has illumined with immortal splendor the darkest passages
of human life, and sustains the soul of man and woman in the severest
trials and conflicts of earth.
THE REJOINDER
(_From the Portsmouth "Times"_)
I was amused when I read in the Portsmouth _Times_ an article from my
friend Metcalf, entitled, A _Labor of Folly_. The genial Henry said
I was a lifelong advocate of "woman's rights," which is true. And an
admirer of Ingersoll. Could any one help admire that great and good
man? And a worshiper of Thomas Paine. Worship is rather a strong word
to apply to me, but I think the man who said, "The world is my country,
and to do good my religion," and who did more than any other man to
put the stars on our flag and to give that flag to the breeze, should
be loved and respected.
He, the aforesaid Henry, said I collaborated with Elbert Hubbard. I am
proud of that, whether it is true or not.
I consider Hubbard the most brilliant writer in this country.
Henry also said I feared neither God, man nor the Devil, because I did
not believe particularly in any of them. If he would add an "o" to
God and make it good, take the "d" from devil and make it evil, then
I would have something tangible to write about besides man, in whom I
believe.
Henry also said that I was engaged in a "labor of folly," fighting the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
I simply expressed my opinion on the subject. My friend Henry wrote me
not long ago that there was no earthly need of a Freethought paper;
that thought was as free as air always and everywhere. I take issue
with him there, and I call his attention to the _Little Journey_ to
the home of Copernicus--of January, Nineteen Hundred Five--by Elbert
Hubbard. Copernicus was the founder of modern astronomy.
If Henry will read his life he can see what freethought meant at that
time. I also call his attention to Giordano Bruno. He can see what
happened to him and how free thought was at that time. Henry said I
could write what I pleased, and get it printed where I could.
That was well added, for I could not in the year Nineteen Hundred Nine,
in the city of Dover, New Hampshire, get my article on Immortality
printed in the only paper in the city; so you see how freethought is up
to date.
I certainly "take issue" with Henry, "That the hope or consciousness
of life beyond the grave, or immortality of the soul, inspires mankind
to all that is noble and heroic in the great struggle for progress and
development here."
Robert Ingersoll did not believe in immortality, but he was a great,
tender-hearted man, full of kindness, full of generous impulses. No man
ever loved the true, the good and the beautiful more than he. He would
take the case of a poor man into court without pay; he would give a
young reporter an interview when he could sell every word he spoke for
a dollar; he would present the proceeds of a lecture to some worthy
object as though he were throwing a nickel to an organ-grinder; and
when there was persecution he was on the side of the persecuted.
I do not believe in individual immortality, but I do the best I can,
pay one hundred cents on the dollar, and I am not afraid to die. I
know thousands who believe as I do.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed in the immortality
of the soul--so do his followers. He also believed that sin was the
cause of earthquakes, and the only way to stop them was to believe in
the Lord Jesus Christ. He didn't know much about seismology, but he
certainly had faith, plus.
John Calvin founded the Presbyterian Church; he believed in the
immortality of the soul. So do his followers; but Calvin was a murderer.
Henry, it is absurd to say that without hope of immortality we should
be degraded to brutes; in my opinion it is not true. What we want is a
religion that will pay debts; that will practise honesty in business
life; that will treat employees with justice and consideration;
that will render employers full and faithful work; that will keep
bank-cashiers true, officeholders patriotic, and reliable citizens
interested in the purity of politics (and the woman citizen will
be)--such a religion is real, vital and effective. But a religion that
embraces vicarious atonement, miraculous conception, regeneration by
faith, baptism, individual immortality and other monkey business is, in
my opinion, degrading, absurd and unworthy.
Henry, you say you want no controversy with me. I enjoy controversy,
but if you are averse to it I'll stop and we will unite in singing one
stanza of that Christian hymn:
King David and King Solomon
Led merry, merry lives
With their many, many lady friends
And their many, many wives;
But when old age came o'er them
With its many, many qualms,
(It was said)
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And King David wrote the Psalms.
But did they?
[Illustration]
Where religion is afraid of liberty, liberty should be afraid of
religion.--_Lemuel K. Washburn._
So long as man believes that he has an immortal soul, he will fear
the future.
THE HOLY GHOST
For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men
and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great
ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between
Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor,
to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this
world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle,
to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have
said, "Think!" The many have said, "Believe!"
--_Robert Ingersoll._
[Illustration]
THE HOLY GHOST
Of all the weird, fanciful and fabulous stories appertaining to
the gods and other pious frauds, that concerning the Holy Ghost
ranks them all! Now listen to what the Bible has to say about
that mythical personage--alias, the Holy Ghost. You will see that
scarcely any two references to it agree in assigning it the same
character or attributes. (It reminds me of what an old lady said at a
prayer-meeting: "Dear brothers and sisters, it seems to me that there
are no two of a mind here tonight, nor hardly one!")
In John xiv: 26, the Holy Ghost is spoken of as a person or personal
God. In Luke iii: 22, the Holy Ghost changes and assumes the form of
a dove. In Matthew xiii: 16, the Holy Ghost becomes a spirit. In John
i: 32, the Holy Ghost is presented as an inanimate senseless object.
In I John v: 7, the Holy Ghost becomes a God--the third member of
the Trinity. In Acts ii: 1, the Holy Ghost is averred to be a mighty
rushing wind. In Acts x: 38, the Holy Ghost, we infer from its mode
of application, is an ointment. In John xx: 22, the Holy Ghost is the
breath, as we legitimately infer by its being breathed into the mouth
of the recipient after the ancient Oriental custom. In Acts ii: 3, we
learn the Holy Ghost "sat upon each of them." In Acts ii: 1, the Holy
Ghost appears as cloven tongues of fire. In Luke ii: 26, the Holy Ghost
is the author of a revelation or inspiration. In Mark i: 8, the Holy
Ghost is a medium or element for baptism. In Acts xxviii: 25, the Holy
Ghost appears with vocal organs and speaks. In Hebrews vi: 4, the Holy
Ghost is dealt out or imparted by measure. In Luke iii: 22 the Holy
Ghost appears with a tangible body. In Luke i: 5, we are taught that
people are filled with the Holy Ghost. In Matthew xi: 15, the Holy Ghost
falls upon the people as a ponderable substance. In Luke iv: 1, the Holy
Ghost is a God within a God--Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost.
These are only a few quotations. There are many more, but we can all
see what a multifarious personage, or rather _he_, _she_, or _it_ the
Holy Ghost is.
* * * * *
I remember hearing much about the unpardonable sin against the Holy
Ghost. The sin against the Holy Ghost consisted in resisting its
operations in the second birth--that is, the regeneration of the heart
or soul by the Holy Ghost. And it was considered unpardonable simply
because as the pardoning and cleansing process consisted in, or was at
least always accompanied with, baptism by water, in which operation
the Holy Ghost was the agent in effecting the "new birth," therefore,
when the ministrations or operations of this indispensable agent were
resisted or rejected, there was no channel, no means, no possible mode
left for the sinner to find a renewed acceptance with God.
When a person sinned against the Father or the Son, he could find a
door of forgiveness through the baptizing processes, spiritual or
elementary, of the Holy Ghost. But an offense committed against this
third limb of the Godhead had the effect of closing and barring the
door so that there could be no forgiveness, either in this life or in
that which is to come.
To sin against the Holy Ghost was to tear down the scaffold by which
the door of Heaven was to be reached. This _sin_ against the Holy Ghost
has caused thousands of the disciples of the Christian faith the most
agonizing hours of alarm and despair.
It has always been my opinion that many people who thought they had
sinned against the Holy Ghost simply had dyspepsia.
_If people should deceive in other matters as the priests, parsons
and teachers do in religion, they would not escape arrest._
The destruction of religions and superstition means the upbuilding
of charity and ethics.--_Ralph W. Chainey._
Superstition is nothing but a misplaced fear of some fancied
supernatural phantasm of divinity.
HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST?
All that is good in our civilization is the result of commerce,
climate, soil, geographical position, industry, invention,
discovery, art and science. The Church has been the enemy of
progress, for the reason that it has endeavored to prevent man
from thinking for himself. To prevent thought is to prevent all
advancement except in the direction of faith.
--_Robert Ingersoll._
[Illustration]
HOW CAN WE "TAKE" CHRIST?
I receive many letters from various people telling me that Christ is
mine if I will only take him. I am always amused at the solicitations
of these people and feel as President Taft did when Peary "laid the
Pole" at his feet. Taft replied he had no idea what he should do with
it. I should not know what to do with Christ if I took him.
What can they mean by taking Christ? The word Christ is used to
designate a certain individual who died, if he ever lived, nearly two
thousand years ago. Now to take this person we should have to take
him from the earth where he was buried. I am at a loss to comprehend
what Christians mean when they offer Christ to any one. What right has
an individual today to offer another a person who has been dead two
thousand years? I fail to see any sense in such an offer.
Certain men and women go about the world asking people to come to
Christ, to accept Christ. What do they mean--do they know?
In my opinion the supreme dogma of Christianity is the divinity of
Jesus. If Jesus was a man, all that was related of his divine acts
in the four Gospels is false. How would a person like the Nazarene
peasant be accepted today were he to play the part of a god?
Suppose a person who had lived in our neighborhood should come to us
and say, "I am God, and I want you to help me save the world; quit your
work and follow me." What would you think of him? Would any one pay
the least attention to him, except to think he was insane and have him
placed in an asylum for safety?
The people who are preaching the divinity of Jesus know nothing about
him except what they read in a book that was written by unknown
authors. Jesus is the last hope of Christian theology. He is the only
solution of the divine problem that Christianity has to offer. Is
not the direction of the world's most rational thought away from the
Christian notion of Jesus? In my opinion it is.
* * * * *
Let us look at the once famous stronghold of New England Orthodoxy, the
Andover Theological Seminary, which was chartered on June Nineteenth,
Eighteen Hundred Seven, and opened for instruction on September
Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Eight. I think it was about seven years
ago that it was transferred to Cambridge and became a part of Harvard
University. At that time the school consisted of seven instructors,
twelve students and a library of sixty-five thousand books, with an
endowment of eight hundred fifty thousand dollars in productive funds
and an annual income of thirty-five thousand dollars.
It has been said that the highways were scoured every Summer for
students, and enticing scholarships held out, but to no avail. No
students materialized.
Why is this? In my opinion it is the rising generation's
dissatisfaction with traditional theology; they have outgrown it.
Ingersoll said that once in five years the President of the Seminary
summoned his professors before him to make oath that they had learned
absolutely nothing during the preceding five years and would not learn
anything for the next five years. And that promise was not subject to
recall.
But even Andover couldn't remain in that condition. In Eighteen Hundred
Eighty-six it announced its new system of "progressive orthodoxy." This
created a division between the Old School and the New, and marked the
beginning of the end of Andover; and after much litigation it consented
to be "gathered in" by Harvard or "swallowed," or perhaps they would
say "merged."
They have now a new building located upon land adjacent to that of
Harvard University, and the last account from the "Great Seminary" was
that they had twenty-four pupils. The library of the Seminary and
that of the Harvard Divinity School have been combined and are housed
together in Bartlett Hall.
* * * * *
The defenders of the Gospel of Christ don't seem to be increasing;
on the contrary, there seems to be great depression in matters
ecclesiastical these days, even in puritanical New England. It
plainly shows that the young men of the present day are not anxious
to wear the "Dog-Collar of Christianity," and as far as I've heard no
Christian arose to remark that the morals of the "Reverend" Clarence
Richeson were contaminated by reading the words of Thomas Paine, Robert
Ingersoll, Elbert Hubbard or Lemuel K. Washburn. The Reverend Clarence
seemed to be a product of the Christian Bible, and talked to the last
of his God and his Bible.
What is left of Christianity? Who wrote the Christian Bible? The
smallest child in a Sunday School would answer the question by saying
"God," but the most learned person on the globe would say, "I do
not know." It is being admitted by thinking persons that answers to
religious questions possess nothing more than a religious value. When
a person is graduated from a Sunday School he is wiser than he will be
after he has lived forty years, provided he learns anything by living.
"God" is a term used to express what man does not know, but it does
not seem to me necessary to assign to the Bible divine authorship, as
it can be accounted for on other grounds. It is certain that men and
women have written books. It is not certain that there is a God and,
if so, that he has written a book. If man could write the Bible, there
seems to be no need for God to do so. It is a fact that no one knows
who wrote a word of the Bible, and yet it will require many more years
to kill the foolish superstition that God inspired certain men to write
this book.
Nothing grows slower than truth, and nothing faster than superstition.
Falsehood was never known to commit suicide. Unknown men wrote the
Christian Bible, not an unknown God.
* * * * *
Not many years ago I saw that a teacher in the Holyoke (Massachusetts)
High School was dismissed for saying that Jesus was one of a family of
ten. Jesus is a word that paralyzes the mental faculties. As to the
accuracy of the statement we have only the Gospels for authority. At
any rate, if Matthew and Mark are reliable he had four brothers and
sisters.
In Matthew xiii: 54 we read: "Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not
his mother called Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon,
and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?"
Mark confirms Matthew about the size of Mary's family.
I tried to learn something concerning this case, but silence a yard
wide lay all about it. I fancy the teacher was silenced in some way.
Leastwise I could learn nothing.
It doesn't take much to silence a teacher, or it didn't fifty years
ago, especially if she were dependent upon teaching for her bread and
butter, which I was.
I, at one time, tried to substitute one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's books
to be read in school in the morning instead of the Christian Bible. I
was informed by one of the committee that the Bible must be read every
morning and the Ten Commandments repeated. The next morning I selected
the "truthful" and startling account of Jonah whilst he was sojourning
at the Submarine Hotel. I at that time made up my mind that if I were
ever financially independent I'd say what I thought concerning the
Christian religion, and no one doubts that I've done so.
* * * * *
Jesus is the last hope of Christian theology. It can be but a few years
at most when faith in Jesus as God will be the mark of intellectual
stupidity. It seems to me that mankind will soon be sensible enough to
dismiss this dogma to eternal oblivion.
It is the last relic of heathen mythology that clings to modern
civilization. The Christian church is put to its utmost ingenuity to
hide the absurdity in this dogma.
The dogma of the divinity of Jesus rests upon fictitious events, and
hence its fate is sealed.
Many persons regard any one that calls Jesus a man as a blasphemer.
There is a great amount of pious nonsense in the world, and there
is more connected with Jesus than with any other character whom
Christendom honors.
The reverence paid to Jesus by Christians is the homage of idolatry.
The first thing for people to do is to get rid of the silly notion that
there is anything holy in the name of Jesus any more than in the name
of Hercules, Bacchus or Adonis. All the gods of the past are myths to
the present. Jesus stands in the way of the world's advancement. The
path of civilization is over his grave. The mind has been fettered by
worship of this myth. We want to get rid of the Christian superstition.
_Isn't it astonishing that many children should be taught about the
"resurrection" before they can spell cat?_
Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there
is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty
born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of
theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance.
Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master,
and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power.
When a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain
thing to be happy forever, or that a certain belief is necessary to
insure eternal joy, there is in that man no spirit of concession.
He divides the whole world into saints and sinners, into believers
and unbelievers, into God's sheep and Devil's goats, into people
who will be glorified and people who will be damned.
--_Robert Ingersoll._
COLONEL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
We need no myths, no miracles, no gods, no devils.--_Robert
Ingersoll._
The world is my country and to do good is my religion.--_Thomas
Paine._
The presence of a hypocrite is a sure indication that there is a
Bible and a prayer-book not very far away.
[Illustration]
COLONEL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL
It is difficult to sketch this many-sided man. He was full of pity and
sympathy for the poor and unfortunate. He was great enough to applaud
the good, and good enough to forgive the erring. He could charm a child
with his speech, or sway thousands by his magic words. He was the
supreme philosopher of commonsense.
He knew how to answer a fool, but he never forgot to be courteous to
an opponent. He would take the case of a poor man into court without
pay; he would give a young reporter an interview when he could sell
every word he spoke for a dollar; he would present the proceeds of a
lecture to some worthy object as though he were throwing a nickel to
an organ-grinder; he would lead a reform with a dozen workers if he
believed them in the right, just as if he had a million followers;
and where there was persecution he was on the side of the persecuted.
Ingersoll was the truest American that America ever bore.
He was the orator of her rivers and mountains, of her hills and dales,
of her forests and flowers, of her struggles and victories, of her
free institutions, of her Stars and Stripes--the orator of the home,
of wife and child, of love and liberty. The head, heart and hand of
Ingersoll were perfectly united and worked together. As he thought
he acted; when he had anything to say, he said it aloud. He was not
ashamed of his thoughts. He did not hide or go around the corner, or
beat about the bush. He spoke honestly what he saw, what he thought,
what he knew.
[Illustration]
MARK TWAIN'S BEST THOUGHT
The entire New Testament is the work of Catholic
Churchmen.--_Lemuel K. Washburn._
God is not a fact; nothing that can be seen, heard or felt; nothing
that can be found out or in. God is a verbal content.
[Illustration]
MARK TWAIN'S BEST THOUGHT
The best thing Mark Twain ever said was, "I should like to see the
ballot in the hands of every woman." Freethinkers should also remember
him with gratitude; he said enough from our point of view to warrant
that. "Give me my glasses," were his last words. It will be but a short
time before some pious evangelical hypocrite will add, "I want to
read my Bible!" They are already writing about his "highest sphere of
thought," namely, his religious thought.
I remember when a Presbyterian deacon said of him, "I would rather
bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow." The church
people are all anxious to avoid their own history concerning Mark Twain
and many other people.
The Reverend Doctor Twitchell said at Mark's funeral that a simple soul
had gone trustingly to the beyond. He didn't mention where the beyond
was, and he prayed to the Christian God that courage in the faith of
immortality be given to those who mourn.
Through all these Christian notices runs an undercurrent that Mark
Twain was only secondarily a humorist. I knew him somewhat in the old
days and have heard him lecture. He certainly laughed superstition from
the minds of thousands, and the most of his books bear witness to his
broad and liberal views.
The Reverend Doctor Van Dyke mixed much religious sophistry with
his remarks at the funeral of Twain, but the reverend doctor is a
theological acrobat.
He preached once on the Atonement, and said there are a thousand
true doctrines of the Atonement, which is saying substantially that
no doctrine specifically is true--for instance, the doctrine of the
Westminster Confession, to which Van Dyke pledged loyalty when he
was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He at that time ripped up the
Westminster settlement, and reopened the whole question for discussion.
Any preacher who believes in the geology of Moses, the astronomy of
Joshua, and the mathematics of the Trinity, must do an immense amount
of "side-stepping."
_Christianity is only a bubble of superstition, and Jesus is
reduced to a toy god of the Sunday School._
AN IRRELIGIOUS DISCOURSE ON RELIGION
Religion is inherited fear.--_Lemuel K. Washburn._
In my opinion a steeple is no more to be excluded from taxation
than a smokestack.
Faith is the cross on which man crucifies his liberty.
[Illustration]
AN IRRELIGIOUS DISCOURSE
We are living in the Twentieth Century of what is called the Christian
Era, and we have not outgrown the superstitions of the First Century.
And worse than this, we have not had the courage to abandon the
fictions of the Book of Genesis for the truths of modern science. Just
what the world is afraid of, that it fears to trust its senses, its
reason, its knowledge, surpasses my understanding.
One of the first things that men and women should learn is, that there
is nothing in the universe to be afraid of; that all the malignant
deities are dead; that the ancient gods that presided over the destiny
of earth and of earthly things have all fallen from the sky; that in
the realm of Nature everything is natural, and that no man is pursued
by a god of wrath and vengeance who would punish him for his unbelief.
Every god that can not hear the truth without getting mad should be
dethroned. Every priest who can not join in singing the songs of
civilization should be warned to look out for the engine while the bell
rings.
This world of ours is a world to be enjoyed, but it can not be enjoyed
if we fear every manifestation of Nature and if we put a cruel god
behind every cloud.
Let us live without fear, without superstition, without religion.
* * * * *
There is nothing above, beneath or around you that cares whether you
are a Christian or an unbeliever. The real reason why a priest hates an
unbeliever is that he can not get a dollar out of him. He damns those
who know better than to swallow his say-sos. But it still remains a
fact that an infidel can raise as many bushels of potatoes to the acre
as can the Roman Catholic. The sun will not wrong an honest man. The
stars will not punish a single human being for telling the truth. The
sky will not persecute a person who gives his thoughts, his talents,
his time, to finding ways to help mankind.
Everything that man believes in that can not be found, that can not be
proved, that can not stand the test of commonsense: everything that
contradicts Nature, that is opposed to established facts, that is
contrary to the laws of the universe, must be given up.
We must have a new man: the man born of woman, not the man made by
God; the man who has been growing better ever since his advent on
earth, not the man who has been growing worse; the man who started
with nothing and has conquered the earth, the sea and the air; not
the man who began perfect and has not got halfway back; the man who
made the telescope, the steam-engine, the power-loom, the telephone and
the wireless telegraph; not the man who made the thumbscrew, the rack,
the ducking-stool and the stocks; the man who has carried the torch
of liberty to enlighten the world, not the man who has carried the
crucifix to enslave mankind.
* * * * *
It is quite common to be told what Moses said or what Jesus said. Now,
if all that these two Hebrew gentlemen (who in my opinion never lived)
said, is preserved in the Bible, I appeal from what they said to those
who know more. I assert that Moses said a lot of stuff that isn't so,
and a lot more that never was so, and that all that Jesus is said to
have said is practically worthless to the world today; that there is
not in all of his utterances a single word that will help man to get a
living, a single word that will aid man in his struggle for knowledge;
that there is not a statement of a single scientific fact, or a plea
for human liberty in all his language. He told his generation nothing
that was not already known, except a mess of superstitious nonsense
about angels and devils, heavens and hells. His so-called gospel of
salvation was to follow him, and he landed on a cross.
The truth is this: the world has outgrown Moses and Jesus. It does
not take commands from either. This age believes in work, not worship;
in deeds, not prayers; in men, not monks; in liberty, not in pious
obedience; in human rights, not in submission; in knowledge, not in
revelation.
For hundreds of years man was bound by a religious faith, and the
priest was his cruel master. He dared not doubt; he dared not rebel;
he dared not dream of freedom; but there came a time when religious
tyranny could no longer be borne. Then Mankind cried out to the Church:
Give back man's brain to man; restore to him the mind you have robbed
him of; take from his head and heart the paralyzing fear that makes him
a coward and a slave, and leave to him the liberty with which Nature
dowered him, that his mind may discover and preserve those mighty
thoughts which make man brave, honest, free and happy.
That cry was heard far. It was heard by glad ears, and liberty sprang
from the ground like the warriors from the fabled dragon-teeth of
Cadmus. The war between liberty and tyranny, between fact and fable,
between truth and falsehood, between man and priest, was on, and for
centuries this war has raged, nor is it yet over. Freedom still lies
bleeding, but victory for the right will sooner or later be won.
That victory will not be complete until every man will dare to say:
Let come what will come, no man, be he priest, minister or judge, shall
sit upon the throne of my mind, and decide for me what is right, true
or good. I am my own master, my own teacher, my own guide. I will keep
my reason free from control and will never surrender my own convictions
to the dictates of another.
Nature has made every man commander of his own destiny.
* * * * *
But we are yet victims of ecclesiastical villainy. The priest is still
the worst enemy of mankind. His church is like that monster of fiction
which lived on little children. In the name of the children I protest
against the action of the Church in stealing their tender brains, in
making them slaves of superstition before they are old enough to know
to what they are doomed.
The age of consent to a religious faith should be determined by law,
if necessary. Today any boy or girl may be the victim of a designing
priest or clergyman, or of a designing religious system.
No person under eighteen years of age should be allowed to join a
church or consent to a statement of faith. Mental purity should be
guarded and protected as well as physical purity.
While the Church is powerful in numbers and while its religion is
supported by wealth and fashion, the world is becoming more and more
emancipated from its pernicious influence. The light that truth gives
is still ahead of us, but _it is there_, and some day the world will
grow warmer under its rays and men become better and kinder to one
another.
A hundred years ago the God worshiped in orthodox churches went about
drowning little boys and girls who went skating on Sundays. Those were
the "good old days" when men and women had religion for breakfast,
dinner and supper, and took it to bed with them. It takes a long time
to get such a horrible religion out of the system.
Men and women still have a mean faith, a faith which can see others
damned with satisfaction if they can only be saved. Nothing but a mean
religion could make men and women as mean as that. I would rather
starve than preach the doctrine of endless pain for a human being--or
even for a dog. I believe that this world is hard and dark and cruel
enough without borrowing suffering from another world to make darker
and harder the road of life and add torture to the nights of pain and
misery.
A church must be sunk pretty low when it lives on the fears and tears
of mankind; but what lower depths of degradation does it sound when it
can deliberately create fears and tears that it may live and thrive
in its vile and cruel business! A human being without pity should be
shunned and despised; but a human being who can fill the heart with
terror should not be allowed in a civilized community.
The mind today wants to get out into the open, into the free daylight,
wants to walk the earth, look at the stars and sky, feel the warmth of
the sun and smell the odor of the ground; it has become tired of being
shut up in a faith, in a creed, in a church; tired of being kept in
the darkness of the past, in the tomb of dead thoughts, in the moldy
caskets of unreal things, and in the dungeon of fear.
The mind is striving to break the chains of the priest and be free from
the bonds of the Church.
You can not have men free where the priest demands and claims their
obedience. The greatest menace to our national institutions is the
power that controls men; that controls their thoughts, their actions
and their destinies. Liberty can survive only where men are free:
free to think, free to read, free to speak and free to act. The mind
must not be bound by any vow of obedience. One man, no matter what
his office, what his position, what his rank, has no right to compel
another's obedience. This is the worst oppression on earth.
* * * * *
What is needed in this country is more men who dare think and speak
for themselves; who dare belong to no church; who dare work for the
right as they see it, and speak the truth as they understand it; who
dare live their own lives independent of fashion's demands or society's
usages; who dare put liberty above conformity, and who dare defy
customs, law and religion in their zeal to help their fellow-beings.
There is more than one liberty--more than the liberty to do right--that
is partly won for every civilized being. There is another liberty that
is dangerous and that persists even where civilization exists--the
liberty to take another's liberty from him. This liberty is usually
taken from another in the name of God and what is called holy; but
there is nothing on earth so holy as liberty, and he who takes it from
another robs him of the dearest right possessed by man. Binding a human
being with the chains of faith before that being is old enough to judge
whether the faith is reasonable or true is the assassination of freedom.
The greatest danger which confronts our nation today is not political
but religious, and the preservation of our free institutions does not
depend upon our army and navy, but upon the emancipation of the human
mind from ecclesiastical slavery. As Thomas Paine well said, "Spiritual
freedom is the root of political liberty." You can not have free
schools, free speech and a free press where the mind is not free.
There is too much faith in this country and too little sense. Men have
given up about everything they possess to be saved; but it is more
necessary, and more commendable in the workingmen of this nation, to
save their dollars than to save their souls.
* * * * *
A subject that needs to be investigated quite as much as, if not more
than, the high cost of living is the high cost of worship. There may be
some justice in the criticism of the price of meats. We must remember,
however, that we do get something for our money when we buy meat, but
let us not forget that we get absolutely nothing for the money spent
for worship. Money given to the Church is lost to the world. It is
not used to improve homes; to help the poor and needy; to alleviate
suffering; to bring hope to the sick or to give a few comforts to old
age. It goes into the pocket of ecclesiastical greed.
This country just at present is suffering from those twin curses of
humanity--religion and Bull-Mooseism. The priest and Bull-Mooseism
are the two worst trouble-makers in this country. To get rid of this
precious pair of knaves would be to bring peace on earth and hasten the
dawn.
I don't know which is the bigger knave, the priest or the Bull-Mooser,
but I do know that the priest is engaged in the meaner business of the
two.
When a man tries to sell me a mouse-trap to catch elephants, I am
suspicious of his mental sanity; and when a man tells me that eternal
happiness can be won by enlisting in his salvation army, I question
his moral sanity. I know that religion is offered at cut rates, but
there is no discount on morality. You can not have the reward of good
behavior unless you behave. You may save your soul by saying, "I
believe," but you have to _do_ something to save your body.
There is too much of this "believe-in-me" business. You don't want to
believe in any one you know nothing about. The faith of a little child
in its parents is beautiful, but the faith of a grown-up man in a
priest is idiotic. Faith has ruined more than it has saved. With faith
goes obedience, and he or she who obeys is lost.
There is no honest call today to believe, because there is opportunity
to know. Faith is hatched in the nest of imposition. He who yields
obedience is a fool, and he who demands it is a scoundrel.
In this age, as in the past, a lie made "holy" is allowed to
assassinate the truth. Nothing is cursing this nation; nothing is
cursing human life; nothing is cursing honest effort and brave striving
so much as what is called holiness. It is holy to believe all you are
told; holy to wear the robes of hypocrisy; holy to rob the poor in the
name of God, and holy to put the poison of faith to the lips of a
child. It is holy to repudiate Nature and make a lie of your body, your
mind, your life. To purify the dwelling-place of man, it is necessary
to drive from the earth everything that religion has made holy.
The only really sacred things were holy before a church was ever built,
before there was a priest on the globe.
Human love and the home which human love built for its offspring were
the first holy things which men and women knew, and it is this human
love of ours which is holier than mosque, temple or church; holier than
priestly robe or ecclesiastical rite; holier by far than all the holy
things of faith.
* * * * *
The Church has always lived by robbing the home; the priest has always
lived on the wages of the toiler. The gods of religion have never done
aught to lighten the heavy load on the shoulders of labor. The priest
has said to mankind that his Lord left this consolation to the world:
"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I will give
you rest."
What the priest really means is this: Come unto me and I will do the
rest; and by the time he has done it, there is nothing of manhood left.
The priest also teaches that his Lord and Master said, "Ask and ye
shall receive," and adds, "The Lord will provide." How many poor
wretches have believed those words; but their outstretched hands
withered away day by day, and at last dropped empty by their sides.
There they lay white and cold, holding not the bread they fondly
expected, but holding the hand of death.
It may be pious and it may be beautiful to say, "The Lord will
provide," but it is a lie just the same. When, the other day, the
bodies of a mother and her two children were being carried to the
grave with the words, "starved to death," written on their faces, but
not written on their caskets, it was a sufficient refutation of the
religious teaching that "The Lord will provide." It is the plain,
unvarnished truth that the Lord will _not_ even provide the coffin for
the poor victim of such a false, deceptive, religious faith.
In olden times it was customary for the Church to say, God's light
lights the world. Not so today. God's light has gone out. It is man's
light that lights the world and the Church too. Our enlightenment is
human, not divine. No altar of religion burns with the fire of truth.
Science carries the torch of knowledge: liberty is the way and truth is
the goal.
* * * * *
On our earth gods no longer make their homes. It was not safe for them
to live any more. Their sons may once have married the daughters of
men, but they can not get a license to do so today. Parents will not
stand for it.
So the gods have gone, bag and baggage. Where they have gone, no one
knows. The skies give no sign that they are hiding up there. The
telescope has found _seventy million stars, but not one god_.
It is time for the pulpit to stop repeating the old superstitions about
God and about what he has done for man. He has never done any more
for man than he is doing today; never spoken to man any more than he
is speaking today; never revealed himself to anybody any more than he
stands revealed to you and me and to every human being everywhere.
Every word that ever came from the mouth of God man put in his mouth,
and every book revealed by God was written by man.
Half the work of man for the next one hundred years will be to kill the
lies told about what God has done.
Whether there is in all the vast universe a higher and nobler being
than man, I don't know. Whether there is in all the vast universe a
better place for man to live than on this earth, I don't know. And no
one knows any more about these matters than I do.
We have found out much that is not so; now we want to find out all
we can that is so. And it is of no use to go to the Church to learn
anything. The Church is only a place where falsehoods are kept in cold
storage. The man who thinks and studies is the man who is helping the
world most, not the man who preaches and prays. To find the truth one
needs to get as far from the Church as possible.
Christians of all denominations have lots of pity for the man without
a church. Let me assure these persons that the man without a church
doesn't want one. As a rule, he is satisfied with what he has. He
has a home, which is better than a church. If those persons who are
pitying men and women for not having a church would, instead, pity
the man without a home, and pity him enough to help him get one, they
would show much better sense and manifest a truer sympathy with their
fellow-beings.
* * * * *
I can not see any good in painting a thing white that is black, or
calling a thing beautiful that is ugly. There are persons who talk as
though they believed that a Northeast storm was sunshine. I am not made
that way. I am as ready and as willing as anybody to acknowledge the
good in Nature, or the good in life, but I do not believe in lying, in
saying that wrong is right, or that suffering is to be enjoyed. There
are lots of hard things in our life, and it does not alter facts to
call them by some other name. A man dying with a cancer can not be made
to believe that he is having a good time.
The most that any man can do who goes through this earthly existence
is to use his fellow-mortals right and square; to give them an honest
day's work when he works for them and an honest day's pay when he hires
them; to say nothing to hurt them and everything he can to assist them;
to help them out of trouble and not get them into trouble. If one does
this, and does no more than this, he has done what beats every religion
on earth.
We have got to deal with men and women as they are and where they are.
The man who is natural; the man who has not been made a fool of by a
priest or parson; the man who has not swapped his commonsense for a
foolish belief; the man who has not had his mind stuffed with religious
dope, knows that this life on earth is the important life, and that it
is a higher work to determine his fate here than anywhere else.
There is not a person living who would not be well and strong and
happy here rather than hereafter. I would rather have the power to
make every cripple straight and whole; every poor, unfortunate man
and woman prosperous and contented; every sick person well, every
bad person good, and every slave to vice master of his appetite and
passions, in this life on earth, than to save the human wrecks, the
human unfortunates, the human victims of vice and crime, for another
life somewhere else.
* * * * *
What men and women want is happiness, not Heaven. They want a good
home on this globe, not a loafing-place in Abraham's bosom. They want
the opportunity to enjoy the good things of this life, not the promise
that they will hear the angels sing. They want better wages for their
work, better treatment from their employers, and better things to
eat and drink and wear. They want better things here, not hereafter.
They want to be happy while they are living on earth, not have the
assurance of happiness after they are dead. If I ever attempt to write
my creed, I shall say: I believe in so much that I can hardly expect to
express all of my faith in one statement. I am all the time believing
in something new. But there is one thing that I most heartily believe
in now and have believed in ever since I was a child, and that is,
SUNSHINE--external and internal and eternal sunshine.
Sunshine is the joy of the universe, and joy is the sunshine of the
human heart. Let us be bright and cheerful. Let us be happy. Let us
give to the world the sunshine of our hearts.
_A male trinity is repulsive; Father, Mother and Child is the
sacred triad. The Christian trinity is a monster._
DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY
Nature has no need of a Holy Ghost.--_Lemuel K. Washburn._
All progress has been due to the Devil. He was the first
investigator.--_Ingersoll._
God takes care of the weed. Man must take care of the corn.
[Illustration]
DECAY OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY
There is a great deal of exaggerated rhetoric employed in praising what
is called "Christian Morality." I have examined with considerable care
everything that may justly come within the meaning of this expression,
and I am bound to say, out of respect for the truth, that such morality
does not deserve praise and can not be praised by the honest lips of an
honest person.
I am perfectly aware that I have made a statement which challenges the
sincerity of the Christian pulpit, but every one knows that there is
not a minister in Christendom whose practise agrees with his preaching.
While it is common to hear a clergyman in pious ecstasy exhaust the
vocabulary of laudation in his praises of the beautiful morals of the
"Sermon on the Mount," it is exceedingly rare to see one of these
parsons sacrifice his commonsense to the nonsense of Jesus.
We are learning that the theological morality of the Christian faith is
not the right kind of morality to make manhood and womanhood. The great
weakness of Christian morality is this: It depends upon the Christian
idea of Jesus, and when the world has outgrown the superstition about
this person, all of his moral precepts will lose their value and their
splendor.
Men and women of any intellectual penetration know that the New
Testament story is founded upon unreliable tradition; that its heart is
a myth.
Where men live independent of the foolish faith of the Gospels, there
is a character of self-reliance which towers like a mountain-peak
above the dead level of Christian endeavor. The person who accepts the
Christian theology is no more in sympathy with the best thought of the
age than is the man who wanders about the streets, begging his food and
sleeping wherever he can, in harmony with the highest comforts of our
civilization.
There is a nobler purpose in a train of cars carrying grain and produce
across the continent than in a conference of clergymen trying to keep
alive a theology which teaches that God was born of a Jewish maiden
who lived and died in Palestine, and devising ways to make the people
believe the ridiculous superstition.
Truth is born where men are allowed to think and speak their thoughts.
Error can not be maintained where man is permitted to ask questions.
The only way to preserve Christianity is to put it in a tin can and
have it hermetically sealed.
We are getting a new examination of the universe as a basis for our
philosophy. The telescope has afforded man visions far beyond the
seventh heaven of the Apocalypse. The genesis of things is found to lie
millions of years back of the Genesis of the Bible. The chaos out of
which this world was made has been discovered to be a previous state of
existence.
Science is laying the new foundation for our faith, and knowledge is
building the new temple of the mind.
Men and women everywhere are stating their opinions, and the world
recognizes that there is to be a religious controversy upon this earth
which will shake to its base everything that is not true. Not one
stone of falsehood will be left standing upon another. Every dogma of
superstition must find a grave, and truth alone be reverenced by man.
* * * * *
The world has taken a step forward of Christianity, and in its march of
advancement has left behind the Christian God, the Christian Savior,
the Christian Bible, and the Christian Faith. But the world will not
stop here. It must go further. The question which the human mind wants
answered today is this: Is the decay of Christian theology to be
followed by the decay of Christian morality?
I think that it is, and I also think that this morality is about as
near dead now as it can be.
It is true that the author of this morality is painted in divine colors
for human adoration Sunday after Sunday, and that his other-world
ethics are inculcated by the pulpit; but beyond these attempts to
give the peculiar moral teachings of Jesus the show of life, there is
absolutely no sign of them in the world of man.
The morality of the Christian system is not designed for humanity in
its present condition, nor does it possess the elements necessary
to make man into the image of any higher virtue. It is, in fact, an
unreal, unnatural morality which Jesus taught, and the notion that men
and women do not practise it because it is too far above them, depends
upon an estimate of this morality which we are not willing to allow.
I do not wish to be misunderstood on this point. I want to say that
the general moral duties of man, as they have been taught for ages by
teachers of every race and of every religion, are not Christian, and
that Christian ethics are found in the code of moral duties taught by
Jesus _which are different from the recognized standard of morality
adopted by mankind generally_. Christian morals are Christian _only
wherein they differ from all other morals_.
It is because they are peculiar to Christianity that they are
Christian.
Because I do not believe in Christianity--in the Christian theology and
in Christian morals--I do not wish it said that I do not believe in
morality, for I do. I believe that man can be good and true and that he
can do right, and I believe that he ought to do right.
I do not say that every one can reach the same moral altitude. I do
not even say that every individual can be good and true. Some persons
do not seem to be morally adjusted. I think, however, that we do not
trespass beyond the domain of truth when we predicate the power of man
to be moral.
The notion that man can not be good has been the apology of half the
criminals of the world. It is the creed of all crime. If we affirm the
idea of human depravity, we may as well erase our statutes, for, if man
can not be good, it is the height of folly to expect him to be so.
The healthy faith of man is faith _in_ man.
The theology which has been preached for the past few centuries is
not calculated to make men moral. Those ministers who have shouted
themselves hoarse for the salvation of the soul, and who have made no
account of man's behavior in their scheme to save the race, are the
ones who have rubbed humanity in the dirt and undermined the moral
foundations of the world.
* * * * *
Every ethical principle that supports our social structure is
independent of ecclesiastical relations, and it is not essential that
we recognize any theology in order to comprehend the necessity of moral
obedience.
There is no sympathy between right, truth and justice, and the
"Apostles' Creed." We may go so far as to say that the attempt to
establish a perpetual union between Christianity and morality would
result in an absolute divorce of these two forces.
I wish to make it plain beyond a question that the Christian faith, in
itself, is entirely distinct from all moral effort on the part of man.
To believe that Jesus was the Christ does not carry any obligation to
do right; does not make it incumbent upon the believer to do a single
moral action.
It is sufficient to establish our predication that not a single church
in Christendom makes moral character the condition of membership, or
good behavior the way to Heaven.
There is a code of Christian morals which has been taught, but never
practised. The special duties which Jesus enjoined upon his followers
have never been reduced to conduct. It is not too much to say that
the moral precepts of Jesus, if carried into action, would cause
social revolutions beyond precedent, and produce a state of existence
compared with which anarchy would be government, and confusion would be
order.
But, before we undertake to examine the Christian morals, let us shed
a few tears of rejoicing upon the grave of Orthodox theology. We do
not ask to have a coroner's jury decide what caused the death of this
theology. We bless the cause, whatever it was. We only wish to feel
assured that it is really, truly dead, and the fact that "not a single
treatise written by a New England Puritan is a living and authoritative
book" seems to prove it beyond a question. The persons who still preach
this theology and profess to believe it are only "sitting up with the
corpse."
While it is asserted that a wrong interpretation of this theology sent
it out of the world, it is pretty evident that a right understanding of
it inspires no wish to have it back. Much of the superstition in morals
sprang from fear of God, which the Christian church has inculcated as
the highest incentive to right doing.
The truth, broadly and frankly stated, is this: God is no longer the
inspiration of morality. Fear of God does not check the actions of man
today, nor is the attempt to make human and divine interests identical
sufficient to insure obedience to moral laws. The ancient basis of
morals is gone, and another and better one must be found to inspire a
freer life, a fuller life, a better life, and a higher.
We who have rejected the Christian theology are looked upon as orphans.
But, if I understand the position of freethinkers, the question of a
supreme power is neither affirmed nor denied by those who wish to have
no further business with the God of Orthodoxy.
We read that, "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God," but
we prefer to say nothing about the matter. Theologies may come, and
theologies may go, but humanity goes on forever, and so we do not deem
it as important to worship the fleeting shadows of the universe which
are cast upon the minds of men as it is to hold fast to those realities
which make human existence a blessing and "a joy forever."
We are called "infidels" and denounced as "unbelievers" because we
will not march in the ranks of hypocrisy, and dance to the music of
Orthodoxy. We believe no statement which our reason can not approve; we
accept no doctrine which is contrary to commonsense; we have confidence
in human nature; we believe in truth, justice and love; we accept life
as a blessing, and try to make it so; we believe in taking care of
ourselves, in helping others and in being just and kind to all, and we
say to the Christian Church, "If this be Infidelity, make the most of
it."
* * * * *
It is suggested by some that if man's exact relation to the Deity
were understood, the whole question of morals would be settled at
once. But would it not be truer to say that if man's exact relation to
his fellowmen were understood and respected, the highest individual
welfare, no less than the general good, would dictate the morality
which the world needs? And is not this the grand task for the human
race, to rightly interpret the effect of human action upon the
individual and the community, and to deduce from human experience the
rules for human conduct?
I do not know that I owe to God any duty. I do know that I owe a duty
to my neighbor. I plead total indifference to the demands of divine
ethics, but I trust that I am not completely callous to the wants of
my fellow-beings. I owe it to myself to be moral. I owe it to my race,
to every man and woman that I meet in life, to be as honest, as true,
as upright, as my nature will permit. I can comprehend and appreciate
obligations to humanity, but moral indebtedness to the Deity I know
nothing about.
The Christian morals are founded upon the assumption that the work of
man here is to do something that he may escape punishment hereafter,
and hence the morality of the Christian Church has had little
reference to the concerns of the present life.
Christian morality is based upon the Christian faith that the human
race is under the curse of God, and that, to evade the penalty
pronounced upon him, man must perform certain duties--these duties
being taught as paramount to all we owe to self, to family, to society,
and to the world.
But an almost universal disbelief of the Christian dogmas prevails
today, and, consequently, a new morality, with man's welfare for
its supreme object, is fast supplanting the outworn and valueless
performances of Christian duties.
The moral teaching of the New Testament may be the highest and purest
of its kind of teaching, but it is not the kind which is needed today.
It is a false morality, yea, a dead morality for the most part, which
the Christian Church demands of men. The general conviction is that
no salvation is needed by man, and that all the virtues advertised as
requisite for such safety as the Church is prepared to secure, are
spurious virtues.
Those actions which advance man along the way of general prosperity,
which make it easier to live and get a living on the earth, which have
their value determined by their respect for human beings, are what the
world needs.
The generally acknowledged author of Christian morals offers no
salient points for criticism, as he can not be regarded as a historical
person whose career has been carefully followed and marked by the
biographer. He is a mythological man, with a little less of the
fabulous and a little more of the real than attaches to the gods and
goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.
The name of Jesus adorns an anatomy of words. It pictures a person,
not of flesh and blood, but of faith and fancy. Jesus is a man of the
imagination; but mythical as he is, certain men and women believe
in him in their own way, and are not over-tolerant of those who are
disposed to ask for the proofs of his life and works.
This person has left no more marks of his living upon the earth than
have the birds the marks of their flight through the air. The New
Testament is no more history than is Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_.
We can not make any positive assertions in regard to the life and
character of a man when we do not know who was his father, where or
when he was born, with whom he lived, nor when he died. The only
historical fact connected with Jesus which is not disputed is that Mary
was his mother. This is a very important point in his history, but it
is not sufficient to constitute a biography.
Notwithstanding the fact that the entire narrative of Jesus is without
a single chronological date, and the vastly more significant fact that
not a single incident connected with the career of Jesus is mentioned
in contemporaneous history, we must perforce speak of him as a person
whose life was watched and noted from his miraculous advent to his
miraculous ascension, and look upon his disciples as so many Boswells
ready to mirror to the world his every speech and act.
We must do this--Why? Because the world will not candidly and
critically study the gospel-story.
For the present, then, we will speak of Jesus as a man, and accept him
as the author of the moral code in the New Testament. But a word or
two about the man. The Christian world sets him apart as the model of
the race, as the masterpiece of Nature, as the utmost which earth can
produce. Every man must here fetch his word of praise, and every word
be a mountain to meet the demand of the Christian Church for reverence
of Jesus.
* * * * *
I do not believe in the infallibility of any man, but I believe in
the improvability of all men. Is man no longer heir to the virtues of
life, that he must erect monuments of praise forever over the name of
Jesus? I shall take the liberty to express my dissent from the common
expressions of admiration for this man. I can not praise everything
which he did, nor can I think that every word he uttered is a star of
wisdom. He said some good things, but much of what he said is good
for nothing. His theology will do for Sunday Schools, but it will not
stand half a dozen questions by commonsense. His Hell is barbarous,
his Heaven childish, and his ideas of humanity show but a superficial
knowledge of human nature. His life can not be imitated with advantage
to the race, and his notions of human existence are wholly inadequate
to the complex, varied civilization of this age.
Let us see what he did. He paid no filial respect to his parents; he
refused to acknowledge his mother and his brothers; he lived a roving,
wandering life; he paid no heed to the laws of his country; he placed
no value upon industry, and even went so far as to tell men and women
that God would feed and clothe them; he helped himself to the property
and possessions of other people without paying for them, and destroyed
what belonged to others without offering an equivalent; he had no
property, no home, not a place to lay his head; he hated the rulers,
yet sought to establish a kingdom for himself; he failed to reach the
throne he sought, and died upon the malefactor's cross.
Is this the man for the Twentieth Century to honor? Is this the man for
men to follow in this age? Is this the man whose life all should strive
to imitate?
The man who took the life of Jesus for a model would hate father and
mother, brother and sister; he would have neither wife nor child; he
would live from place to place; he would be a lawbreaker and an idler;
he would live the life of a wanderer and die the death of a criminal.
Have I put a false color in this picture which I have painted? Have I
misrepresented the life of Jesus? Read the four Gospels and see. I find
this character sketched in the New Testament, and it is there called
Jesus, and it is this character which we are adjured to imitate if we
would be perfect.
To the man or woman who declares that the life of Jesus is the way to
salvation, I have only this to say, "Why then do you not imitate it?"
Now, I wish to ask, "What kind of morals would such a man as we have
sketched naturally teach?"
You will answer, "The morals he lived." At least, we find such morals
taught in the New Testament.
My point here is: If the life of Jesus was an honest, faithful exponent
of his moral teachings, then such a morality as he practised is not
wanted today--and that such a morality is not wanted is shown by the
fact that no one practises it.
I know that it is considered respectable and pious to profess great
admiration for the doctrines taught by Jesus, and the world has paid
them the outward compliment of profession, saying that the moral
code of the New Testament was the despair of man; but it has never
seriously set to work to reduce this code to practise, which proves
that such profession is only a part of the universal accomplishment of
fashionable hypocrisy.
* * * * *
Do not understand me as saying that there is no moral precept contained
in the Gospels which is worthy of being practised. I make no such
declaration, and wish no such construction put upon my words. What I
desire to enforce is this: That the morality of Jesus sprang from a
philosophy which has passed away, and therefore, that it is, for the
greater part, obsolete and worthless. That Jesus shared the general
belief of his age that the world was soon to be destroyed, is shown by
his estimate of earthly things; and that a morality founded upon such a
belief should survive and outlast the faith which inspired it reveals
a condition of things that is not flattering to our intellectual
perception or to our moral sense.
The morals of the New Testament are founded upon a theory of the
universe which is found now only in creeds--those epitaphs of religion.
The most superficial observation is sufficient to enable us to perceive
that theology can no longer be the basis of morality, and that the
authority of the New Testament can not be accepted on this question.
There is nothing more firmly impressed upon the mind of man than the
fact of the stability of the universe, notwithstanding an occasional
earthquake; and the value of earthly things has a higher moral
significance consequent upon the assurance of material existence.
Morality must have a physical basis; that is, the moral code which man
can practise to his safety and his honor must not contradict human
nature. The defeat of the New Testament morals is assured by their
antagonism to the nature of man. The morals of Jesus were designed
to fit man for what he called the "Kingdom of Heaven," but the only
morality which is worth the name is that which fits man for living his
life on earth.
Jesus constantly urged men to the performance of moral duties that they
might be rewarded by their "Father in Heaven." Such a motive for good
behavior is offensive to the rational mind, and moral commandments
which are enforced with a Heaven and a Hell do not spring from an
opinion of human nature which deserves our respect.
The most comprehensive criticism which one can make upon the morals of
the New Testament is, that they are not practicable. Is the character
of Christians fashioned by the power and influence of the words
which Jesus left in the world? This question should be pressed to an
answer, and honesty would answer it in a way which would shake every
church-building in the land and tear the mask from the face of every
Christian worshiper on the globe.
Jesus taught that men and women were to love him more than father or
mother, son or daughter. Imagine human beings loving a man whom they
know nothing about, and consequently can care nothing about, and who
has no more claim to their affections than has the ghost in Hamlet,
better than they love parent or child! Such morality as this is not fit
for a Hottentot.
If any command is implanted in our nature and is a part of the bone
and fiber of our very being, it is to love beyond all else those who
have borne us and cared for us through infancy and childhood, and
those whose existence depends upon us, and to whom we stand pledged
by the holiest ties of our beings, to watch over and protect, to care
for and love, to the last days of our lives. It is love of parent and
child which is alike the supreme obligation and the supreme benefaction
of our humanity. No being has walked this earth who had the moral
right to demand a greater love than is due to father and mother, son
and daughter; and if Jesus claimed such affection, his claim is an
impertinence which we are bound to treat with indignation and scorn.
* * * * *
For the Christian Church to make of the words of Jesus commands to the
world is to deserve the severest condemnation. Jesus taught that men
were not to make for themselves a home, not to cultivate those virtues
which blossom into the family, and not to save the fruits of their toil
to make old age with its tottering form and feeble limbs less liable to
the hardships of the world, but he summed up all the duties of life in
these words: "Sell what thou hast and give to the poor, and come follow
me."
To obey such teaching as this would overturn every monument of
prosperity upon the earth, blight every feeling of happiness that
gladdens the heart of man, and convert the busy, working, loving world
into one vast army of tramps, following a king without a kingdom, a
leader without a purpose, a commander with nothing to give those who
followed his command.
Jesus taught that we were not to resist evil; that is, that if a thief
stole our watch and chain, we were bound to run after him and give him
our purse also; that if a man took away our coat, we should wrong him
if we did not send him the balance of the suit; that if a man struck
us on one side of the face, we were to invite him to strike us on
the other side also; that if, as it were, the armies of some foreign
powers were to invade our land, and burn and destroy our cities and
towns, pillage our homes and murder our families, we were in duty bound
to look upon them as benefactors and thank them for their work of
destruction, and ask them to come and do it again.
Such moral teaching as this would make a nation of cowards and slaves.
It is our duty to punish thieves and robbers, not to reward them; to
resist wrong and injustice, not to submit to them like cravens; to
protect our country from foes, even though we are obliged to shed their
blood and our own in so doing.
Is there a Christian on the globe who pays the least heed to a single
one of the moral commands of Jesus? You all know there is not.
I need not tell the Christian Church that the morality taught by Jesus
is decaying when every church is its coffin, and every minister its
grave-digger.
If you wish to see how much respect for the moral teachings of Jesus
one of his professed followers has, just steal his coat, and if he
gives you his cloak also, as he is commanded to do by his Lord and
Master, please publish his name in the daily papers--for the benefit of
others who wish to get a cloak.
We find among the express commands of Jesus this advice: "Lay not up
for yourselves treasures upon earth." The most liberal translation of
this counsel can not make it anything but poor advice. Every material
blessing of mankind has come from the savings of human labor, and the
value of laying up treasures upon earth is more evident than that of
laying up treasures in Heaven, whatever this saying may mean. When
every Christian tries as hard to be poor as he tries now to get rich,
we shall think that he has some regard for the moral teachings of Jesus.
* * * * *
It must be apparent to all that what may be claimed as Christian
morality is not only decaying, but that it ought to decay. There is
no sense in it. Imagine a man telling people in the Twentieth Century
to "take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall
drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on," and endeavoring
to prove that because the fowls of the air do not have to broil a
beefsteak for their breakfast or make biscuit for tea, human beings
will be fed whether they provide anything for their appetites or not.
Jesus tells us that our Heavenly Father will feed us because we are
better than the fowls of the air, and that he will clothe us because he
clothes the grass of the field. Our earthly fathers seem to have done
more in the way of providing food and clothing for us before we were
able to take care of ourselves than any Heavenly Father. Others may put
their trust in God for something to eat and drink and wear, if they
wish to, but I prefer to give the matter a little thought myself.
Jesus concludes these admonitions by saying, "Take no thought for the
morrow." This is bad counsel, and it shows the good sense of mankind
that it has never been followed. The whole world lives in what one of
our poets called, "The bright tomorrow of the mind."
We will refer to only one more of the peculiar moral injunctions of
Jesus. In the fifth chapter of Matthew, in the forty-fourth verse,
we read, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and
persecute you."
If we were to do as herein commanded, we should have an inverted
morality which would place the crown of virtue upon the forehead of
vice.
Let us see if the preacher of this doctrine practised it.
Did Jesus bless the Scribes and Pharisees when they refused to
acknowledge his claim to be the Messiah? This is the blessing which he
pronounced upon them: "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,
for ye devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers;
therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." "Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" That is
not a very sweet blessing!
And these men did not curse Jesus. They only did not agree with his
opinions. Jesus, also, in his wrath against his enemies, calls them,
in the seventeenth and nineteenth verses of the twenty-third chapter
of Matthew, "Ye fools and blind," forgetting, doubtless, that he had
previously declared, when preaching on the Mount, "Whosoever shall say,
'Thou Fool,' shall be in danger of hell-fire."
The moral teachings of Jesus were inspired by a false estimate of all
earthly things. There is no doubt that Jesus believed the world was
coming to an end in his generation. How to get into the Kingdom of
Heaven was of more consequence than how to reform mankind, or improve
the world, since the end of earthly things was near at hand. This
appears to have been the thought of Jesus, and explains much of his
language.
But today we do not believe that the earth has run its course, and
that the end of all material things is near at hand. We are living
without fear of failure on the part of the universe, and are giving our
attention more to human wants than to divine commands.
_Not fear of offending God, but fear of wronging man, is the highest
basis of morals._ We have reached a time when apologies are not
respected, when repentance is looked upon as the mask of villainy,
when the stature of life is most shorn of manliness by prancing in
the garb of humility, when a brave facing of life's trials and demands
counts for more than cowardly surrender in the name of God. In fact,
we have come to say to the world of humanity, "Be moral, and you need
not be religious." Work for man is coming to be a sufficient excuse for
neglect of God.
* * * * *
But we want no cheap moral duties held up for man to perform. It is
serious business to live this life of ours and live it well, and it
is hard work to do it. Morality sets us as high a task as we are able
to perform, and a higher task than has yet been performed by most of
mankind. The effort of this age is to expose the sham of what is called
holiness, and make sacred the surroundings of human beings. We must
throw off the past, and stand upon that sunlit height where we can feel
that "somehow life is bigger after all than any painted angel, could we
see the man that is within us."
This is the moral duty of the world: to respect the man that is within
us. We ought to rear on the earth a range of moral Alps that would
stand and command the admiration of the world as long as eye could see
and heart could feel. We need a rational hope and a burning purpose in
this century, something noble to live for and the courage of nobility
to work and win it.
The improvement of the world is the only object of life worthy of man.
Do and say nothing that will not improve mankind. Were this simple
admonition heeded, we should have the key to the kingdom of the only
heaven that man needs in our own pocket.
It is time for the reign of commonsense to begin on earth; time for
men to elevate morality above religion; and time for us to say,
"Millions for the world, not a cent for the Church." The battle between
Freedom and Christianity has begun, and I believe that when it ends
Christianity will be buried beneath the ruins of its own dogmas, there
to remain forever. It possesses no spirit that can rise again from its
ashes and mount on wings of flame to a higher life. When superstition
dies, it dies to the root.
The Christian minister can not arrest the march of liberty by crying,
"Infidelity!" and threatening with everlasting cremation all those who
refuse to heed his words.
But let there be no base understanding of freedom. The new John the
Baptist must not be a cowboy, saying, "The kingdom of highwaymen is at
hand." As a person when in perfect bodily health knows not from any
intimation from the respective parts that he has a stomach, a brain,
or a heart, so a person when living in perfect freedom is unconscious
of law, of creed, of custom. The healthy man physically is the free
man physically; the healthy man mentally is the free man mentally; the
healthy man morally is the free man morally; liberty of the individual
is health of the individual, and a free man means a man who is true and
obedient to all natural laws.
* * * * *
There is a misunderstanding of freedom upon the one side, and a
misrepresentation of it upon the other, that make it hazardous for one
to employ the word. To connect this word with morality in the eyes of
many is to confound the Madonna with Mary Magdalene. It is to start the
ghost of Don Juan.
The conservatism of society has ever regarded liberty as the black flag
of the moral marauder, the emblem of a piratical intention upon the
casket of the world that contains the jewels of honor, justice, virtue
and social order.
So persistently and malignantly has freedom been represented as a
wrecker's light, kindled only to lure to destruction, that to represent
it as worthy to be trusted is to arouse the spirit which pursued
Voltaire to his grave with a lie, erected a shaft of calumny over the
tomb of Paine, and which now, with the coward's weapon of slander,
attacks the living who refuse to acknowledge that the voice of the
Church is the voice of God.
But nevertheless we believe with Burns that:
Upo' this tree there grows sic fruit,
Its virtues a' can tell, man;
It raises man aboon the brute,
It maks him ken himsel', man;
Gif ance the peasant taste a bite,
He's greater than a lord, man,
And ni' the beggar shares a mite
Of a' he can afford, man.
And so we exclaim in the words of one of our own true poets:
Always in thine eyes, O Liberty!
Shines that high light whereby the world is saved,
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.
You have all heard of the man who refused to open his eyes for a year,
and who declared that during that time nothing could be seen on account
of the darkness. But the endeavor to perpetuate old errors by keeping
the eyes closed to the facts of science, the truths of philosophy, and
the progress of the human race, has not been crowned with success.
The further attempt to convert the world to what James Parton calls a
"kitchen religion" is merely waste of power.
The preaching of Christianity is making "much ado about nothing." What
we want is manhood and womanhood.
It is said by the Church that the man who lives for his family and
brings all that he can win of what is fair and bright and glad to those
he loves, may be a good man, but he is not a Christian, and therefore
has no religion.
Give me then the man who is not a Christian, and who has no religion,
for if the man who loves his wife and children, who gives to them the
strength of his arm, the thought of his brain, the warmth of his heart,
has not religion, the world is better off without it, for these are the
highest and holiest things which man can do.
[Illustration]
There is only one thing worth praying for: to be in the line of
evolution.--_Elbert Hubbard._
Jesus as Savior of the world is a theological creation, and not a
historical character.
SO HERE THEN ENDETH THAT GREAT AND GOOD BOOK "I DON'T KNOW--DO
YOU?" WRITTEN BY MARILLA M. RICKER, AND PRINTED AND BOUND FOR HER
BY THE ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST AURORA, ERIE
COUNTY AND STATE OF NEW YORK, MCMXVI.
THOMAS PAINE
Born Jan 29, 1737.
Friend and adviser of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Monroe,
etc., etc.
Author of _Common Sense_, _The Crisis_, _Rights of Man_, and _The
Age of Reason_;
Editor of _Pennsylvania Magazine_;
Enlisted in Continental Army; appointed Aide-de-Camp to General
Nathaniel Greene;
Secretary of Committee on Foreign Affairs, Congress and
Pennsylvania Assembly;
By his writings did more for the American cause in the Revolution
than any other one person;
First proposed American Independence;
First suggested the Federal Union of States;
First proposed the abolition of Negro slavery;
First suggested protection for dumb animals;
First proposed arbitration and international peace;
First suggested justice to women;
First pointed out the reality of human brotherhood;
First pointed out the folly of hereditary succession and
monarchical government;
First proposed old-age pensions;
First suggested international copyright;
First proposed the education of the children of the poor at public
expense;
First suggested a great republic of all the nations of the world;
First proposed "the land for the people";
First suggested "the religion of humanity";
First proposed and first wrote the words, "United States of
America";
Founder of the first Ethical Society;
Proposed the purchase of the Louisiana Territory;
Inventor of the iron bridge, the hollow candle--principle of the
modern central-draft burner, etc., etc.
Died June 9, 1809.
=_This is history. But this great and good man was called "a filthy
little atheist" by a hyphenated Dutch-American._=
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "I don't know, do you?" ***
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