"Oh, that is not so; my G.o.d is no respecter of persons; that"s his very strongest hold. He treats rich and poor just alike, only if anything he leans a little toward the poor."
"That is pretty clever. But what else did he tell you in that talk?"
"Well, he told me to tell the people, "Thou shalt not kill;" and afterwards, at another time, he told me to take a lot of my men, and go over there to that town just across, and kill all the men and boys I could find, and if they fought hard for their homes, and I seemed to be getting the worst of it for a little while, not to be afraid, he"d be with me, and he"d see that I came out all right. Oh, he"s the gayest old G.o.d you ever saw to help in a fight."
"Well, yes, that was pretty clever to you; but isn"t he the G.o.d of that village too!"
"Oh, yes; but you see one of the men that lives over there went and worshipped another G.o.d one day, and this one didn"t like it."
"I see; but if he treats them all that way, don"t you think it is rather natural that they should go and hunt up another G.o.d to admire?"
Well, while I was waiting for Moses to answer this question, I heard another man say that only a day or two previously this very fellow had burned up their homes, and murdered a good many people who had never injured him; and that he had dashed out the brains of the innocent children, and had actually sold the sweet, pure young girls to his brutal soldiers. Since I heard that, my mind has been so occupied with some other little matters that my revision has not gone any farther, and somebody else has got one out; so I don"t know that I shall ever finish mine. It does not seem to be very encouraging work any way; and I am afraid that people would find fault with its scholarship if it should be finished. Theological scholarship and common-sense always did disagree.
A man who is well vaccinated with either will never catch the other.
THE CHURCH"S MONEY-BOX.
The Church used to keep a box about four feet long and two feet wide which it called the sacred ark of G.o.d. It was certain death for any man not a priest to touch that box. It is supposed that they kept in it gold and jewels which they extorted from their dupes, and that for fear of robbery they made superst.i.tion their banker. Well, they had to move that jewelry-box once for some reason, and it is not said that anything happened to the men who put it on the cart; but as the man who drove the oxen--in one place it says that they were oxen, in another that they were cows with young calves, and you will be d.a.m.ned if you don"t believe both--anyhow, as the driver walked along in horrid fear lest something should happen to that ark of G.o.d, the oxen shied, and the ark toppled, and instinctively the driver put out his hand to steady the sacred thing. Well, you would think that any sane man, any reasonable being, would have commended him for it; but no! Jehovah struck him dead for his pains. Why? Because that box was so supremely sacred. Supreme nonsense!
Suppose he had not touched it and it had fallen? What then? Most likely Jehovah would then have struck him dead for not touching it. It strikes me that the only reasonable, sensible being connected with that whole story was the driver, the man they abuse, the man the priests murdered, I suspect because he discovered what was in that ark, and threatened to expose the humbug.
Whenever any man uses judgment and common-sense the Church calls him wicked and dangerous. They say he "touches with unholy hands holy things;" and when he dies, whether his death was expedited or otherwise, they say G.o.d killed him.
Now, if G.o.d did kill that man for touching the ark to save it from falling, what do you think of him--as a G.o.d? I can tell you what you would think of him as a man. You would think he was a ruffian and a murderer--that is what you would think of him as a man.
Truly G.o.ds are made of poor stuff. If I can"t have a G.o.d that is n.o.bler and better and truer and kinder than the very best man I ever saw, then I don"t want any G.o.d at all. And candor forbids me to state that I ever saw, heard, or read of any such a G.o.d. All the G.o.ds I ever read or heard of have fallen infinitely below a few men I know.
Jehovah, it seems to me, is hardly an average G.o.d, even as G.o.ds go. He believed in polygamy. He believed in slavery. He was a murderer--killed 52,000 people once because somebody looked into that four-by-two box that he thought so much of. Human life was not worth a copper in his neighborhood. He was always in a rage about something, and you never knew when he would "get the drop on you" because somebody else had ruffled his temper. "Any man was liable," as the Irishman said, "to wake up any morning and find himself burned to ashes in his bed," because one of his neighbors had been wicked enough to lend a five-dollar greenback to one of the Philistines, or had eaten a gum-drop in the dark of the moon, or committed some other awful crime like-that.
SHALL PROGRESS STOP?
In its day the Bible was all very well, no doubt. It was the expression of the best that the Jewish people then knew in morals. In his time Christ was a great reformer and a brave man. His philosophy was then an onward spring, and he detested the shams of the Church.
But with the knowledge we have to-day we should call that man a lunatic who tried to bind medical science by the teachings of that age, and maintained that when a man was sick he had a devil, and that if he got worse he had a whole flock of them. Yet Christ thought that. We should call the man utterly insane who insisted that Joshua gave us the last light that is ever to be thrown on astronomy. We should simply look with pity on one who should try to convince us that the legal profession ought to be bound by the laws of Moses; and we know that any nation that attempted to act under his guidance would be soon convinced by the unerring voice of foreign cannon that somebody had made a mistake.
Science has grown. Philosophy has developed. International law has sprung up. In religion alone we are asked to accept the standard of morality and honor of ages that are dead--to take as the last word of wisdom the reformer"s code of eighteen hundred years ago. We may grow in all else; in this we must stand still. We may use a text-book on Nature, Medicine, Law, or Mechanics, until by its aid we pa.s.s beyond its knowledge to a higher; but in morals and religion the book that was a light to the ages of ignorance and superst.i.tion, and the production of its brain, must still be the sole illuminator of a world made wise and critical and thoughtful by science and deep experience. The fisherman"s lantern, although useful in its day, cannot guide us while we stand in the glare of electricity. Why stand persistently with our faces westward, and gaze at the declining light, crying out impotently and hopelessly as we see it grow dim and vanish?
Our wise men have kept steadily onward, guided by the light of the breaking dawn; and with their faces to the East their star has never set. The fishermen"s light has sunk below the horizon, leaving behind it the glow of honest labor and earnest effort to keep their memory bright.
The scientist"s star has risen, and with no claim that it is even yet the highest light--the final promise, it throws its rays of knowledge, its beams of hope, far into the future, and bids us follow, leaving the cold embers of the dead past for the warmth and light of the living future.
The hope of the past is the despair of the future. Stagnation is death.
In movement and thought alone is progress. The wealth of the world is the brain of the scholar.
The past is dead; peace to its ashes. The future is ours to form on new models; models deformed by past superst.i.tions, or models though faulty, instinct with true freedom. You are the jury, what is the verdict?
HISTORICAL FACTS AND THEOLOGICAL FICTIONS.
CHURCH FICTIONS.
IT is one of the glittering fictions of the Church that to her civilization is due,* and that it is to her benign influence and direction alone that woman has been advanced to her present position in the social scale; that without the Bible and the Church the status of woman in Christian countries would be lower and her lot harder.
* See Appendix T,
1st. To prove this claim she directs attention to the status of woman in several non-Christian countries, and compares the degradation and hardship she there endures to the position of woman to-day in America, England, and France.
2d. The Church claims the credit of originating and sustaining the various steps of progress by which woman has been elevated. She claims to have originated and to sustain the idea that woman is man"s equal, and to recognize her as such in the Church.
3d. She points with pride to the superior education and intelligence of the women of Christian countries, and contrasts this intellectual alt.i.tude with that of women elsewhere. She says that women owe their superior opportunities of education and advancement to their religion.
4th. But above all the clergy attempt to silence those who ask questions, by calling attention to the superior _legal_ status of woman in Christian countries, and a.s.serting that the Church secured this, _and that it made marriage honorable and home a possibility_.
5th. The clergy claim that the Bible is woman"s best friend and staunchest defender, and that it is the originator of morality.
HISTORICAL FACTS.
"The moment there is fixation, petrification and death ensue." "Profound sincerity is the only basis of character."
--Emerson.
CIVILIZATION.
We are told that our superior civilization and high moral tone are due to Christianity. I think that this is not true. The whole, or at least much the larger and foundation part of the question of civilization--where it shall grow and where only live, where it shall drag and where scarcely exist--seems to me to be decided primarily by environment, the basis of which is climate and soil.
Where the climate and soil are most favorable to the highest development; where the environment is neither too hard nor too indulgent; where man is neither enervated by heat and the absence of necessity to labor, nor stunted by cold and hardship and the ever-present necessity to search or labor for food and warmth; there will be the highest types and forms of civilization.*
* See Appendix A*
If the Buddhist religion had chanced to be the one that in the process of events took root in the climate and soil where the Hebrew Bible and the Christian belief hold sway; and if, on the other hand, the Hebrew and Christian religions had been the ones developed in India or China, the civilization of the various countries would still, in the main, be what they are to-day.