Now I should just like to ask you one honest question. Why should any book bind us to sentiments that we would not tolerate if they came from any other source? And why tolerate them coming from it? Do you know who compiled the Bible? Do you know it was settled by vote which ma.n.u.scripts G.o.d did and which he did not write? The ballot is a very good thing to have; but I decline to have it extend its power into eternity, and bind my brain by the capacity of a ballot-box held by caste and saturated with blood.
There can be but slow progress while we are weighted down by the superst.i.tions of ages past. The brain of the nineteenth century should not be bound down to the capacity of the third, nor its moral sentiment dwarfed to fit Jehovah.
But so long as the theories of revelation and vicarious atonement are taught, we shall not need to be surprised that every murderer who is hanged to-day says that he is going, with b.l.o.o.d.y hands, directly into companionship with the deity of revelation. He has had ample time in prison to re-read in the Bible (what he had previously been taught in Sunday school), of many worse crimes than his which his spiritual adviser a.s.sures him (to the edification and encouragement of all his kind outside) were not only forgiven, but were actually ordered and partic.i.p.ated in, by the G.o.d he is going to.
That is what orthodoxy tells him! Just think of it! Do you think that is a safe doctrine to teach to the criminal cla.s.ses? Aside from its being dishonest, is it safe? Does it not put a premium on crime? I maintain that it is always a dangerous religion where faith in a given dogma, and not continuous uprightness of life, is the standard of excellence. It is a cruel religion where force is king and immorality G.o.d. It is an unjust religion which seeks to make women serfs and men tyrants. It is an unreasonable religion where credulity usurps the place of intellect and judgment. It is an immoral religion where vice is deified and virtue strangled. It is a cowardly religion where an innocent man, who was murdered 1,800 years ago, is asked to bear the burden of your wrong acts to-day. Aside from its impossibility that is cowardly.
Man should be taught that for every wrong he does, he must himself be responsible--not that some one else stands between him and absolute personal responsibility--not that Eve caused him to sin, nor that Christ stands between him and full accountability for his every act.
And he should be taught that for every n.o.ble deed, for every act of justice or mercy, he deserves the credit himself; that Christ does not need it; that Christ cannot want it; and that Christ does not deserve it.
And you will not want to "wash your hands in the blood of Christ," nor to shed that of any other innocent man, if your motives are pure and your lives clean.
VICARIOUS ATONEMENT.
IN an art collection in Boston there is a G.o.d--a redeemer--the best ill.u.s.tration I have ever seen of the vicarious atonement theory. It is a perfect representation of the agony endured by a helpless and innocent being in order to relieve the guilty of their guilt. This G.o.d was captured in Central Africa before his mission was complete, and there is still suffering-s.p.a.ce upon his body unused.
It is a wooden image of some frightful beast, and it is represented as suffering the most intense physical agony. Nails are driven into its head, body, legs, and feet. Each wrongdoer who wanted to relieve himself of his own guilt drove a nail, a tack, a brad, or a spike into the flesh of his G.o.d. The G.o.d suffered the pain; the man escaped the punishment.
He cast his burdens on his G.o.d, and went on his way rejoicing. Here is vicarious atonement in all its pristine glory. The G.o.d is writhing and distorted with pain; the criminal has relieved himself of further responsibility, and his faith has made him whole. His sins are forgiven, and his G.o.d will a.s.sume his load.
It is curious to examine the various ill.u.s.trations of human nature as represented by the size and shape of the nails. A sensitive man had committed a trifling offence, and he drove a great spike into the head of the G.o.d. A thick-skinned criminal inserted a small tack where it would do the least harm--in the hoof. An honest, or an egotistic penitent drove his nail in where it stands out prominently; while the secretive devotee placed his among a ma.s.s of others of long standing and inconspicuous location.
One day I stood with a friend looking at this G.o.d. My friend, who was a devout believer in the vicarious theory of justification and punishment as explained _away_ by the ethical divines of Boston, was unable to see anything but the most horrible brutality and willingness to inflict pain on the part of these African devotees, and was equally unable to recognize the same principle when applied to orthodoxy. She said, "Is it not horrible, the ignorance and superst.i.tion of these poor people? What a vast field of labor our missionaries have."
To her the idea of justification by faith in a suffering G.o.d meant only superst.i.tion and brutality when plainly ill.u.s.trated in somebody else"s religion; but the same idea, the same morality, the same justice, she thought beautiful when applied to Christianity.
I said, "There is the whole vicarious theory in wood and iron. That is exactly the same as the Christian idea; and the same human characteristics are plainly traceable in the size and location of these nails.
"A Presbyterian or a Methodist drives his nail in the most conspicuous spot, where the flesh is tender and the suffering plainly visible. The Episcopalian or Catholic uses a small tack, and drives it as much out of sight as possible, covering it over with stained gla.s.s, and distracting the attention with music; but the bald, cruel, unjust, immoral, degrading, and dishonest principle is there just the same.
"Faith in blind acts of devotion; the suffering of innocence for guilt; transferring of crime; comfort and safety purchased for self by the infliction of pain and unmerited torture upon another; premiums offered for ignorance and credulity; punishments guaranteed for honest doubt and earnest protest--all these beautiful provisions of the vicarious theory are as essential to our missionary"s belief as to that of his African converts; and it seems to me simply a choice between thumbs up and thumbs down."
While we were talking my friend"s pastor joined us, and she told him what I had said, and asked him what was the difference between the Christian and the heathen idea of a suffering G.o.d. He said he could explain it in five minutes some morning when he had time. He said that the one was the true and living faith, and the other was blind superst.i.tion. He also said that he could easily make us see which was which. Then he gracefully withdrew with the air of one who says: "In six days G.o.d made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day _he_ and _I_ rested." He has not called since to explain. While he stayed, however, his manner was deeply, solemnly, awfully impressive; and of course I resigned on the spot.
The theory of vicarious atonement is the child of cowardice and fear.
It arranges for a man to be a criminal and to escape the consequences of his crime. It destroys personal responsibility, the most essential element of moral character. It is contrary to every moral principle.
The Church never has been and never will be able to explain why a G.o.d should be forced to resort to such injustice to rectify a mistake of his own. To earnest questions and honest thoughts it has always replied with threats. It has always silenced inquiry and persecuted thought. Past authority is its G.o.d, present investigation its devil. With it brains are below par, and ignorance is at a premium. It has never learned that the most valuable capital in this world is the brain of a scholar.
FEAR.
Every earnest thought, like every earnest thinker, adds something to the wealth of the world. Blind belief in the thought of another produces only hopeless mediocrity. Individual effort, not mere acceptance, marks the growth of the mind. The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
Fear is the nearest approach to the ball and chain that this age will permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers of to-day that so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be left for those who come after us. We owe physical freedom to the intellectual giants of the past; let us leave mental freedom to the intellectual children of the future.
Fear scatters the blossoms of genius to the winds, and superst.i.tion buries truth beneath the incrustation of inherited mediocrity. Fear puts the fetters of religious stagnation on every child of the brain. It covers the form of purity and truth with the contagion of contumely and distrust. It warps and dwarfs every character that it touches. It is the father, mother, and nurse of hypocrisy. It is the one great disgrace of our day, the one incalculable curse of our time; and its nurse and hot-bed is the Church.
Because I, a woman, have dared to speak publicly against the dictatorship of the Church, the Church, with its usual force and honor, answers argument with personal abuse. One reply it gives. It is this. If a woman did not find comfort and happiness in the Church, she would not cling to it. If it were not good for her, she in her purity and truth would not uphold it in the face of the undeniable fact that the present generation of thinking men have left it utterly.
You will find, however, that in every land, under every form of faith, in each phase of credulity, it is the woman who clings closest and longest to the religion she has been taught; yet no Christian will maintain that this fact establishes the truth of any other belief.*
* "Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental They do not complain.... They think our women insufferably unfeminine."
--Mill.
They will not argue from this that women know more of and have a clearer insight into the divine will! If she knows more about it, if she understands it all better than men, why does she not occupy the pulpit?
Why does she not hold the official positions in the Churches? Why has she not received even recognition in our system of religion? Who ever heard of a minister being surprised that G.o.d did not reveal any of the forms of belief through a woman? If she knows and does the will of G.o.d so much better than man, why did he not reveal himself to her and place his earthly kingdom in her hands?
That argument won"t do! As long as creed and Church held absolute power there was no question but that woman was a curse, that she was an inferior being, an after-thought. No Church but the Roman Catholic has the decency to recognize even the so-called mother of G.o.d! The Church has never offered women equality or justice. Its test of excellence is force. The closer a Church or creed clings to its spirit, the more surely does it a.s.sume to dictate to and control woman and to degrade her. The more liberal the creed the nearer does it come to offering individual justice and liberty.
The testimony of our own missionaries, as well as that of many others, a.s.sures us that it is not the Turk but his wives who hold fastest to their faith. The women of the harem, whom we pity because of the injustice of their religious training, are the last to relinquish their G.o.d, the most bitter opponents of the infidel or sceptic in their Church, the most devout and constant believers of the faith, and the most content with its requirements. They are the ones who cling to the form even when the substance has departed--and it is so with us!
Among the "heathen" it is the women who are most shocked and offended by the attacks made upon their superst.i.tions by the missionaries whom we pay to go to them and blaspheme their G.o.ds and destroy their idols.
Go where you will, read history as you may, and you will find that it is the men who invented religion, and the women who believed in it.
They are the last to give it up. _The physically weak dread change_.
Inexperience fears the unknown. Ignorance shuns thought or development.
The dependent cannot be brave.
We are all prepared to admit, I think, that, with but few marked exceptions here and there, the women of most countries are physically and mentally undeveloped. They have had fear and dependence, the dread enemies of progress and growth, constantly to r.e.t.a.r.d them. Fear of physical harm, fear of social ostracism, fear of eternal d.a.m.nation. With rare exceptions a child with a weak body, or any other dependent, will do as he is told; and women have believed to order. They have done so not only in Christianity but in Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Mormonism, and Fetichism--in each and all of them. Each and all of these religions being matter of faith, religion was the one subject in which every Church alike claimed ignorance as a virtue; and the women understood that the men understood it as little as they did. It was a field where credulity and a solemn countenance placed all on an intellectual level--and the alt.i.tude of the level was immaterial.
Women have never been expected to understand anything; hence jargon about the "testimony of the spirit," the "three in one" absurdity, the "horns of the altar," or the widow"s oil miracle was not more empty or unmeaning to her than a conversation about Bonds and Stocks, Political Economy, or Medical Science. She swallowed her religion just as she did her pills, because the doctor told her to, and said there was something wrong with her head--and usually there was.
BEGINNING TO THINK.
The past education of woman gave her an outlook which simply embraced a husband or nothing at all, which was often only a choice between two of a kind.
There are a great many women to-day who think that orthodoxy is as great nonsense as I do, but who are afraid to say so.
They whisper it to each other. They are afraid of the slander of the Church.
I want to help make it so that they will dare to speak. I want to do what I can to make it so that a mother won"t have to evade the questions of her children about the Bible.