People ask what good I expect to come of an attack on Christianity. They ask me if I think Christianity does any direct harm. Yes! _It makes a man unjust to believe in unjust doctrines_. Any man who honestly believes in the righteousness of a system of vicarious rewards and punishments is ripe for any form of tyranny. And the more honestly he believes in it the less will he be a good man from principle.
I want men and women to be good and true because it is right towards each other, and not because they are afraid of h.e.l.l. Honor towards people in this world, not fear of a fiend in the next--that is my doctrine. That is the way to make men and women strong and brave and n.o.ble. Stop telling them they can"t be good themselves; teach them that they must do right themselves. Make them self-dependent. Teach them to stand alone. Honor towards others, kindness, and love--these are what make a man a good husband, a n.o.ble father--king in his household.
Fear never made any man a gentleman. Fear never made any woman a true wife or a good mother. Fear never covered the pitfalls of vice with anything stronger than the gloss of hypocrisy.
When Reason"s torch burned low, Faith led her victims by chains of ignorance into the land of hopeless superst.i.tion, and built her temple there.
GEOGRAPHICAL RELIGION.
A religion of faith is simply a question in geography. Keep your locality in mind and you are all right. On the banks of the Red Sea murder and slavery were a religious duty. On the Ganges infanticide is a virtue. In Rome you may steal or lie; you may deceive an innocent young girl and blast her life forever; you may stab your friend in the dark, and you are all right: but if you eat a piece of fried pork on Friday you are a lost man! China arranges her prayers in a machine, and turns her obligations to Deity off with a crank. There is usually more or less intimate relationship between prayer and a crank. Our G.o.d loved human sacrifice in Galilee, and rewarded Abraham for it. He abhors it in Poca.s.set, America, and his followers threaten to hang the only consistent follower of Jehovah who has come amongst them.
If you live in Utah, or had lived in Jerusalem, your most certain hope of salvation would have been the possession of numerous wives. In England or New York more than one is sure d.a.m.nation.
Lose your bearings and you are a lost man! Make a mistake in your county and your soul is not worth a copper. A traveler is not safe five minutes, and I doubt if an accident policy would cover his case.
G.o.d and the Devil have been held accountable for about every crime that ever has been committed, and it has been very largely a geographical question which of the two was responsible. If it was longitude 35 14"
east it was the Lord! If you shifted to longitude 70 58" west it was the devil.
When locality becomes the all-important question, we do not wonder at the old lady who felt relieved when the new survey threw her house just across the state line into Ohio, after she had been under the impression that she lived in Indiana. "Well," said she, "I am glad we don"t live in Indiana; I always did say it was a very unhealthy state. Now, our doctor"s bills won"t be so high."
Poca.s.set, Ma.s.s., is in the devil"s country, and murder is not safe; it is a crime. Abraham and Saul lived in a healthier climate--in G.o.d"s congressional district, where murder was above par and decency was out of fashion. Take it all in all, and the devil seems to make the best governor.
Now it seems to me that Sunday-schools should teach nothing so much as geography, so that a man may not be in doubt as to who is his Secretary of State, and when an order comes from head-quarters he may fairly be expected to know whether it is safe to obey--whether obedience means glorification on earth and a home in heaven, or a sprained neck and a bright fire. It seems now that Poca.s.set is over the line and out of the Lord"s clearing.
REVELATION.
Now this G.o.d either did or he did not believe in and command murder and rapine in the days when he used to sit around evenings and chat with Abraham and Moses and the rest of them. His especial plans and desires were "revealed" or they were not. The ideas of justice and right were higher in those days than they are now, or else we are wiser and better than G.o.d, or else the Bible is not his revealed will. You can take your choice. My choice is to keep my respect for divine justice and honor, and let the Bible bear the burden of its own mistakes.
If religion is a revelation, then it is not a growth, and it would have been most perfect in design and plan when it was nearest its birth.
Now accepting the Bible theory of Jehovah, we find that when the communications of G.o.d were immediate and personal there could have been no mistake as to his will. To deal with it as a growth or evolution toward better things is to abandon the whole tenet of a revealed law of G.o.d. But to deal with it as a revelation is to make G.o.d a being too repulsive and brutal to contemplate for one moment with respect.
He either did or did not tell those men those things. Which will you accept?
He divided men into two cla.s.ses. Of one he made tyrants and butchers; of the other, victims. He made woman weak in order that she might be the more easily overcome by vice; helpless, in order that she might the more easily be made the victim of brutal l.u.s.t! He made children to be the beasts of burden, the human sacrifices, the defenceless property of criminals and fiends. He did these things, or the prophets romanced about it, or some one else romanced about them. Which?
If I accept the former alternative. I can have nothing but loathing and contempt for the Diety and his followers. If the latter, it clouds the character of no one. It simply places the ignorance of the past on the same plane with the ignorance of the present. It rescues the reputation of the Infinite at the trifling expense of a few musty fables.
I choose the latter! I prefer to believe either that a few men were themselves deceived, or that they tried to deceive others--it does not much matter which. I prefer to adopt this belief, and so keep the character of even a supposit.i.tious G.o.d above reproach.
If we accept a G.o.d at all let us accept an honest one.
EVIDENCE OF FAITH.
We are asked to be as fair toward the evidence of Bible witnesses as we are toward other evidence. We are told that we believe a great deal that we have never seen, and that we accept it on the word of others; that we have never seen a man hung, but that we believe that men have been hung; we never saw Napoleon"s great feats of generalship, but we believe in them because history records them. Why not believe in the Bible as well as in other history? Why not, on the testimony of witnesses, believe that Christ turned water into wine, as readily as that a man was hung?
Why not accept the miracle of the loaves and fishes on evidence, as readily as the victories of Napoleon?
Now that line of argument, although it is the one used by and for theological students, is entirely illogical. It will not work with people who think. The cases are not parallel.
We believe the facts of history and the occurrences of to-day not solely on the testimony of others, but because they are in accord with common-sense and experience and judgment; because they fall within the range of possibility, and do not antagonize the laws of nature. We know a man can be hung. We know one general may defeat another. We are asked to believe nothing outside of reasonable bounds. Here then the only thing to examine is the credibility of the witnesses.
If, however, our witnesses told us that whenever Napoleon wanted to know the strength of an enemy he flew up over their camp and counted their men; or that when he found too many he prayed down fire from heaven and burned them up, we should dismiss their testimony at once as unworthy of farther notice. We should know that they were deceived, or that they were trying to deceive us. We should know that Napoleon"s real means of estimating the strength of his enemy were of a different nature, and that he did not resort to the upper air and flit about at will. We should know that no fire was prayed down, and that although soldiers might be told to put their trust in G.o.d, the little addition--"and keep your powder dry"--would be the really important part of the command.
So when we are told that wine was made out of water, and bread and fish out of nothing in large quant.i.ties, we know that we are listening to statements that simply go out of the field of credible testimony into the realm of supreme credulity. Such a.s.sertions require you to believe not only what you have not seen, but what all experience and reason tell you you never can see. They ask you not only to believe in a past event, but in a past event outside of all reason, beyond all experience, incapable of demonstration, unsupported by nature, opposed to all natural laws--beneath the realm of reason, out of the light of experience, under the shadow of superst.i.tion!
The great electric light of the intellect is turned off at the church door. On one day out of every seven the human lamps enter in utter darkness a field of superst.i.tion. During six days the light is turned full on the world of commerce, science, art, and literature, and these glow and grow and are examined by its rays. When, however, the signal tolls from the steeple on the seventh day, the light is turned off for that day, and for that topic alone; and then there is brought out once more the old tallow candle of ignorance that hides in shadow the cobwebs of undeveloped thought!
Use your n.o.blest powers of thought freely in the bank; strain and develop your ability to improve and control in the engine-room; train and exert your judgment in literature and art; push and brighten and sharpen your reason in science or political economy.
In the practical affairs of life faith will not help you. It is childish and insecure. It will not honor your cheque; it will not prevent the broken engine from hurling its human companion into eternity. It will not prove the rotundity of the earth, nor establish a sound financial basis for a nation. In all such matters it leads to nothing but ignorance and disaster. In theology it is the one element of light.
As a test and an aid in this world, it is puerile and trifling; but the depths of the Great Beyond it fathoms to a nicety. It gives no grasp upon the truths of Time; but it is the all-sufficient hold on Eternity.
It leads to the discovery of no important principle here; but it holds the keys to the secret chambers of divinity! It is an attribute of childish development now. It is to indicate infinite mental superiority hereafter!
It is a strange philosophy which a.s.serts that a faculty which is a hindrance to superiority in this world is the one thing needful for the soul of man!
Give me the brain that dares to think! Give me the mind that grasps with herculean power the rocks that crush the treasures of intellectual growth, and tears them from their foundation! Give me the mind that dares to step from the fallen stones, that leaps from rock to rock past the dark rift torn in the superst.i.tions of ages past, and that, standing on the farthest crag, waits and watches for the breaking light! He can trust his future whose present scorns stagnation!
DID HE TALK?
In olden times--in the times of the Bible--men believed that animals sometimes used human language, and that beasts were wiser than their masters. I"m not now going to question that belief, but still I don"t think that nowadays one-half of us would take the word of a horse on any important subject. You must remember, however, that it took an a.s.s to know an angel at first sight in Balaam"s time. Balaam never suspected that there was an angel in his path until that a.s.s told him! In those days, on a little matter like that, the word of any beast seemed to be taken as good evidence.
But let a mule jam his rider"s foot against a wall, nowadays, and then lie down under him, and there is not one man in ten who would a.s.sociate that fact in his mind with the presence of an angel. I suppose, however, there wasn"t as much known about mules then as there is now; and most a.s.ses were of a more pious turn of mind.
I don"t suppose there is one intelligent man in this city who believes that story, and yet he is not a good Christian if he questions it.
Show me a locality where actual belief--where old time orthodoxy--is looked upon as a requisite of good citizenship and standing in society, and you will show me a place where intellectual development and rapid progress have died or gone to sleep!
The most ignorant and backward parts of this great country, the localities where Congress is asking for better and more secular schools to be established as a means of safety to the state, are situated in the very States where orthodoxy holds absolute sway. In those states a man is looked upon as a very dangerous character if he questions the accuracy of that story about those three hot-house plants, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Yes, the people of that pious region would be afraid of a man who was wicked enough to laugh at that yarn; and yet do you believe there is a man in this city who could make you believe it?
And you don"t look dangerous either; and I don"t think that I do.
It seems that when they used to run ash.o.r.e for big scare-stories, they just poked up the fire and went into the blastfurnace business--here and hereafter. But--seeing that a furnace--a real one--heated seven times hotter than it takes to melt iron, did not injure those three tropical innocents--did not even singe their eye-brows--it does look a little as if we should stand a pretty fair show with the spiritual fuel they now promise us hereafter. Still I must say I don"t believe I should like the climate.
Speaking of Bible arguments, I must tell you of a new one I heard recently. A gentleman acquaintance of mine asked a colored woman, who had applied to him for money to help build a colored people"s church, whether she thought G.o.d was black or white. She replied that the Bible implied that he was black--that it said, "And His wool shall be whiter than snow;" and that _white men don"t have wool!_